Rogue Nation USA
Which country refuses to sign international treaties and ignores U.N.
resolutions while demanding that everyone else play by the rules? You
guessed it.
By Christopher Hitchens
May/June 2001
Quick -- no peeking. Who was the last American to be awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize?
I try this in front of audiences, including quite "concerned,"
liberal ones, all the time. It's shocking to hear the enveloping
silence that falls. All right -- it was Jody Williams in conjunction
with her organization, the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines.
Now why is it that so few people know that? It's not as if the
American press doesn't print prominent annual coverage of U.S. Nobel
laureates, and it's not as if the Peace Prize goes very often to an
American citizen.
There are probably two reasons why Ms. Williams is not more famous
than she is. The first has to do with the fact that the late Princess
Diana sucked up all the available oxygen on the land-mines issue by
the simple tactic of staging a couple of photo ops in Bosnia and
Angola. The second is that President Bill Clinton did not follow the
usual practice of telephoning the winner with his congratulations.
Perhaps this reluctance derived partly from the fact that Ms. Williams
had publicly called him a "weenie" for refusing to put an American
signature on the treaty, which (though it was a great triumph as
international agreements go) did look a bit threadbare without the
assent of the world's largest exporter of arms. In the end, there was
a Clintonian compromise. He belatedly made the call of felicitations.
But he didn't sign the treaty.
What was the reason given by the United States for being the holdout
country? It was candid enough: We quite like land mines, and may need
or choose to employ them. You don't just have to be a very big country
to say that. You have to be a very arrogant one.
A small but interesting thing happened in the last year of the
Clinton administration. The State Department decided to drop the term
rogue state as applied to unpopular or unpleasant regimes, such as
those in Libya or North Korea. This was a relief; a serious nation has
no business employing cartoonish designations or schoolyard epithets.
But one of the reasons for the decision, as I was told in confidence
by a person at Foggy Bottom, was that the phrase could be too easily
turned around on its author. Time and again, the United States exempts
itself from the standards that it applies to others.
This is not a new contradiction. In the late 1970s the U.S.
government quite rightly took Iran to the World Court for the crime of
diplomatic hostage taking, and secured a judgment in its own favor. A
few years later, Nicaragua took the United States to the World Court
for the crime of mining its civilian harbors, and secured a judgment
in its own favor. On this occasion, Washington refused to recognize
the jurisdiction of the court. So it goes.
The word for this might be unilateralism -- a superpower that openly
proclaims that it recognizes no interests except its own. The
so-called Powell Doctrine, named for Colin Powell himself, states with
beautiful simplicity that the United States reserves the right to act
only in its own interests, to do so with overwhelming force, and to
disregard any tedious legalisms that might stand in its way. (This
also exempts the United States from participating in bleeding-heart
humanitarian missions it doesn't like.) Currently, a version of the
same doctrine is being wheeled out in order to demolish the most
important treaty that the United States actually did sign -- the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, forbidding the development of shields
such as the Star Wars fantasy. Ah, say the Bush people, we didn't sign
that treaty with Russia. We signed it with the Soviet Union! (And they
like to mock Clinton's tricky way with words.)
Remember the invasion of Panama in the winter of 1989? A full-scale
military operation to apprehend a drug-dealing head of state who had
turned sour on his partners in Washington, it was given the
grand-sounding title "Operation Just Cause." Reviewing some of the
more pathetic justifications offered for this operation, in which
young Colin Powell so distinguished himself, my then-colleagues at
Harper's came up with the brilliant slogan "Just Cause We Say So."
This fat and superior mentality can be found all over our official
rhetoric. Not long ago, Madeleine Albright was asked why the United
States imposed diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions on Cuba,
but not on the far more repressive People's Republic of China. Her
reply, essentially, was that China is a world power whereas Cuba is
only a regional nuisance. Regional to whom, one might ask? The
unexamined assumption is that something is what it is because a
superpower says so. (She might as well have answered that China is a
big potential market for American corporations whereas Cuba is not,
but that would be making the same point in a different way.)
The United States is a founding and senior member of the United
Nations and also its host country, but it doesn't feel like paying its
full membership dues. (The current U.S. proposal to pay perhaps half
our debt to the U.N. is even more arrogant than the original deadbeat
line: As Alfred Rubin, a Tufts University professor of international
law, points out, you express more contempt for your obligations if you
acknowledge them but say you'll meet them as and when you feel like
it.) The United States nonetheless reserves the right to veto U.N.
resolutions, to insist on their full implementation, or to ignore
them.
Does it make wise use of this luxurious range of choices? In 1994,
several smaller states went to the U.N., urgently pleading for a small
but decisive increase in the world body's presence in Rwanda. Advance
warning had been given of the intentions of the Hutu militia, and word
of their plans had been authoritatively leaked to local peacekeepers.
Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. envoy to the U.N., was instructed to
block the proposal to send more troops. After the self-inflicted
debacle in Somalia, the United States had decided that Africa was
boring and dangerous and that its pleas should go unheard. The Hutu
genocide plan went off without a hitch; the United States then
approved a military intervention by the French government, which sent
its troops to protect the mass murderers against the rebellion of the
Rwandan Patriotic Front.
