I've been reading that myself. The fact is that the US doesn't have to, and it looks like it won't unless it is perceived to be in our best interests, or Iraq's. Steven Den Beste has his usual blunt take on the situation:
There's a smart-ass comment that engineers sometimes use. When hearing someone emphatically declare, "We can't do that!" someone else may reply, in exasperation, "Why not? Does it violate the laws of physics?"
We can't go faster than light. We can't violate the second law of thermodynamics. These are hard and fast restrictions imposed on us by the Universe; it isn't possible for us to fail to comply with these laws. But for lesser issues, it's not so clear.
There are some who have enormous faith in the power of law. Not the laws of physics, mind, but the laws of man. But in a sense they seem to conflate the two, and for some reason I've never understood seem to think that if you pass a law against something-or-other, then mysterious forces will transform space-time and thereafter whatever-it-was will cease to happen, because it will be impossible.
Advanced practitioners of this principle have perfected an even more sophisticated version of this approach: they don't even need to formally pass laws. What they do is talk about "emerging international law", which sort of spontaneously springs out of nowhere, and once it's in being, the fabric of the universe is modified.
For months we heard, "You American's can't go to war in Iraq without UN approval." Of course, that was part-and-parcel of a modern repackaging of Catch 22:
1. You can't fight a war without dealing with the UN first.
2. If you deal with the UN, then it means that there's still a remote chance that diplomacy may still work, and you can't have permission to go to war as long as there's even the faintest hope that a diplomatic solution is possible.
Eventually, Bush and Blair got fed up, and they went to war anyway. Fortunately for us, doing so didn't violate the laws of physics. If you try to exceed violate the second law of thermodynamics, you'll fail. That's all.
But we seem to not only be fighting a war in Iraq, but also seem to be winning it. (So far, so good.) It's always good to have a field test occasionally of a new scientific theory, and we seem to be proving that "emerging international law" doesn't have the same power as the laws of physics.
And we're about to prove that again. We can't fight a war without UN approval, and the US can't be primarily in charge of the post-war rebuilding of Iraq. The UN must approve all wars, and the rebuilding of Iraq must be under UN control.
Or so we're being told.
These comments are coming from a lot of places, and the arguments take multiple forms. For example, someone named Mark Malloch Brown, from the UN:
A U.S.-run administration in Iraq will not have the authority under international law to award American companies major contracts to modernize and run Iraq's vast oil industry, a senior U.N. official said Thursday.
Under the Geneva Conventions, an occupying power can only deal with day-to-day administrative operations unless the U.N. Security Council decides otherwise, said Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the United Nations Development Program.
"Until there is a new Security Council resolution, you are only as the occupying power able to deal with day-to-day administrative decisions," Malloch Brown said. An occupier cannot change the constitution or make long-term legal commitments such as the kind of 10- to 20-year contracts and concessions that oil developers need, he said.
Now I know that I cannot change the value of the universal electrical constant, but I was not aware that it was impossible for me, or for my nation, to "change the constitution" of Iraq.
Philip Carroll, who was president and chief executive of the U.S. arm of the London-based Royal Dutch/Shell Group until 1998 told the Houston Chronicle Thursday that he had been asked to restore oil production and create new production capacity if needed.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday that the United States not the United Nations must have the lead role in Iraq's postwar reconstruction.
Senior U.S. officials have said they expect revenue from Iraqi oil to cover much of the cost of postwar reconstruction. Iraq's oil, however, is currently sold under the U.N. oil-for-food program, which is controlled by the Security Council.
Any change to divert money to reconstruction or reward U.S. companies would almost certainly face stiff opposition from France, Russia, Germany and China, which opposed the U.S. resolution seeking authorization from the Security Council for war.
There was also stiff opposition to us fighting the war in the first place, as this article mentions, and we're fighting anyway.
Suppose that we ignore the UN. Suppose that we run Iraq for a year or two with a military government. Suppose that we and the Brits and Aussies supervise the process of a gradual transition to civilian rule. Suppose that we operate the oil fields, and pump the oil into ships we control and haul the oil out and sell it on the world market, or sell it to ourselves at a fair market price, and take the money and use it to rebuild Iraq.
What in hell is the UN going to do about it? What I just described is not, in fact, physically impossible. It's entirely practical, especially when we military occupy Iraq after the war. If we tell the UN oil-for-food program to go get stuffed, then what?
If we don't even go to the UN for any kind of authorization, then what?
