The U.N. Security Council discusses the situation in Syria on June 26, 2014. Credit: UN Photo/Devra Berkowitz

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 12 2014 (IPS)

The U.N. Security Council (UNSC), the only international body empowered to declare war and peace, continues to remain a silent witness to the widespread devastation and killings worldwide, including in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Ukraine.

A sharply divided UNSC has watched the slaughter of Palestinians by Israel, the genocide and war crimes in Syria, the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, the U.S. military attacks inside Iraq and now a virtual invasion of Syria – if U.S. President Barack Obama goes ahead with his threat to launch air strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)."As an instrument for preventing or restraining war, the United Nations has devolved into a plaintive institution, with its Security Council dominated by superpowers." -- Norman Solomon

The United States has refused to go before the UNSC for authorisation and legitimacy – even if it means suffering a veto by Russia or China or both.

Still, ironically, Obama is scheduled to preside over a UNSC meeting when he is in New York in late September since the United States holds the presidency under geographical rotation among the 15 members in the Council.

A head of state or a head of government chairing a meeting of the Security Council is a rare event, not a norm.

But it does happen when a UNSC member presides over the Council in the month of September during the opening of a new General Assembly session, with over 150 world leaders in tow.

In his address to the nation early this week, Obama said, “I will chair a meeting of the U.N. Security Council to further mobilise the international community around this effort” (“to degrade and destroy ISIS”, the rebel Islamic militant group inside Iraq and Syria).

Still, the proposed strike inside Syria is not part of the Council’s agenda – and certainly not under the U.S. presidency.

Obama also said intelligence agencies have not detected any specific ISIS plots against the United States.

ISIS is still a regional threat that could ultimately reach out to the United States, he said, justifying the impending attacks.

Norman Solomon, executive director of the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy and co-founder of RootsAction.org, told IPS, “As an instrument for preventing or restraining war, the United Nations has devolved into a plaintive institution, with its Security Council dominated by superpowers — most of all by the United States in tandem with its permanent-member allies.”

He said it used to be that U.S. presidents at least went through the motions of seeking Security Council approval for going to war, but this is scarcely the case anymore.

“When it lacks the capacity to get what it wants by way of a non-vetoed Security Council resolution for its war aims, the U.S. government simply proceeds as though the United Nations has no significant existence,” said Solomon, author of ‘War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.’

Internationally, he said, this is the case because there are no geopolitical leverage points or institutional U.N. frameworks sufficient to require the United States to actually take the Security Council seriously as anything much more than a platform for pontification.

A Russian official was quoted as saying the Obama administration would need to get a UNSC resolution before it launches air attacks inside Syria — which, of course, the Russians did not do either before they intervened in Ukraine.

Perhaps all this points only in one direction: the UNSC has time and again proved its unworthiness – and remains ineffective and politically impotent having outlived its usefulness, particularly in crisis situations.

Humanitarian aid? Yes. Collective international action? No.

The veto-wielding permanent members of the UNSC – the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia – are obviously not interested in fairness, justice or political integrity but only interested in protecting their own national interests.

In an editorial Friday, the New York Times struck a cautious note when it said there will be no turning back once air strikes enter Syrian territory, unleashing events that simply cannot be foreseen.

“Surely, that’s a lesson America has learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco where he serves as coordinator of the programme in Middle Eastern Studies, told IPS, “Regardless of whether it is justified or not, air strikes by the United States or other foreign powers in Iraq and Syria are clearly acts of war requiring U.N. authorisation.”

If the threat from ISIS and the limited nature of the military response is what President Obama says it is, then the United States should have little trouble in receiving support from the Security Council, said Zunes, who has written extensively on the politics of the Security Council and serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.

“The refusal to come to the United Nations, then, serves as yet another example of the contempt Washington apparently has for the world body,” he said.

Peter Yeo, executive director of Better World Campaign, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) dedicated to strengthening U.S.-U.N. relations, has called on the U.S. Congress to engage the United Nations in addressing the critical challenges in the Middle East, including Syria and Iraq.

“Let Congress know the U.S. cannot go it alone in confronting this challenge, and that we should continue to utilise resources like the U.N. Security Council and the U.N.’s humanitarian response agencies to combat ongoing and future threats,” he said.

More than ever, the U.S. needs the U.N. as a strategic partner to help facilitate the complex security and humanitarian response needs in the region, he said in a statement released Thursday.

Solomon told IPS that the domestic politics of the U.S. have been sculpted in recent decades to relegate the U.N. to the role of afterthought or oratorical amphitheatre unless it can be coupled to the U.S. war train of the historic moment.

“Deformed as it is as a representation of only the governments of some sectors of global power, the Security Council still has some potential for valid exercise of discourse – even diplomacy – if not legitimate decision-making per se.”