Do yourself a favor and look up the date on which the United States
actually ratified the 1948 Convention on Genocide (40 years after its
passage at the United Nations) or the last time it refused to
recognize a genocide (the 1915-1923 massacre of Armenians, the subject
of a failed congressional resolution last fall).
On the other hand, when it wants to mobilize the international
community, the United States is prepared to expend a lot of effort.
The same Madeleine Albright supported the passage of the Helms-Burton
legislation, which sought to extend the embargo on Cuba to any third
country or corporation doing business with Havana. This is probably a
violation of international law; it is certainly a violation of the
norms of international trade. Countries not party to the U.S.-Cuban
quarrel, like Britain and Canada, objected to being sanctioned for
carrying on ordinary commercial relations. They were told, basically,
that this was just too bad because the Senate has a mind of its own.
They are told the same thing when they inquire about the U.S. refusal
to pay U.N. membership dues or sign on to the land-mines treaty.
Sorry, our Congress can't be persuaded. But if an administration wants
to persuade Congress on a foreign policy matter, it generally can do
so -- as the Gulf War demonstrated.
One definition of a "rogue state" was that it engaged in the
promiscuous sale of weapons. North Korea, it is true, does sustain its
near-dead economy by this means. But the United States helps float a
whole booming industry on the manufacture and sale of all kinds of
weaponry, and is not in the least bit choosy about where it
distributes the stuff. (The latest, and perhaps the worst, example of
this involves the means by which Pakistan, our client in the
Afghanistan nightmare, acquired the makings of a nuclear capability.)
The term double standards became customary in the time of Jeanne
Kirkpatrick, who famously distinguished between authoritarian and
totalitarian regimes, allegedly preferring the first to the second,
but actually preferring authoritarianism to democracy. The same
three-card monte operated when it came to terrorism; guerrillas in El
Salvador were terrorists by definition, but French agents blowing up
an unarmed Greenpeace vessel and killing a crew member were not. (In
those days, Nelson Mandela's African National Congress was on the
administration's list of terrorist organizations, as of course was the
PLO.) At the time, even some Democrats made critical noises about this
hypocrisy, but that didn't prevent it from persisting across changes
of regime in Washington. Thus, for example, Libya is quite rightly
subjected to sanctions until it gives up two wanted men in the Pan Am
103 atrocity, but Saudi Arabia escapes even rebuke for sheltering Idi
Amin. After a bit, this stops looking like a double standard and
becomes a single one: It's okay if we do it or if it's done by one of
our friends.
I happen to be one of those on the left who was sufficiently
impressed by the threat of war and fascism in Bosnia to urge that
international military help be given to the Bosnian resistance. (This
meant that I sometimes found myself signing the same petition as
Jeanne Kirkpatrick.) And I still can't read the urgent faxes and
cables sent from Rwanda in the last days before the genocide without a
feeling of insurmountable rage and frustration. Many on the left do
not especially like to admit it, but there are probably other genuine
"just causes" in our future, where American help will be solicited by
deserving victims. It will be harder to argue about this logically or
intelligently if the political establishment allows itself to go on
picking and choosing from its own standpoint of impregnable moral
self-regard.
Recently there was a semiserious proposal that European Union
countries be graciously allowed to join nafta and share in its fabled
benefits. But suppose the offer was reversed and the United States
was seeking to join the European Union? It probably would be refused
membership, because it has not yet ratified the Convention on the
Rights of the Child, which forbids the execution of minors. The only
other holdout country when last I checked was Somalia.
Actually, the United States might also be refused membership because
it, along with China and a handful of other execution states, voted at
the United Nations against an E.U. proposal for a moratorium on
capital punishment for the underage, the insane, and the pregnant. In
fact, it might be refused membership because of its addiction to
capital punishment across the board, and for its occasional
boastfulness about the fact.
The classic statement of arrogant fatuity in this department was made
by our president while he was still governor of Texas. A Canadian
citizen had been executed in the Lone Star State in violation of a
treaty that mandated consular access to prisoners accused of serious
crimes. When asked why the Canadian had been snuffed without proper
notification to his embassy, Bush replied that this sent a message
about not committing murder in Texas. It did not even strike him that,
by this standard, the Canadians could sentence an American tourist to
life imprisonment while ignoring his request to contact the U.S.
consul. Of course, the Canadians wouldn't do that. But that's because
they don't suffer from a superpower superiority complex.
The laws, it was said by cynics in classical times, are like cobwebs.
They are strong enough to hold the weak, but too weak to detain the
strong. Case in point: the International Criminal Court, which has
been set up as a kind of permanent Nuremberg tribunal by a large
majority of the world's democratic nations. Bill Clinton could not
bring himself to sign the treaty establishing the court until his last
weeks in office, and Congress has yet to ratify it. However, this
abstention does not prevent the United States from demanding that
other smaller countries such as Serbia (but not yet Chile) adhere
fully, deliver their own wanted war criminals, and generally shape up.
And what is the reason given by the military and political right wing
for opposing the establishment of an International Criminal Court?
Why, such a court might impede the orderly conduct of American foreign
policy. Think about it. What kind of implicit admission is that?
