MaximsNews

Skeptic Ian Williams questions Bill Clinton during the New Hampshire Primary.

Deserter: George Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past...

Ian Williams’ first book The Alms Trade was published in 1989 and his second, The UN For Beginners, was published in 1995. The Deserter: Bush’s War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past is published by Nation Books and is scheduled for release in July 2004.

In 2004, he will have chapters in George Orwell into the 21st Century - T Cushman ed, Paradigm Publishing, Why Kosovo Matters: The Debate on the Left Revisited - Danny Postel, ed. (Cybereditions, 2004) Irving Howe, Ed. John Rodden “Irving Howe’s hero-worship of Trotsky: Where the NeoCons came from,” and in 2005, The Iraq War Rick Fawn and Raymond Hinnebusch (eds), 2005 “The UN and Iraq.”

He has also contributed to several collections on international affairs.

He has written for on line media such as www.MaximsNews.com, Salon, Alternet, Fox and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, has also been a columnist for the New York Observer and is correspondent for the Nation, Middle East International, and is regular columnist for George Orwell’s old newspaper, Tribune.

From 1994-1999 he was US Editor of Balkan War Report. Since 1995 he has been US contributing editor and columnist for Investor Relations magazine for which he writes a monthly column, The Speculator which takes an offbeat look at the world of business and economics.

As editor and contributor for IWPR’s WarReport and Transitions he covered the political, economic, and social problems of transition countries and worked with many local contributors.

Internationally, he has contributed to media across the world, from Punch to the Jordan Times to the South China Morning Post, Asia Times, and the Australian.

Before moving to New York in 1989, and since, he was a regular contributor in Britain to the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, the European, The Observer, and The Independent for which he was one of the founding contributors.

He was twice President and twice Vice President of the United Nations Correspondents Association. He has produced several booklets for UN agencies, including one on Portugal and aid to Africa , another on ASEAN, and has edited reports for agencies such as UNCTAD.

He speaks on the UN and other aspects of international affairs and American foreign policy at venues such as the UN University in Tokyo , Yale, Columbia , NYU, Freedom Forum, and Rutgers , Al Maty Kazakh University, Fukuoka University Japan.

Born in Liverpool in 1949, he graduated from Liverpool University, despite several years suspension for protests against its investments in South Africa.

Consequently, he had a variegated career path, which included a drinking competition with Chinese Premier Chou En Lai and an argument on English Literature with Chiang Ching, a.k.a. Mme Mao.

Chinese Premier Chou En Lai (l.) on his way to a drinking competition with Ian Williams (r., rear) on New Years Eve, 1970.

He worked on the buses and trains, and eventually became a full time labor union official until the early eighties, when he moved into full time writing after winning a Nuffield Fellowship to study Indian unions in 1984.

In 1987 he was a speech-writer for UK Labour party leader Neil Kinnock during the elections. (Joe Biden’s presidential ambitions were derailed when it was revealed that he had plagiarized a Kinnock speech).

In addition to writing, he has worked in various capacities for many TV and radio outlets, ABC, CBC, CNN, BBC, ITN, CNBC, etc.

On target: Williams in shooting competition with a governor in Yemen.

He has appeared on Good Morning America , the O’Reilly Factor, Hardball, Wolf Blitzer, etc.

In 1995 a CBC programme investigating CIA influence on UN contracts, for which he was associate producer, won prizes at both the New York and Columbus festivals.

email: uswarreport@igc.org
website: www.ianwilliams.info

UNITED NATIONS -- 16 June 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com / Hastily contrived, verbose, fudged and filled with diplomatic ambiguity as it is, Security Council Resolution 1546 is an epitaph to the wilder dreams of empire entertained by most of the Bush administration.

Any reading of the final text when compared with its three previous drafts, or with the triumphalism from the “Pentagon Intellectuals” a year ago when George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished,” will show that the Administration has been in steady retreat ever since.

The problem facing the Security Council has been that of the apocryphal lost traveler in Ireland, who asks for directions and is told “Well, if I was you, I wouldn’t be startin’ from here.”

Right from the beginning, the other members had to weigh between letting the Americans fester in the hole that they had dug themselves, and their duty to the Iraqi people and their neighbors and to international peace and order.

They could have simply refused to deal with what the U.N. still coyly calls “the Situation between Iraq and Kuwait.”

They could have tried to condemn the U.S. invasion outright in a resolution and seen it vetoed, which would have had a doubly dire effect: of destroying any chances of bringing the U.S. back inside the Charter – and direct dire consequences for the movers.

Even in the General Assembly, despite ringing denunciations of Kofi Annan and the U.N. in many Arab capitals, the President of the Assembly, Jan Kavan, could not find a single nation prepared to put its name to an explicit resolution.

Instead, France, Germany, Russia and other members of the Council moved to recognize the reality of the occupation, while at no point recognizing the legitimacy of the invasion.

The text and tenor of the earlier resolutions showed the Security Council on the defensive against American and British demands.

They were also helped along by some appreciation for the U.S. trying to come back into the multilateral fold after its foray into international lawlessness, even if this owed less to contrition than to Washington’s discovery that they could not sell Iraqi oil on the world market without a U.N. seal.

By the time the text of 1546 was in negotiation, the balance of power had tilted completely.