Well, they'll get angry. They'll denounce us. Europe will aim nuclear-scale scowls in our direction. They will issue calls for us to stop. We'll get daily or bi-daily press releases where they use increasingly emphatic language to describe how much they disagree with what we're doing.
The reason we know that is because it's what Germany and France and Russia have been doing in reaction to the war for the last two weeks. And as amazing as it may seem; it doesn't seem to be making any difference.
In actual fact, the only way they can stop us is by going to war against us, and they're not going to do that. If we are determined to take control of post-war Iraq and to run it and rebuild it without ceding to the UN, there's really nothing they can do to stop us.
There are occasional moments in history, identifiable instants, when a hell of a lot changes. One of those happened three weeks ago, when Bush and Blair decided that they were willing to fight the war without the UN.
A lot of people don't want to accept the fact that three weeks ago, "emerging international law" was revealed to be a hollow fiction. It does not have the power of the laws of physics; it was never really even as powerful as national law. International law only had power as long as it was respected by the powerful nations of the world. Now that two of the most powerful have clearly decided that it is corrupt and useless, it's dead.
And if we simply ignore it, and ignore all the criticism of us for doing so, then what?
Like as not there will be a role for the UN. But it's not going to be what the French are hoping. I suspect that the World Food Program, and the World Health Organization, and UNICEF will be welcomed in to supervise distribution of humanitarian aid in the first months after the war. But there won't be a hand-off to "UN Peace Keepers", for instance. We won't turn over administration to UN bureaucrats.
And we're not going to let the UN "Oil for Food program" continue to sell Iraq's oil. Which is to say, we're not going to let TotalFinaElf keep its cushy contract which permits it to pay the Iraqis a price well below the going price elsewhere, with some of those excess profits going into UN coffers and some being kept by TotalFinaElf (and some being funneled to French politicians).
The UK is caught in the middle on this. Blair really wants the UN heavily involved.
During the last year we have cut Blair a lot of slack. We've made a lot of concessions to him, made a lot of decisions in ways which helped him. He's a valuable ally, and the UK has made a significant contribution to the war, and to the diplomacy leading up to it.
But we aren't going to give away the entire farm even to him. We've cut Blair a lot of slack, but we're not going to give this away. So what you've been seeing is that he comes to Washington to talk to Bush, and comes away saying that the US is probably going to run things. Then he goes to talk to leaders on the continent, and seems to reaffirm that the UN really should be in charge.
Blair, of all people, should now realize that once Bush actually makes a decision, that's the end of it. And I think that it's extremely likely now that Bush has already decided that any UN role in post-war Iraq will be minimal, at best token. UN agencies may well do quite a lot, but they will have no power and make no decisions.
Meanwhile, the same talking heads in Europe who thought that they could use the UN to keep us from fighting now think that exactly the same tactics in exactly the same institution will prevent us from governing Iraq after the war.
Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou and NATO Secretary General George Robertson both said they saw moves toward closing the splits that over Iraq in the weeks before the war.
"We see a consensus emerging," said Papandreou, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency. "The importance we place on the United Nations role is recognized by the United States."
That's an interesting way to phrase it. I would agree that the US "recognizes" the importance that the Europeans place on the UN. Given the flow of recent events, it would have been damned hard to not recognize it.
But that doesn't mean we agree with them about it, nor does it mean that it's even anything we're willing to actually negotiate about. Why would we? What the events of the last six months have proved beyond doubt is that negotiating with the Europeans gives them the opportunity to stab us in the back, and that they eagerly seek to take advantage of exactly that opportunity.
There's an old saying that "possession is nine tenths of the law." We have already put together the structure of a post-war military government of Iraq; most of the people involved are actually in Kuwait now, ready to move into Iraq once the situation stabilizes. We've already selected the governor. Contracts for repairs of some of the more important facilities have already been signed. And if we simply go ahead and do all that, and don't even ask anyone else, and keep doing it even when they bitch and moan and condemn it, and are still doing it a year from now, then what?
At a certain point it will become fait accompli. At a certain point the question of whether it is "legitimate" or not will become moot. In fact, it already is moot.
The Russians and French and Germans are not going to go to war about this. And they don't have any other way to actually force us to stop. They didn't, in the end, have the ability to prevent us from starting the war, and they won't actually have the ability to prevent us from controlling the post-war administration of Iraq. The laws of physics are not on their side in this. |
