[WCUSP] UN council and Iraq

Fri Nov 30 07:14:19 CST 2007

I heard Raed Jarrar on KBOO this morning and it occurs
to me that we ought to have a lot more direct
influence as a "democracy" on our UN Ambassador 
(Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who as you probably know
was Ambassador to Afghanistan and then Iraq just prior
to being John Bolton's permanent replacement at the
UN).
When the UN Security Council used to have to renew the
sanctions on Iraq every 6 months, we made efforts to
contact then-Ambassadors Madeleine Albright and Bill
Richardson, who kept on voting to starve Iraqi
children anyway.But if we say nothing, it's worse than
letting Khalilzad bypass the Iraqi parliament and
renew the UN mandate with no exit timeline. Of course,

we'd like to see that timeline be the day after the UN
vote, and that should be part of any message on this
matter, whether to the press or whoever.
Oh, I believe the address at the UN is
      United States Mission to the United Nations
        140 East 45th Street
        New York, N.Y. 10017
Anyway, the vote is probably coming up really soon,
since resolutio 1723 (passed last December) expires on
December 31
(http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2006/sc8879.doc.htm
 Iraqi Government to UN: 'Don't Extend Mandate for
Bush's Occupation'

By Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar, AlterNet
Posted on November 9, 2007, Printed on November 29,
2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/67383/

    The United Nations Security Council, with support
from the British and American delegations, is poised
to cut the Iraqi parliament out of one  of the most
significant decisions the young government will make:
 when foreign troops will depart. It's an ugly and
unconstitutional move, designed solely to avoid asking
an Iraqi legislature for a blank check  for an endless
military occupation that it's in no mood to give,
 and it will make a mockery of Iraq's nascent
democracy (which needs all the legitimacy it can get).
 While the Bush administration frequently invokes
sunny visions of spreading democracy and "freedom"
around the world, the fact remains that democracy is
incompatible with its goals in Iraq. The biggest
 headache supporters of the occupation of Iraq have to
deal with is the occupation itself. As far back as the
middle of 2004, more than
    [1]nine out of 10 Iraqis said the U.S.-led forces
were "occupiers," and only 2 percent called them
"liberators." Things have only gone downhill since
then, and any government that represents the will of
the Iraqi people would have no choice but to demand a
timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops. This
fact poses an enormous problem, as the great triumph
of the Bush administration and its supporters has been
in their ability to convince Americans that Iraqi
interests and Washington's interests are in harmony,
even when they're diametrically opposed.
   Crucial to this fiction is a U.N. mandate that
confers legal cover on the so-called "multinational"
forces in Iraq. The mandate is now coming up for
renewal, and a majority of Iraqi legislators oppose
 its renewal unless conditions are placed on it,
conditions that may include a timetable for the
departure of American troops.

    The process of renewing the mandate is
highlighting the political rift that's divided the
country and fueled most of the violence that's plagued
the new state. That's the rift between nationalists --
 those Iraqis who, like most of their countrymen,
oppose the presence of foreign troops on the ground,
the wholesale privatization of Iraq's natural
resources and the division of their country into
ethnic and sectarian fiefdoms, and Iraqi separatists
who at least tolerate the occupation -- if not support
it -- and favor a loose sectarian/ethnic-based
federation of semiautonomous states held together by a
minimal central government in Baghdad.

    In the United States, the commercial media has
largely ignored this story, focusing almost
exclusively on sectarian violence and doing a poor job
giving their readers and viewers a sense of what's
driving Iraq's political crisis. An understanding of
the tensions between nationalists and separatists is
necessary to appreciate the import of parliament being
cut out of the legislative process and the degree
 to which doing so hurts the prospect of real
political reconciliation among Iraq's many political
factions. (We've discussed this dynamic in greater
detail in [2]an earlier article.)

    The key ingredient to understand is this: The
Iraqi executive branch, the cabinet and the
presidency, are completely controlled by separatists
(including Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and secular
 politicians). But the parliament is controlled by
nationalists, nationalists from every major ethnic and
sectarian group in the country, who enjoy a small but
crucially important majority in the only elected body
in the Iraqi government.

    In 2006, Maliki's office requested the renewal of
the U.N. mandate without consulting the legislature, a
process that many lawmakers maintained was a violation
of Iraqi law. The problem was that Maliki didn't have
the authority to make the request under the Iraqi
constitution. Article 58, Section 4 says that the
Council of Representatives (the parliament) has to
ratify "international treaties and agreements"
negotiated by the Council of Ministers (the cabinet).
    Specifically, it reads: "A law shall regulate the
ratification of international treaties and agreements
by a two-thirds majority of the  members of the
Council of Representatives."

    Prime Minister Maliki had claimed that the
constitution didn't refer to the U.N. mandate. A
senior Iraqi lawmaker, speaking on condition of
anonymity, said of the assertion: "If we are asked to
approve a trade agreement concerning olive oil, should
we not have the right to pass on an agreement
concerning the stationing of foreign military forces
 in our national soil?"

