ZGram - July 3, 2002 - "UN/USA rift over ICC"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - July 3, 2002

July 3, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

So how to title this one?  Back to the Nation States?  It's costly to 
have Israel as a friend?  The New World Order coming apart at the 
seams?  It's not nice to fool Mother Nature?

The bottom line is this:  The USA is now visibly becoming as isolated 
and, in many ways, as shunned as is the State of Israel.  And what a 
pity and a shame - after all Americans have done for that irksome 
bandit statelet!

It's not nice to drop bombs, or use gunships, on a wedding party on 
the other side of the world!
[START]

NEWS ANALYSIS UN rift over court reveals fraying of Sept. 11 solidarity

Serge Schmemann The New York Times

Wednesday, July 3, 2002
 
NEW YORK The showdown this week between the United States and other 
members of the UN Security Council was the latest and strongest 
confirmation that the international solidarity forged after the 
terror attacks of Sept. 11 was probably superficial and temporary.

The immediate issue at the United Nations was Washington's demand 
that U.S. troops and all other UN peacekeeping forces be exempted 
from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which came 
into existence Monday under the shadow of intense hostility from the 
Bush administration.

Unless either the United States or other council members back down 
before midnight Wednesday, the UN police-training mission in Bosnia 
will be abruptly terminated. If the standoff continues, all other UN 
peacekeeping operations will be jeopardized as they come up for 
renewal, starting with the mission in Lebanon later this month. The 
immediate impact in Bosnia was likely to be largely organizational. 
Only 46 Americans are in the police-training mission, and the entire 
operation was to be turned over to the European Union in six months.
But the very notion of Americans threatening to pull forces out of 
Europe in a dispute, even if symbolic, carried troubling connotations 
on a continent where the U.S. presence had represented a shared 
commitment for decades.

Even if all parties heed a call from Secretary-General Kofi Annan and 
find a solution for the peacekeeping missions, the fact that the 
United States cast a defiant veto in the teeth of its closest allies 
- and that Britain and France were prepared to do likewise against 
Washington - spoke of sharp differences and a growing mutual 
irritation.
At the heart of the divergence was a fundamentally different vision 
of global organizations. The Europeans, accustomed by their history 
and geography to think in terms of multilateral arrangements, have 
always placed a greater premium on international organizations. To 
them, the end of the Cold War brought an era for building 
international institutions and a global justice system, of which the 
European Union was the shining example.

In the United States, international organizations like the United 
Nations have been viewed with suspicion, much of it affirmed by the 
anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli votes of the Cold War. The emergence of 
the United States as the sole military, economic and cultural 
superpower has only deepened the resistance, especially among 
American conservatives, to potential international restraints on U.S. 
powers.

"An 800-pound gorilla just doesn't like anything to restrict its 
freedom of action, unless it thinks it can control it completely," 
said Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at the Kennedy 
School of Government at Harvard.

Beyond that, Walt said, there is a sincere fear among many U.S. 
officials that Americans engaged in military or other operations 
overseas could become subject to politicized prosecution. "The fairly 
extensive role the U.S. military has taken around the world makes it 
leery of being tried by a tribunal whose standards we can't control," 
he said.

For the Europeans, however, the U.S. stand amounts to a double 
standard: one set of rules for the United States, another for the 
rest of the world. Several stands taken by the United States since 
the end of the Cold War - against the Kyoto Protocols on greenhouse 
gases, against a treaty to limit biological weapons testing, against 
a ban on land mines - have especially irritated the Europeans.

"There you see the beginning of a real problem," said a senior 
European diplomat at the United Nations. "If the U.S. says, 'We are 
from a different nature, we cannot be compared with others, 
discipline is good for others, but not for the United States,' then 
the future of humanity is at stake. If the United States believes it 
doesn't need to respect multilateralism and international rules, how 
do you get China to respect them?"

The tensions were already there long before Sept. 11. But in the 
immediate aftermath of the terror attacks, most of the world lined up 
in solidarity behind the United States, and the Security Council 
passed resolutions requiring all UN members to act against terrorism.

Many members hoped that the United States would become more active in 
multilateral organizations out of a recognition that terrorism was a 
universal problem requiring international effort. That sense began to 
erode when the United States made clear that it intended to prosecute 
the war on its own terms.

In the vote on the Bosnia mission, the conflicting perceptions came 
to a head. The Europeans saw the Americans as trying to undermine a 
prime example of the new world order, the International Criminal 
Court, which was created to take action if local authorities failed 
to prosecute especially heinous war crimes, human rights violations 
or genocide. The United States saw a confirmation of a world deaf to 
America's genuine needs and concerns.

For the Europeans, the issue is the sense that the Bush 
administration was trying to curtail a court that they regarded as a 
major achievement in the struggle for global justice and human 
rights, issues on which the United States regarded itself as the 
global standard.

( Source: 
http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=63227 
)