But the Security Council ultimately represents the skewed agendas of its permanent members, and those agendas only include peace to the extent that permanent members are actually interested in peace and such interest, at best intermittent, depends on undependable willingness to look beyond narrow nationalistic and corporate interests, Solomon added.

“Of course, the U.S. government has continued to engage in acts of war in several countries on an ongoing basis for more than a dozen years.”

The military strikes now being planned by the White House will add Syria to the list of countries attacked by a Washington-based government that speaks loudly about international law at the same time that it violates international law at will, he argued.

The U.S. government will decide whether to seek any authorisation or resolution from the U.N. Security Council primarily on the basis of gauging likely benefits of rhetorical grandstanding, Solomon predicted.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Amidst a roiling and mostly partisan debate over Washington’s global role, a survey released here Thursday suggests that President Barack Obama’s preference for relative restraint and multilateral – over unilateral – action very much reflects the mood of the voting public.

The survey, which was conducted by prominent pollsters for both major political parties, confirmed a decade-long trend in favour of reducing active U.S. involvement in global affairs and focusing more on domestic issues.“It’s not that ‘leadership’ is seen as a negative term, but what people object to is putting the U.S. out front while others are hanging back.” -- Steven Kull

At the same time, however, it found strong support for working cooperatively with other countries to address international issues, including and especially through the United Nations about which, remarkably, twice as many respondents (59 percent) said they felt favourably than they felt about the U.S. Congress (29 percent).

Indeed, a whopping 86 percent of the 800 voters contacted randomly by the poll said that it was either “very” (61 percent) or “somewhat” (25 percent) important “for the United States to maintain an active role within the United Nations.”

“This not about apathy to foreign policy or assistance – to the contrary, the poll shows voters feel a strong, vested interest in global affairs,” said Peter Yeo, executive director of the Better World Campaign, which commissioned the survey.

The survey, which was conducted in mid-April as the crisis over Crimea and Ukraine dominated the news, comes amidst strong criticism of Obama by neo-conservatives and other hawks over what they allege is his passivity in reacting to Russian aggression, as well as China’s assertion of territorial claims in the East and South China seas and advances by government forces against western- and Gulf Arab-backed rebels in Syria, among other presumed setbacks.

In their view, Obama’s restraint, or what they increasingly call “retreat”, has fed “isolationist” tendencies that have grown steadily stronger as a result of the continuing effects of the 2008 financial crisis and the failure to achieve “victories” – attributed largely to Obama’s lack of political will – in Bush-initiated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the administration has angrily rejected these charges, noting, for example, that it has upheld all of Washington’s treaty commitments; that it is deeply engaged in rallying regional and international opposition to moves by Russia and China; and that it is Republican hawks who, for example, have slashed foreign aid, attacked the U.N. and other multilateral forums, and promoted unilateral military measures that proved ineffective, if not counter-productive, especially during the Bush years.

The hawks have tried to conflate “military restraint with isolationism, but that’s really a ploy to tar people who have a more critical stance because of the experience of the past 13 years,” Carl Conetta, director the Project for Defense Alternatives (PDA), told IPS.

Indeed, recent polls have shown a clear public desire to reduce Washington’s international commitments. Most famously perhaps, a major Pew survey published last December found that 52 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that the U.S. “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.”

It was the first time in the nearly 50-year history of the question that a majority agreed with its proposition.

But, according to Conetta and other analysts, that result has much more to do with Washington’s unilateral military adventures – and the disappointments that resulted from those in Iraq and Afghanistan – than other forms of international engagement support for which has been remarkably steady for many years.

“All the polls show that there’s reduced enthusiasm for international engagement, but they also show that that doesn’t apply to all forms of engagement,” Conetta said. “We see that people are quite supportive of cooperative engagement.”

Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), agreed. “Overall, this poll and others show that during a period of economic downturn, there’s a strengthening of a feeling that we need to deal with problems at home. But that doesn’t mean that people want to disengage from the world, but rather that there’s a stronger interest in collaborative approaches where the United States isn’t out front so much.

“As we can see from this (Better World) poll, support for multilateral forms of engagement are just as strong as ever,” he told IPS.

Indeed, asked to choose up to two out of ten different international policy approaches the U.S. should pursue, the single most popular choice (40 percent) was “America working with global partners around the world and letting our partners take more of the lead.”

And while the second-most popular choice (34 percent) was “letting other countries solve their own problems without American involvement,” it was virtually tied with “international cooperation” (33 percent).

Significantly, the least popular choices were “America going it alone in resolving international issues” (2 percent) and “Isolationism” (4 percent), and “America taking the lead in preventing and resolving deadly conflict around the world” (12 percent).

“All of these answers show a cooperative orientation on the part of the public,” noted Kull. “It’s not that ‘leadership’ is seen as a negative term, but what people object to is putting the U.S. out front while others are hanging back.”

