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 -- 2 June 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com / When you are locked in a room with an angry ogre of limited intellectual powers, it often makes sense to humor the beast, and pander to its whims, even if you roll your eyes in disbelief at its demands.

So when the U.S. delegation two years ago threatened sequential vetoes of Peacekeeping operations unless the Security Council agreed a resolution that pretended to exempt U.S. citizens from the International Criminal Court, the decision of most of the other members to go along with the farce hovered somewhere on the boundary between cowardice and rational prudence.

With long-time U.N. baiter and ideological, indeed theological, unilateralist John Bolton in charge of ICC affairs at the U.S. State Department, linked into a triumphant group of likeminded ideologues in the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney’s office, it could be argued that these people were indeed stupid and deranged enough to make it too dangerous to call their bluff.

On Wednesday 19 May, the U.S. delegation withdrew the “blackmail-the world” resolution that they had been trying to force to a vote in the Security Council, when they realized that there was a serious chance that enough other members may try to call Washington ’s bluff.

The resolution is to renew Resolution 1487, which in turn was to renew Resolution 1422, which was the one that sought to exempt U.S. military in U.N. peacekeeping forces from any chance of arrest and removal for trial before the International Criminal Court in The Hague .

The resolution requests the ICC not to open proceedings against any current or former officials from “a contributing state nor a party to the Rome Statute” for a twelve month renewable period.

This is an insult to all of us who think that it is a better world in which Henry Kissinger, General Pinochet, Charles Taylor or Ariel Sharon have to check simultaneously with their lawyers and travel agents before going abroad.

Faced with the American threat to veto peacekeeping, in previous years, the British have led some of the Europeans into the “hold your nose and vote for the resolution” lobby.

This time, with the images of battered bodies of dead Iraqis and the humiliated live ones fresh in the minds of the world, and indeed of Americans, is an opportune moment for the Europeans to make a stand.

Han Corell, who was Legal Counsel for the U.N. at the time argued that the resolution had no legal force, since the clause of the ICC statute it invoked was clearly aimed at individual cases, and not at giving a blanket exemption, a preemptive “get out of jail free card” to American Forces, but he warns that these pandering resolutions effectively dilute the authority of the Security Council – and call into question the credibility of the U.S. administration.

(In fact, he is too kind: they call into question the sanity of the Bush administration.)

So far, over 120 countries have signed the treaty setting up the ICC, and 94 have ratified it.

The U.S. has expended immense diplomatic effort, and incurred equally immense ill will by bullying nations into signing bilateral exemption treaties promising not to hand over Americans to the Court.

The treaties are of dubious legality, and have set Washington at loggerheads with all its Western allies.

However, the last twelve months have not been good ones for the US . Ironically, supporters of the ICC used to suggest that it was unthinkable that U.S. military would be guilty of crimes against humanity, or that the U.S. would fail to deal with adequately.

Sadly, their argument was that the U.S. had little or nothing to fear from the court does not ring so true anymore.

The behavior of the U.S. military in Abu Ghraib, deaths and abuse of journalists, the attack on the village – wedding party or not – near the Syrian border, suggest exactly the kind of culture of impunity that the ICC was set up to counter.

Even a year ago, the thought that the U.S. might need allies, and might need the help of the global community for its endeavors would have tickled the ribs of the unilateralists in the administration.

Now the June 30 deadline for renewal of 1487 coincides with the final date for the U.S. “handover” in Iraq , for which it is desperately seeking the support of the U.N. and its members.

On the other hand, it has severely dented the Americans’ somewhat contradictory case that they had the best-disciplined, best-lawyered, and best-behaved armed forces in the world, so it was an insult to the flag to suggest they would commit any crime.

By definition, they implied, the only ICC prosecutions of Americans would be politically motivated.

Hmm, well as the old saying had it, tell that to the marines, or the military police in Abu Ghraib.

Taken together, the “favorable” conjunction of the recently exposed flagrant torture and murder of detainees by American forces, the need for international help and a U.N. Resolution on the Iraqi handover, and the impending Presidential election, offer an unrivalled opportunity to restore some sanity to this degrading annual charade.

Under such circumstances, could President Bush actually veto peacekeeping operations as he has threatened in the past and keep any credibility either domestically or globally?

In his recent decisions on Iraq , he has shown an almost admirable ability to throw his fundamentalists overboard when their dogmas conflict with the primary cause: a second term in the White House.

While it is hardly likely that any of the other permanent members of the Security Council would tweak the deranged eagle’s feathers by actually vetoing the resolution, there may well be enough countries prepared to call the Bush bluff and at least abstain on the resolution, thus denying it the nine positive votes it needs.

Of course, if the British lived up their other principles, other than the cardinal one of assisting their special relation across the Atlantic no matter how eccentric it gets, it would be a done deal.

Even without London ’s dubious good offices, the hasty U.S. withdrawal of the resolution on the 19^th suggests that this is an unrivalled opportunity to get U.S. policy down to a soft landing from Cloud Nine.

Now is the time to ponder an end to pandering, or as Hans Corell said in his recent forthright letter, “It is time to stop this nonsense.”