The U.N. Also Rises
Bolton, John R.
The U.N. Also Rises American power and Israeli security may never be the same. BY JOHN R. BOLTON WHETHER LAST WEEK'S heralded Mideast summit will achieve either its immediate goal of ending...
...President Clinton has tacitly encouraged reversing America's longstanding opposition to a major U.N...
...His recent Middle East efforts, too, were doubtless supported, if not initiated, by the floundering Clinton team...
...What is clear, regrettably, is that a fundamental and perhaps irreversible shift in Middle East diplomacy has occurred...
...In Baghdad, he torpedoed the U.N.'s own weapons inspection efforts, almost certainly at the Clinton administration's bidding...
...Although the Bush administration succeeded in 1991 in repealing the assembly's despicable 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism, the General Assembly has remained an extraordinarily unhelpful place for U.S...
...Third, the U.N.'s ill-defined consultative role in the post-summit investigative commission is a time bomb for Israel and its friends...
...Permanent members cannot be neutral, whatever the view of Clinton's diplomats, as everyone else understood...
...Some ascribe this tendency to the all-consuming quest for a Clinton "legacy," and that is certainly a factor...
...Fifth, the U.N...
...Not even the Clinton administration could bring itself to defend this particular outrage...
...In the current logic of international human rights, if there are allegations of "criminal" behavior, the inevitable next demand is for a special tribunal to prosecute and punish those who committed such offenses...
...Doing so went against the U.N...
...If sustained, this shift will weaken the hitherto preeminent role of the United States and ultimately imperil Israel...
...Clinton himself will not have to personally bear the consequences of his ill-considered behavior, but his successor at the White House will face terrain much less favorable to the United States and Israel...
...diplomacy in the Middle East...
...The Clinton administration abstained from voting in an effort to signal to the Palestinians their comJohn R. Bolton is the senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute...
...Fourth, ignoring the investigative commission set up by the Sharm el Sheikh summit, the U.N...
...Why would he do so...
...BY JOHN R. BOLTON WHETHER LAST WEEK'S heralded Mideast summit will achieve either its immediate goal of ending violence in Gaza and the West Bank or its larger aspiration of reviving the "peace process" is unclear at the moment...
...But make no mistake, an abstention by one of the five permanent members is the functional equivalent of a "yes" vote, because abstaining allows a resolution (with nine affirmative votes) to be adopted...
...The answer is that weakness in the president's personal position led him to reach out to whomever could "help," regardless of the larger consequences of doing so...
...Human Rights Commission, the General Assembly, and the yet-unborn investigative commission are all now loose in the field, in every case to the detriment of American dominance...
...It unleashed no less than six special rapporteurs to conduct separate investigations, and it invited High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, whose record of anti-Israel bias is near legendary, to grace the region with a visit...
...Obviously the intent of what has been laughably called the "Parliament of Man" was simply to damage Israel, and inferen-tially the United States...
...But it is also evident that "assertive multilateralism," the original Clinton-Albright doctrine, has now emerged in the Arab-Israeli dispute...
...Moreover, the final report is to be published, but it is unclear to whom or for what purpose...
...role in the Middle East...
...Thus, the commission, which is regularly unable to condemn human rights violations in mainland China or Cuba, handed Yasser Arafat what he hadn't won at Sharm el Sheikh...
...General Assembly inserted itself into the complicated Mideast situation by considering a typically one-sided resolution...
...Kofi Annan will apparently help pick commission members, and is entitled to comment on the report in draft...
...As he did in his dealings with Iraq a few years ago, Annan assumed an increasingly powerful and visible role in the shuttle diplomacy that led to the summit...
...mitment to being an "honest broker...
...Human Rights Commission met in a rare, emergency session, and found Israel guilty of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity"—two of the Nuremberg offenses—in the "occupied Palestinian territories, including Jerusalem...
...What will the "honest broker" Clinton diplomats do then...
...A second sign of this tectonic shift was the American failure to veto the U.N...
...During the Bush administration, he was the assistant secretary of state for international organizations...
...Charter's own admonitions against assembly action in situations where the Security Council is engaged...
...Security Council's Resolution 1322, which did little more than blame Israel for the violence it condemned...
...The secretary general, the Security Council, the U.N...
...This development is a striking, 180-degree shift from a decades-long bipartisan policy of keeping the U.N...
...out of Arab-Israeli diplomacy...
...The commission, albeit on a very close vote, created its own "human rights inquiry commission" to do essentially what the Sharm el Sheikh body is to do...
...One sign of this important shift is that the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, was a key player in advocating and fashioning the summit...
Vol. 6 • October 2000 • No. 7
