Features January 15, 2003 a UP: It seemed initially that there was some resistance on he part of France, Russia, and the other permanent mem- ers of the UN Security Council. But recently they seem to e acquiescing to American demands. rankly, they're not going to stand up to the US. No one . The entire world—including Middle Eastern nations ike Iran and Kuwait, the main victims of Saddam while e was a US ally—resists the idea of war. They all hate addam, they'd love to get rid of him, but they realize at, as horrible as he is, he can’t hurt anyone outside his arrow reach. The only people afraid of the mushroom loud are in the United States. But which country is oing to want to prejudice its relations with the United tates over something they know the United States is oing to do anyway? Particularly when the US has been aking clear all along that they don’t need a resolution? In fact, the US has said very explicitly that the UN is nly relevant if it grants Washington the same authoriza- ion that Congress did. Everyone on the Security ouncil knows that, including France, Russia and hina. If the US is going to do it anyway, there’s no rea- on to oppose them. This is what the UN calls the Yemen ffect—it has to do with Yemen’s refusal in the Security ouncil in 1990 to go along with the Gulf War, at which oint they immediately had all aid cut and all sorts of positions imposed on them by the US—other coun- ies don’t want to live with that. UP: So then what is the relevance of the Security Council nd UN in world affairs today? ero. The US has made it clear that their relevance is ro. When you say at high levels, “you are relevant if you t us do what we want to do, and youre irrelevant oth- twise,” then the answer is that they’re irrelevant. cidentally, that’s nothing new. Go back 30 years, for xample: the big issue of the day was the US war in dochina. Every country at the UN was basically pposed to it, except for maybe England and Canada. ut did that ever come up? No, there was no resolution, o discussion. The reason was perfectly plain. Everyone nderstood that if the issue came up at the United ations, that’s the end of the United Nations. A year or two ago there was some brief talk about how e criminal court in the former Yugoslavia might inves- gate NATO war crimes. That was dropped very fast. uring that period an American congressman visiting anada was asked by the National Post what would hap- en if someone looked into NATO crimes, and his swer was basically correct: that if that ever happened, e United Nations buildings in New York would be en apart brick by brick and thrown into the Atlantic cean. UP: How do you see military action against Iraq affecting e Palestinian-Israeli conflict? Ariel Sharon’ representatives ave said that Israel will wait until the US has dealt with aq before pursuing a political track with the Palestinians, nd Binyamin Netanyahu has said that US assistant secre- http://otherpress.douglas.bc.ca tary of state William Burns roadmap for peace “is simply not on the agenda.” We don’t know if the roadmap is on the agenda because we don’t know what it is. In fact, we don’t even know that it exists. There are plans about the Palestinians. The peo- ple near the centre of power, like Richard Pearl, Douglas Feith and, probably, [Donald] Rumsfeld have been talk- ing about reorganizing the Middle East for years. They have all kinds of far-reaching plans. A war will be a complete disaster for the Palestinians. Sharon does have a plan for peace. Everyone has a plan for peace. Hitler had a plan for peace. The question is, what kind of peace? Sharon’s peace involves some degree of autonomy and administration for Palestinian enclaves which Israel doesn’t want to have to administer. Sharon's borders for Israel are much more expansive than Barak’s were, but the basic conception is the same. Barak’s chief negotiator at Camp David in 2000, Shlomo Ben Ami, has explained that the goal of the Oslo process from the beginning has been to establish a permanent neo-colonial dependency for the Palestinians—something on the order of South African bantustans. In fact, the security officials in Israel have been paying close attention to South Africa’s solution to the black problem 40 years ago. Establish black homelands, black police, black administration that control the population; white South Africans don’t want to bother with that. And you can have some development dependent on white South Africa. That’s a model that has been seriously con- sidered in Israel. It’s discussed very prominently in the Israeli press at high levels, and it was more or less the framework for the Camp David proposal. Sharon's roadmap is on that order except that he wants the Palestinian enclaves to be small. CUP: Is the war on terrorism a manifestation of the “Frankenstein syndrome,” meaning that the US is now hav- ing to protect itself from enemies that it itself has created? That’s happening, but let’s be a little bit clearer. The war on terrorism was declared in 1981, by pretty much the exact same people who re-declared it after 9/11 and with the same rhetoric. The war on terrorism has been going on for 20 years. Orwell would tell us that the war on terrorism is in fact a terrorist war. In the first phase in the war on terrorism led by Washington throughout the 1980s, the US carried out massive terrorist atrocities in Central America and the Middle East, Southern Africa and so on. That was the first phase in the war on terror. The second phase in the war on terror, which they re-declared on September 11, 2001, happened to be aimed at the organizations that you describe. The terrorists are now those recruited, trained, organized, and armed by the CIA and its associ- ates in the 1980s, not to help the Afghans, but for rea- sons of state, power, the usual kinds. Around 1990 they turned against the US. In 1993, related groups came very close to blowing up the World Trade Centre. That was in 1993, not 2001. Those groups happened to be organized by the West. You can say the same about plenty of others. Take Israel’s main terrorist enemies—Hizbollah and Hamas. Where did they come from? The origins of Hamas lie, in part, with Israeli sponsorship of radical Islamist groups meant to undermine the secular Palestinian leadership. Hizbollah came out of a US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon 20 years ago, which killed about 20,000 and had no defensive purpose whatsoever. The end result is that it helped create Hizbollah. Incidentally, terrorist acts are just a gift to the most hard-line oppressive elements. An increase in terrorism gives Sharon an opportunity to drive the Palestinians out, it gives the Russians an opportunity to clamp down in Chechnya and so on, throughout the world. It’s very probable that the same thing is going on in Indonesia now. What lay behind the Bali [nightclub] bombing is not yet clear, but chances are it was the group Jamat al Islamaya. And where did they come from? They're part of the Suharto dictatorship’s effort, with the backing of the United States and Britain, to link up radical Islamists and the Indonesian military in order to carry out terrorist atrocities against their own populations. The big mas- sacres in Bali, far worse than this one, were a collabora- tion between Islamist groups and the army. CUP: As you said, it seems that a US invasion of Iraq is pretty much inevitable at this point. How much difference can popular resistance still make? A huge difference. It’s the only thing that can stop it. What prevented the US from carrying out saturation B- 52 bombing of Nicaragua in the 1980s? Popular resist- ance. Current resistance to the war in Iraq has no histor- ical precedent, to my knowledge. I can’t think of anoth- er case where there was such large-scale protest against a war before it even started. Protest over the Vietnam War only came after four or five years of smashing South Vietnam to dust. There is unprecedented opposition right now—US policy analysts are keeping their eyes open to it, and if it grows even more, they'll be concerned. In fact, some of the high-level hawkish arguments against the war is that too much division will be created inside the US. That’s a concern which even the worst mass murderers worry about. Hitler worried about it, which is part of the rea- son why the Germans didn’t carry out a full national mobilization the way the Allies did. They just didn’t trust their population, which probably set back their war effort. No matter who you are, military dictator, mass murderer or democratic leader, you have to be concerned about popular opinion. page 19 ©