    In June, we [3]reported that the parliament had
passed a binding resolution that would force Maliki to
go to the parliament and give Iraqi lawmakers an
opportunity to block the extension of the mandate. It
was signed by the majority of the 275-seat
legislature, then sent to the president. According to
the Iraqi constitution, the president had 15 days to
veto it by sending it back to the parliament;
otherwise it automatically became a ratified law. The
15 days passed without a veto and the resolution
became the law of the land in mid-June 2007.

    Something happened, however, between the passage
of that law and the latest report by U.N.
Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon. According to Moon's
latest report to the Security Council ([4]PDF), dated
Oct. 15,  the law that had been passed by the duly
elected legislature of Iraq became nothing more than a
"nonbinding resolution":

      The Council of Representatives passed a
nonbinding resolution on 5 June obligating the cabinet
to request parliament's approval on future extensions
of the mandate governing the multinational force in
Iraq and to include a timetable for the departure of
the force from Iraq.
 One might have believed that the disconnect was a
simple mistake, if not for the fact that members of
the Iraqi parliament, still fuming over being cut out
of the process the year before, sent a letter to the
U.N.'s special envoy for Iraq back in April clarifying
the situation in very clear terms. According to an
English translation provide by the Global Policy
Forum, it says: "The Iraqi Cabinet has unilaterally
requested a renewal of the U.N. mandate keeping the
 occupation troops (MNF) in Iraq" despite the fact
that "such a request issued by the Iraqi cabinet
without the Iraqi parliament's approval is
unconstitutional." It continues: "The Iraqi
parliament, as the elected representatives of the
Iraqi people, has the exclusive right to approve and
ratify international treaties and agreements,
including
 those signed with the United Nations Security
Council."

    According to sources within the Iraqi delegation
to the United Nations, the letter, signed by 144 MPs
--more than half of Iraq's legislators -- was received
in good order by the special envoy,Ashraf Qazi, but
never distributed to the Security Council members, as
is required under the U.N. resolution that governs the
mandate. The parliament, and indeed the majority of
the Iraqi population, had been cleanly excised from
the legislative process.
 The important thing to understand is that the
run-around goes beyond the issue of the mandate
itself. Iraq is not in the midst of an
incomprehensible religious war over some obscure
theological differences between Sunni and Shiite
Muslims but is deeply and profoundly divided over
fundamental questions about the future of the country.
In cutting the nationalist majority in the parliament
out of
 the process of governing, the Maliki administration,
Bush administration and, apparently, the U.N.
secretary-general are making political reconciliation
much more difficult. History has offered the
 lesson time and time again: Deny people the right to
participate in deciding their own destiny in a
peaceful political process, and they'll try to do so
with guns and bombs. The United Nations, like the
administration and its supporters, and like Sen. Joe
Biden and those who favor his plan for partitioning
the country, is taking sides in  political battle that
should be exclusively for Iraqis to decide.

    If there were some similarities between the
current Iraqi-Iraqi conflict and the U.S. civil war it
is in having one side that wants to keep the country
united, and another side planning to secede. All of
 the foreign forces that are intervening in Iraq's
affairs -- whether led by the United States, Iran or
Al-Qaeda -- are on the side of a  minority of Iraqis
who want to secede against the majority's will.

    This U.N. mandate issue is not occurring in a
vacuum. When it comes to the nascent Iraqi government,
supporters of the occupation have long had their cake
and eaten it too. On the one hand, they deny that
 the U.S.-led military force is an occupying army at
all, maintaining that all those foreign troops are
there at the "request" of the Iraqi government. That's
an important legal nicety -- occupying forces have
 a host of responsibilities under international law
and
 acknowledging the reality of the occupation would
result in more legal responsibilities for the
administration to ignore. At the same time, when the
only people who all those purple-fingered Iraqi voters
 actually elected to office try to attach some
conditions to the U.N. mandate, demand a timetable for
withdrawal or come out against privatizing Iraq's
natural resources, then somehow the legislature
 magically disappears and the hopes and aspirations of
its constituents are discarded as if they never
existed.

    It's time to force the issue: The Iraqi
parliament, the only body elected by the Iraqi people,
wants some say over the continuing presence of foreign
troops on its soil, and a majority of its lawmakers,
like a majority of both Americans and Iraqis, wants a
  timetable for ending the occupation.

    [5]Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
Raed Jarrar is Iraq
    consultant to the [6]American Friends Service
Committee. He blogs
 at
    [7]Raed in the Middle.

References

    1.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/poll/2004/06iiacss.pdf
    2. http://www.alternet.org/story/62042/
    3. http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/53230/
    4.
http://www.uniraq.org/FileLib/misc/SG_Report_S_2007_608_EN.pdf
    5. mailto: joshua.holland at alternet.org
    6. http://afsc.org/
    7. http://raedinthemiddle.blogspot.com/

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