2003_03_march_forum for saturday the peace

Let’s hope it is a short war and that the US does not mess up the peace.

Well, it is not a question of the US messing up the peace. The question is whether the US President of the day messes up the peace.

After World War I, President Woodrow Wilson almost made it a good peace. He took the US into the war on the basis of 14 points to make the world safer for democracy and to establish a league of nations after the war. Alas, Congress refused to ratify the treaty and the US was not part of the League of Nations. A chance to prevent World War II was lost.

President Harry S Truman made the best of the peace after World War II. With the Marshall Plan and the Japanese occupation, the vanquished were given a chance to rebuild democracies. The United Nations was set up. In short, the US engaged in the world. Peace had a better chance, but for the fact that during the Cold War the US made the mistake of using poor means to justify worthwhile ends. The US propped up loathsome dictators as anti-communist bulwarks and mistook democratic leftist movements as potential communist tyrannies.

After this war, President George W. Bush has some great contradictions to sort out if he is to win the peace.

It may well be that force is ultimately the only way to deal with a Saddam Hussein, a Hitler or a Tojo. But winning the peace is to make it less likely those sort of regimes arise in the first place.

The world has to hope that Bush can sort out about half a dozen contradictions so that he can win the peace.

He went to war in order to rid the world of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Reducing weapons of mass destruction is a laudable aim, but the US has refused to sign the 1997 landmine prohibition treaty; rejected in 2001 the enforcement protocols of the Biological Weapons Treaty; and refused to abide by treaties with the Soviet Union (now Russia) to continue to reduce the number of nuclear warheads that each nation has. One rule for the US and one rule for everyone else.

Bush has warned Iraqi military leaders not to use weapons of mass destruction in this conflict and warned them not to commit other war crimes because they would be answerable afterwards. Yet the US has refused to sign up to the international war crimes court. Again, one law for the US and one law for everyone else.

The US wanted Iraq to obey international obligations under United Nations Security Council rulings – yet it now ignores the UN weapons inspector’s view that peaceful disarmament was possible and refuses to get Security Council endorsement for an invasion. It may be that existing resolutions might legally support a war. It may be that Saddam Hussein ultimately would have to be removed by force. The trouble with the US position is that it failed to engage with other nations – particularly the democracies – and now finds itself virtually going it alone.

The US has insisted on upholding a Security Council requirement with respect to Iraq yet allows Israel to ignore Security Council requirements.

The US stands for the rule of law and for the universal statements of rights in its Constitution. It argues it will free the people of Iraq from the yoke of oppression, yet cunningly circumvents them in this fight against terror by shipping prisoners to its Guantanamo Bay territory on the island of Cuba and leaves them to rot in hellish conditions without access to courts as if they are persona nullius.

It says the war is not about oil (and it is not), but when the US remains a gas-guzzling nation that refuses to sign the Kyoto protocols on global warming, other nations get suspicious.

All these contradictions are directly related to the US’s war on terror and its war on rogue states.

The US has got to address them if it wants to win the peace.

The tragedy here is that the world needs the US to uphold values of freedom and democracy. It has done it for a long time. President Abraham Lincoln – with his pledge that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth – would have won the peace after the Civil War if given the chance.

Of equal difficulty will be the task for the US to re-engage the world. It might be able to be the sole sheriff (with just two deputies) on this occasion, but ultimately a peaceful, stable world must depend on widespread international co-operation. Surely, US isolationism and the failure of the League of Nations were among the prime causes of World War II. That lesson must be learnt.

It must mean a revamp of the United Nations. The world should not tolerate the sickening hypocrisy of France which sold Iraq the wherewithal to gain weapons of mass destruction then wrung and washed its hands in the Security Council when it came to doing something about it.

The Security Council club of World War II victors, each with a veto, has to end. No one nation should be able to veto UN action. Nor should the UN be a slave to one-nation, one vote.

The experience of Europe since 1945 tells us that nations which have warred for centuries can solve disputes in peace. But it requires effective international agreements, each requiring a slight reduction of national sovereignty which hitherto the US has baulked at.

The US will inevitably win this war against Iraq. But it will not win the peace, and never win its war on terror if it tries to police the world on its own or turns away from international engagement.

It would be tragic if the US wins the war and loses the peace because it fails to face up to the contradictions in its position. Without the US doing that, the quest to uphold democracy and liberty in the world will become near impossible. Without the US engaging in the world that quest is well nigh hopeless.

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