Global Policy Forum

By Phyllis Bennis

It was eminently predictable. Just weeks after the end of NATO's bombing campaign, U.S. officials are blaming the United Nations for NATO's failure to restore peace in Kosovo and the rest of Yugoslavia.

It wasn't until the bombing failed to stop the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo that Washington and its NATO allies grudgingly allowed a role for the once-excluded U.N. The bombing devastated Yugoslavia and shored up support for Slobodan Milosevic. So, it turned out that the United States and its allies needed the U.N. to orchestrate the deal for ending the air war, withdrawing Yugoslav troops and creating an international protectorate in Kosovo.

But it was clear from the beginning that part of the U.S. strategy was to set up the U.N. (already denied adequate resources, personnel and authority) as the fall guy for the not-so-peaceful conclusion of the Yugoslavia war. The United States rejected any U.N. role in decision making about military action. But now Washington holds the U.N. accountable for the messy aftermath of the U.S.-NATO war.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry H. Shelton and Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen focused their recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on condemning the U.N.

"We need to put as much pressure as possible on the U.N. to do more," said Cohen. Adding to the accusations, the committee's chair, Sen. John W. Warner, complained that "the United Nations moves very slowly to assume its responsibilities."

What the officials ignored, among other the things, is that thanks largely to the miserliness of the United States and its NATO allies, the U.N.'s High Commissioner for Refugees has received only $140 million of the $400 million needed to rebuild homes for the returning Kosovar refugees.

The New York Times reported that "only 150 police officers of a projected 3,110-member international force are in Kosovo," and one can almost see the shaking heads of disapproval at the U.N.'s failure. But the real problem is that the members of the volunteer force of more than 3,000 must be individually recruited and sent to Kosovo by separate governments around the world. This is largely because of U.S. opposition to the creation of a standing U.N. rapid-deployment force that could, under the direction of the secretary general, move into crisis zones to act as peacekeepers.

The Clinton administration refuses to help rebuild Serbia's bomb-devastated infrastructure so long as Milosevic remains in power, and it is pressuring other NATO members to do the same. This means that while Kosovo, with its largely Albanian population, will receive millions in reconstruction money, the rest of Serbia will get nothing. As this situation causes ethnic tensions to rise, the U.N.'s task will become more daunting, and Washington's position is likely to make the mission's failure much more likely.

The Clinton administration refuses to recognize how much it needs the U.N. for any hope of achieving a more peaceful world. The United States violated the U.N. charter by using NATO, a military alliance, to authorize its air war against Yugoslavia instead of placing the issue before the United Nations. Widespread human rights violations -- such as those that occurred in Kosovo -- might, indeed, necessitate the consideration of international intervention, even within a sovereign state. But only the U.N. is entitled to make such a determination.

Fear of a possible veto by other Security Council members does not give the United States and Britain the right to do an end run around the U.N.'s primacy in matters of international peace and security. By acting solo, the United States trumpets its contempt for other nations.

So, what's going on here? Why is Washington leading the charge to discredit and undermine the U.N. and international law even further, now that NATO's unauthorized war in Yugoslavia is over?

It's an old story -- the story of a strategically unchallenged dominion, at the apogee of its power and influence, rewriting the global rules for how to manage its empire. The Greeks did it a couple of thousand years ago. Thucydides described how the lands conquered to ensure stability for Greece's golden age would be governed by laws wholly different from those of the Athenians' tranquil (if slavery-dependent) democracy at home. So, too, the Roman empire. During the past couple centuries, the sun-never-sets-on-us British empire did the same thing. And now, having achieved once unimaginable heights of military, economic and political power, Washington takes its turn.

It takes the form of the United States' excluding itself from treaties and other international agreements governing warfare. It is evident in Washington's rejection of the International Criminal Court, designed to hold individuals accountable for war crimes and genocide. Last year, the Clinton administration, through David Scheffer, U.S. Ambassador for War Crimes Issues, reaffirmed the administration's support for such a court. But the United States opposed the court when it came up for a vote at its founding international conference in Rome in July 1998. The court was approved by 102 nations, with only seven -- the United States, Libya, Israel, China, Iraq, Qatar and Sudan -- voting against it.

Why did the United States join this odd collection of opponents? Because "the court places at risk those who shoulder the responsibility for international peace and security," Scheffer said later. In other words, the court was for everyone else in the world -- not for the United States.

The law of empire was clear in the U.S. refusal to sign the 1997 convention prohibiting the use of anti-personnel land mines. The rest of the world agreed that anti-personnel mines, responsible for many more civilian than military deaths, should be outlawed. But Washington, while claiming to support the convention, demanded that the United States be exempt and that it be allowed to continue using land mines in Korea's demilitarized zone and in areas around the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Everyone else should ban land mines, Washington agreed, but the United States should be the exception.

And it is perhaps most clear in how the United States, the only country in the world with the power to do so, shifted international decision-making out of the hands of the United Nations, replaced by unilateral action and NATO decision-making. In 1990, the United States selected the U.N. as its legitimizer of choice by pushing through a Security Council vote authorizing Washington's coalition war against Iraq.

By the middle of the decade, Madeleine K. Albright had called the United Nations "a tool of American foreign policy." Soon after, as the U.S. bombing of Iraq continued, Washington began to claim it no longer needed U.N. resolutions to justify its air strikes. (The U.S.-British "no fly zones" established after the Persian Gulf war were never authorized by the U.N.)

In the run-up to Operation Desert Fox in 1998, Security Council members were afraid that Washington was going to sideline them once more. A parade of council ambassadors stated explicitly that their resolution did not authorize a unilateral U.S. military strike on Iraq. Their fears were right: Then-U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Bill Richardson blithely shrugged and told the press, "We think it does." And four days of bombs and cruise missiles devastated Baghdad.

By 1999, having denied the U.N. and European diplomatic organizations the authority and resources needed for serious preventive diplomacy in the escalating Kosovo crisis, Washington took the final step. It abandoned the U.N., replacing the legal requirement of U.N. authorization for the use of force with the projection of NATO, a military alliance, as champion of yet another bombing campaign.

Of course, the U.N. is the right organization to be in charge of the Kosovo situation -- but it must be granted the money, personnel and authority it needs to do the job. The United States should have promoted the U.N. as the central actor there years ago -- by paying its U.N. dues, by supporting U.N. efforts (along with those of European organizations such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) to take action before the humanitarian crisis in Kosovo escalated.

Setting up the U.N. to take the blame for U.S. and NATO failures is no way to bring peace to Kosovo -- or to Sierra Leone, Colombia or anywhere else. Being the richest and most powerful nation in the world doesn't give the United States the right to trample international law, to run endgames around the U.N., to use or discard the organization on the whims of superpower arrogance or domestic politics.

The world has had enough of empires writing their own rules.

Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and author of "Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's U.N."