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UN Double Standards Again on Display With Syria Resolution
By Salim Lone
11/02/05 "ICH
" -- -- The beginning of the drive to justify the use
of force or other serious actions against Syria for its possible
involvement in Rafiq Hariri’s killing is reminiscent of the run-up
to the 2003 US-led war against Iraq. As then, it is the United
Nations Security Council which is the instrument for escalating the
tensions, with yesterday’s unanimous passage of its resolution
demanding that Syria co-operate in UN investigator Detlev Mehlis’s
Hariri investigation by arresting those he suspects of complicity
and that interrogations be conducted outside Syria. If the Iraq
experience is a guide, the demands will multiply regardless of the
level of co-operation Syria offers, with the US still free to resort
to war if it chooses. With or without war, the resolution will
intensify charges of UN double standards and further polarize
Muslim-western relations.
The arguments being advanced for intervention this time are
infinitely more spurious than the claims that Iraq possessed weapons
of mass destruction. The highly speculative and overtly political
Mehlis report relies on partisan witnesses, does not offer any
concrete evidence that Syria was involved in the Hariri killing and
in any event contends only that such involvement is probable. The
resolution’s passage offers yet more proof that the Security Council
is an instrument of western power invoked principally for
intimidating or punishing Arabs. It is not lost on the region that
when Israel killed over a hundred Lebanese in Qan’a in 1996, and
when hundreds of Palestinians were killed in Nablus, Jenin and
elsewhere in 2003, no UN Security Council action against Israel was
taken.
[Nor is it lost on Muslims that for all the posturing over the
importance of tracking down Hariri’s killers, two mass murderers,
Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who have been wanted by the UN
for nearly a decade for the brutal massacre of over 7,000 Muslim men
and boys taken from the UN’s safe haven of Srebrenica, are still
free men.]
To put maximum pressure on both Syria and the Council in advance of
the vote, US president George Bush had dramatically heightened the
stakes by asserting that the American use of force against Syria was
an option if it did not cooperate with the Mehlis inquiry. The
Hariri killing was an atrocious act, but the notion that the US
could attack Syria even if its officials were involved in the Hariri
assassination defies all international covenants relating to the
legal use of force.
Be that as it may, the Bush threat against Syria, and a similar one
against Iran if it refuses to stop enriching uranium, has seen
tensions soar among Arabs and Muslims amid fears that new western
aggression might be in the offing. On the surface, the fear that the
US might initiate new hostilities in the region seems preposterous
when the US is so hopelessly bogged down in the Iraqi occupation.
But there are numerous American strategists who believe that Iraq
can only be secured if the anti-US regimes in Syria and Iran are
deposed, and that in any event regime change in the two countries,
however destabilizing it might be, is a prerequisite to the
achievement of other strategic US goals in the region, which include
direct control of Arab oil in an energy-thirsty world and a
political reorganization (“democratization”) of the region to make
it more amenable to US interests. So the new belligerence is clearly
not about Hariri; it’s about intimidating Syria and others into
toeing the US line.. [The Iraqi catastrophe and his intensifying
domestic woes -- captured in President Bush’s ratings being at the
lowest level since he was elected in 2000 -- have clearly led his
administration to believe that a hard-line stance in Iraq, and
against other Muslim countries, might be one way to recapture the
national support he has lost.]
Certainly in Iraq, there is no doubt that that the US administration
is embarked on a more aggressive policy. For a few months now, it
had been talking about beginning a gradual pullback from Iraq in the
spring. [US generals had testified in Congress in September that the
presence of foreign troops fueled the insurgency, as did the
“perception” of occupation. They pointed also to the success in
getting three Iraqi divisions to operate independently of the US.]
Then on October 7, in a major address, President Bush put paid to
such talk by indicating that the anti-terror war must be won,
however long it took - including in Iraq. [Ironically, this shift
comes after the October 15 referendum showed that both Sunnis and
the Shi’a militants led by Muqtada al-Sadr are finally willing to
engage in the political process if their concerns over the
occupation are addressed.]
As was revealed once again in New Delhi over the weekend,
international terrorism carried out by Muslim extremists continues
to be a growing and vicious threat. It can only be curbed if the US
supports the forces of Muslim moderation and undertakes concrete
policy changes which resonate with the vast majority of the world’s
Muslims, who yearn for an end to the deepening fissure with the
West. [But the decision by France, a staunch foe of the
Anglo-American drive to attack Iraq, to mend fences with the
super-power by co-operating with it for short-term gains over Syria,
and the election of a new pro-Bush German Chancellor, are major
setbacks to this hope. In addition, since the July terror attacks in
Britain, Prime Minister Blair is no longer seen as merely a weak
Bush follower but an angry and independent challenger of the Muslim
world.]
With the current united front, there is now no major European ally
counseling US moderation in projecting its power in the Middle East.
The inevitable result is yet more polarization in the Muslim world
and a continuing marginalization of its reformers. A tougher world,
and increased instability, stare us all in the face, as the
perpetrators of 9/11 rejoice.
Salim Lone’s <salimlone@msn.com>
last assignment in a long UN career was as spokesman
for the UN mission in Iraq soon after the 2003 war. He writes
regularly on relations between Muslims and the West.
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