The absence of WMD and the presence of torture, had allied with American casualties to blunt the President’s reelection prospects.

Instead of Iraq being a long-term strategic asset and a base for American assaults on Syria and Iran as some of the wilder Pentagonistas had plotted, the U.S. was having difficulty garrisoning the occupation.

Once again, the administration had discounted the malign effects of not getting U.N. backing for its invasion.

The Turks, the Pakistanis, the Indians and others that they had been counting on to provide suicide-bomb-fodder did not deliver.

Half the garrison in Iraq was National Guard and reserve units called up to fill the gap.

Washington sources had originally suggested that the resolution would disband the UNMOVIC and IAEA inspection teams and leave the American inspectors to tidy up the loose ends of the weapons of mass destruction.

That disappeared even before the first draft, and by the final draft, the Russians had inserted a clause recognizing the U.N. inspectors and promising to revisit their mandate.

It was a small but highly symbolic victory if we remember the alleged causes of the invasion.

Washington was originally going to keep a tight hand on the purse strings, but they have now lost the ability to loot Iraqi oil funds for Halliburton, although, buried deep in the hypertext of the resolution is a continuing 5 percent of oil revenues to go for reparations, mostly to Kuwait.

Of course, watching the amnesiac news broadcasts in the USA, one might not appreciate just how far Washington had backtracked.

Now, 1546 says that U.S. troops lose their mandate as soon as the constitutional process is finished, and that their presence could be “reviewed” even earlier - as soon as the Iraqi government wants and in any case within twelve months.

Although no one was rude enough to say so, these sunset clauses are insurance against Bush & Co. changing their minds if re-elected.

Certainly smaller than many would like, but certainly more than Richard Perle, who trumpeted the death of the organization a year ago, would like.

For a start, to break the incestuous cycle of a U.S. appointed government requesting the continued presence of U.S. troops, the U.N. special representative Lakhdar Brahimi was needed to certify that the new administration was virgin-born, free of occupational sin.

Without Brahimi’s role, in his own words as a “catalyst,” it would not have been possible to form a new government.

While one may have doubts about the popularity, or indeed the representativeness of the new Iraqi regime, their independence is certainly suggested by the fast one they pulled on Bremer and Brahimi in the last days of the handover.

It is now in their own interests, and indeed that of the Multi-National Force, for them to appear as ostentatiously independent as possible if there is any hope of lessening the continuing attacks from the various groups.

One of the main fudges in the resolution was over the extent to which the Iraqi administration has effective direction, if not direct command and control of the MultiNational Force.

Understandably, in the real world, the Coalition military wants to be able to respond to attacks without waiting for a cabinet meeting in Baghdad, but in the fantasy world of the Pentagon civilians, it is inconceivable to admit openly that U.S. troops should come under foreign command.

Powell’s compromise pledge, endorsed by the resolution, is that “The commander of the MNF will work in partnership with the sovereign Government of Iraq in helping to provide security while recognizing and respecting its sovereignty,” which panders to the Pentagon by not giving the Iraqis an explicit veto.

However, even if Bush were re-elected, it would be politically very difficult for the Americans to mount such a Falluja-style operation in defiance of the Iraqi government, even if no one ever lost too much money betting on the obtuseness of this administration.

There are many Iraqis angry with the U.S., who seem to want to continue attacking MNF.

It is to be hoped that their current pledge to quit, combined with an injection of sensitivity into the U.S. forces may erase, or at least soften the entirely understandable impression that so many Iraqis had formed, that these were brutal racist invaders who never intended to leave.

How Iraqis judge the sincerity of those pledges depends on U.S. behavior over the next few months.

One serious disappointment in the text was the lack of the explicit human rights clauses that were originally asked for by Brazil and other members of the Council.

The International Red Cross has pointed out an aspect of it that has deep significance in the shadow of Abu Ghraib: will the U.S. abide by the Geneva Conventions and either charge or release all prisoners captured before the end of the Occupation on 30 June?

If the U.S. holds onto prisoners after that date, it is signaling that the occupation is in fact continuing – and inviting continuing resistance.

Another similar incitement would be if the U.S. secures any kind of extraterritorial status for the twenty to thirty thousand private contractors mavericking their way around Iraq.

Even with Chalabi temporarily sidelined, some of its members could reasonably be suspected of having only the most expedient attachment to democracy.

One counter to that is a strong U.N. monitoring presence, able to report back to the Security Council, but once again, that depends on the security situation.

In addition, in the long run, anyone who wants to ensure a belligerent and vengeful future Iraq just has to make sure that the country carries on paying one barrel in twenty of its oil exports to Kuwait and other claimants.

Even so, if everyone carries out their promises then Iraq at least has some hopes, once direction of events is out of the hands of Washington, perhaps the world’s most inept ever imperial power.

However, leaving aside the Iraqis, who have many reasons to be dubious of the kindness of strangers who backed their dictator before piling sanctions and then invasion on them; in one way at least 1546 marks a major victory for the world.

The scofflaw administration that marched into Iraq unilaterally waving the stars and stripes, is now trying to slither out under cover of the U.N.’s blue flag.

On, or shortly after July 1, George W. Bush will start lamenting the first deaths of American soldiers – for the United Nations.