War

UN Resolution 377, AKA the "Uniting for Peace" resolution, resolves:

that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security. If not in session at the time, the General Assembly may meet in emergency special session within twenty-four hours of the request therefor. Such emergency special session shall be called if requested by the Security Council on the vote of any seven members, or by a majority of the Members of the United Nations . . .

Resolution 377 was adopted in November 1950 with U.S. sponsorship and near-unanimous support. It was first invoked in 1956, by the United States, in response to the British and French invasion of Egypt during the Suez crisis; and again, later that year, when the Soviet Union intervened in Hungary. An article written about three weeks ago by Michael Ratner (Center for Constitutional Rights) and Jules Lobel (University of Pittsburgh School of Law) is beginning to spread about the Web. (See also material at the Center for Constitutional Rights.) I suspect there will be more discussion of Resolution 377 now that the United States and Britain are calling for Iraq to complete disarmament (by what measure?) before a March 17 deadline -- a deadline that would surely be vetoed by France, Russia, and China in the Security Council.

Adam Bulger interviews Hunter S. Thompson, "early March 2003," at freezerbox.com:

[HST] I talk about this all the time to a lot of people: Are you more optimistic about the next ten years than about the last, when you started?

[AB] Who, me?

[HST] Yeah.

[AB] No! I . . . man, to rip you off, I'm full of fear and loathing. I am a citizen in the Kingdom of Fear. I'm scared every waking moment man.

[HST] Well, uh, Jesus, that's horrible! That's a kind of, uh, prevailing sentiment.

[AB] Yeah.

[HST] And you know, you look at fear and people, a population that's uh, just riddled with fear and confusion and, uh, loathing, goddamn. Never did it occur to me when I came up with those words that I would be using them to describe the state of the nation 30 years later or whatever.

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times, 3/7/03:

So let's take stock of how our invasion of Iraq is going. The Western alliance is ferociously strained, NATO is paralyzed, America is resented by millions, the United Nations is in crisis, U.S. pals like Tony Blair are being skewered at home, North Korea has exploited our distraction to crank up plutonium production, oil prices have surged, and the world financial markets have sagged.

And the war hasn't even begun yet.

Paul Rockwell, " Who Armed Iraq?" (San Francisco Chronicle, 3/2/03)

Iraq's Weapons Declaration underscores a tragic irony: The United States, the world's leading arms supplier, is taking the world to war to stop arms proliferation in the very country to which it shipped chemicals, biological seed stock and weapons for more than 10 years.

According to the December declaration, treated with much derision from the Bush administration, U.S. and Western companies played a key role in building Hussein's war machine. The 1,200-page document contains a list of Western corporations and countries -- as well as individuals -- that exported chemical and biological materials to Iraq in the past two decades.

Embarrassed, no doubt, by revelations of their own complicity in Mideast arms proliferation, the U.S.-led Security Council censored the entire dossier, deleting more than 100 names of companies and groups that profited from Iraq's crimes and aggression. The censorship came too late, however. The long list -- including names of large U.S. corporations -- Dupont, Hewlett-Packard, and Honeywell -- was leaked to a German daily, Die Tageszeitung. Despite the Security Council coverup, the truth came out.