As to the U.N. itself, while respondents were split on the actual effectiveness of the world body, 85 percent said it should be made “more effective”; only 13 percent disagreed.

More than 70 percent agreed with the statements that “working through [the U.N.] improves America’s image around the world” and that the “U.S. needs needs the U.N. now more than ever because we cannot bear all the burden and cannot afford to pay to go it alone around the world.”

Two-thirds of respondents – including majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents – said Washington should pay its peacekeeping dues to the U.N. on time and in full, while 31 percent opposed payment.

Due to Congressional cuts to requests by the administration, Washington currently owes the U.N. peacekeeping account for 2014 more than 350 million dollars.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

A national poll revealed that 83 percent of voters in the United States believe it is important for the country to be a member of  and provide funding to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, commonly referred to as UNESCO.

Polling results released on Jan. 16 by Better World Campaign (BWC), an organisation that works to support U.S.-U.N. relations, came after recent rows between the U.S. government and U.N. bodies surrounding Palestine’s push for statehood.

In November 2012, the United States was one of nine member states out of 193 in the General Assembly that tried to unsuccessfully bar Palestine from gaining non-member observer state status, and in October 2011, the U.S. cut off funding to UNESCO for admitting Palestine as a member.

The move to cut funds stemmed from a 20-year-old U.S. law that prohibits funding to any U.N. organisation that recognises Palestine as a state.

“The U.S. remains a member of UNESCO even though the U.S. has stopped funding UNESCO,” George Papagiannis, external relations and information officer at UNESCO, told IPS.

“It is even a member of the organisation’s executive board, and fully participates in UNESCO’s Programs,” added Sue Williams, media chief at UNESCO’s Department of Public Information.

UNESCO, a specialised U.N. agency, is described in the poll as an organisation that “helps prevent conflict and build peace around the world by promoting democracy, working to eradicate poverty, and supporting education for all”.

“The public support, indeed, affirms that UNESCO matters to Americans at home and abroad,” said Papagiannis.

Controversial issues

Jeffrey Laurenti, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, told IPS, “There is very little the U.N. does that runs counter to U.S. foreign policy,” but the U.N. does prioritise some issues that are “inconvenient and premature” in Washington politics.

These issues include the death penalty under the Bush administration and the Israel-Palestine conflict under any administration, explained Laurenti.  U.S. President Barack Obama is, however, “pressing to rescue UNESCO from the tangle of 1994 de-funding legislation with regard to Palestinian membership”, Laurenti added.

Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research Associates conducted the bipartisan poll by surveying 900 registered voters via telephone between Jan. 6 and Jan. 9, on behalf of BWC.

“[Part] of our objective is to be the people who look at American attitudes just about what’s happening around the world,” said Bill McInturff, partner and co-founder of Public Opinion Strategies.

In response to one of the survey’s open-ended questions, “What do you think should be the main international priorities for the Obama Administration to accomplish in the next four years?” three out of every 10 responders said they hoped to end the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

According to McInturff, a veteran pollster who gathers data biannually for the U.N. Foundation, three out of 10 is a very high ratio for a response to an open-ended question.

Funding to multilateral organisations

Also on the survey were questions related to U.N. funding.

“We know from previous research [that] Americans greatly overestimate the share of the budget that goes to foreign assistance,” said Geoff Garin, president of Hart Research Associates, citing that the actual amount was less than 1 percent.

During a press teleconference on the morning of the poll’s release, Garin, McInturff, and Peter Yeo, executive director of the Better World Campaign, discussed the topic of U.S. funding to the U.N.

“Two-thirds of our voters support paying our dues to the United Nations on time,” said Yeo, even though “in past years, the U.S. has not paid its dues [on time]”.

“Americans have a sense of ‘Hey, if you’re a member of an organisation, and you’ve agreed to pay the bill, guess what? It’s like a mortgage, it’s just like any other bill. You have an obligation to pay,'” added McInturff.

Laurenti told IPS, “Presumably, the U.S. will continue to pay its assessed dues on time, in full, and without conditions.”

Other multilateral organisations ranked high in polling as well: 87 percent of those surveyed thought the U.S. should be a member of the World Food Programme (WFP).  “You just need to look at the headlines from Syria to know the important role that WFP is playing in feeding and taking care of refugees there,” said Yeo.

Additionally, 92 percent believed the U.S. should be a member of the World Health Organisation (WHO). “This is particularly relevant given that we’re experiencing the worst flu season in many years,” Yeo said.

Laurenti also added, “The U.N.’s performance ratings among Americans are vastly higher than those of the U.S. Congress.”

“Among the international agencies tested, a higher percentage [of people] feel they know enough about what the U.N. is doing that they can offer a judgment, compared to any others,” he noted.