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Ian Williams is a journalist and U.N. Correspondent for The Nation.

He was born in Liverpool and graduated from Liverpool University, despite several years suspension for protests against its investments in South Africa.

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

He 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 1987 he was a speech-writer for UK Labour party leader Neil Kinnock during the elections.

U.S. Sen. Joe Biden’s presidential ambitions were derailed when it was revealed that Biden had plagiarized a Kinnock speech.

Since 1989 Ian Williams has been based in New York City.

The Solution to the Iraqi Knot

by Ian Williams

UNITED NATIONS -- 12 May 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com / Alexander the “Great” solved the complexity of the Gordian knot in a quick, simple and brutal way. He cut through it.

It is worth remembering that the Macedonian King grew into “greatness” by embarking on an intercontinental war of aggression that took little heed of whatever passed for international law at the time.

While subsequent histories praise his dissemination of “Greek Civilization” throughout Asia , the more perspicacious remember that the price was the extinction of Greek democracy back in the homeland, even if, like the later American version, it was a slaveholding democracy.

Alexander the NeoCon may be a more apt title, in fact.

One almost wonders if he left an Athenian and Spartan Patriot Act behind him before leaving for Syria , Iraq , Iran and Afghanistan .

However, this is a digression from a simple, straightforward solution to the Iraqi knot.

Any incoming Iraqi government has to prove that it is independent of the Americans if it is to have the faintest scintilla of respectability at home or abroad.

As we have said, Lakhdar Brahimi and the U.N. have the role of the midwife assisting a virgin birth of a new, sovereign Iraqi government, free of all occupational sin.

This is difficult, since there is a rather hefty and visible umbilical cord hanging about, in the form of some 150,000 American troops.

The problem is, of course, that no one knows if or when these forces will leave.

We have yet to hear a clear and unequivocal statement that the U.S. troops will evacuate when asked by any future Iraqi government.

Even if someone, say Colin Powell, did make such a statement in Washington , then we can be sure the Pentagon, the National Security Council, or the Vice President’s office would contradict it in varying degrees of explicitness.

These are the people who say on the website of the Iraqi Development Fund that its assets belong to them “by the laws and usages of war.”

In short, as was once said about Panama, Iraq was stolen fair and square and it’s ours.

So how can we cut this Gordian umbilical cord, if we can genetically mix metaphors that way?

While one can usually mistrust simple clear solutions, there is one that is amusing in its elegance.

The incoming Iraqi government must immediately sign the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court.

Then, as soon as it thinks it has had enough of the U.S. troops, it should ratify the treaty.

As we all know, in its paranoia, this administration refuses to station troops in any country that has signed the ICC treaty without a bilateral exemption for American troops and even civilians.

The new government must of course refuse to sign any such exemption, and if by any chance, say the IGC, is forced to sign such an exemption it must “unsign” it at the first opportunity.

Of course, such abrogation is against the Vienna Convention on treaties, but any government in Baghdad has a double let out.

It would have signed under duress – and above all, it can cite the American precedent, since this administration unsigned both the Vienna Convention and the ICC treaty.

The threat of such a neat move should be quite compelling.

All the actions of the U.S. (and indeed the UK ) troops in occupied Iraq would become subjects for investigation and prosecution by the ICC.

As we are seeing daily, there is a lot to investigate from Abu Ghraib prison outwards.

Despite Washington ’s paranoia, if the U.S. itself prosecutes war criminals from its forces, there is no problem.

However, the Pentagon will be trying to limit the purges to a few National Guardsmen with no account for command responsibility, and we can already see that bloody carpet unrolling in the direction of the Pentagon higher ups.

After all, the Israelis, following the Nuremburg precedent, hanged Adolf Eichman for simply obeying orders, so some punishment seems in order for those who ordered untrained and ill disciplined part time soldiers to cross the world, and gave them control of people whom they had been told were responsible for September 11^th, the travails of Jessica Lynch, and very probably for the $40 a barrel oil price as well.

That brings into play anyone who is responsible for arresting and depriving Iraqi prisoners of their rights under the Geneva Conventions.

There may a be a few ancillary problems of course, since the U.S. legislation against the ICC has, not totally facetiously, been called The Hague Invasion Act.

If a U.S. prison camp guard or commandant were arrested and transferred to the ICC for trial in The Hague , the act implies that the U.S. is supposed to invade the Netherlands and free him, or indeed her, looking at those photographs.

One would assume that NATO, let alone the U.N. would frown upon such deeds, and indeed even Tony Blair not only signed the ICC, but in common with the rest of Europe refused a special bilateral agreement with the U.S. about its nationals.

So the solution is simple, even if it may have a few complexities arising from it.

However, maybe, like weapons of mass destruction, both real and imaginary, it is always better to imply a threat to use them rather than actually let them off.

Therefore, the Iraqi government should loudly and ostentatiously sign the Rome Treaty, and keep the ratification for the moment when it needs it.

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