The
alleged crises over North Korea and Iran are just not serious enough to
warrant the classroom language of shunning and punishment.'
Illustration by Belle Mellor
By coincidence two clashes over nuclear issues are hitting the headlines together. North Korea and Iran
have both had sanctions imposed by foreign governments, and when they
refuse to "behave properly" they are submitted to "isolation" and put in
the corner until they are ready to say sorry and change their conduct.
If not, corporal punishment will be administered, since they have been
given fair warning by the enforcers that "all options are on the table".
It's
a bizarre way to run international relations, one we continue to follow
at our peril. For one thing, it is riddled with hypocrisy, and not just
because states that have hundreds of nuclear weapons are bullying
states that have few or none. The hypocrisy is worse than that. If it is
offensive for North Korea to talk of launching a nuclear strike at the United States
(a threat that is empty because the country has no system to deliver
the few nuclear weapons that it has), how is it less offensive for the
US to warn Iran that it will be bombed if it fails to stop its nuclear research?
Both
states would be resorting to force when dialogue is a long way from
being exhausted. They would also be acting against international law.
That is patently clear if North Korea ever managed to launch a nuclear
strike against South Korea or the US, but the same is true of an
altogether more feasible attack on Iran. There is no conceivable
scenario under which the United Nations security council would authorise
the United States, let alone Israel, to take military action, even if
Iran were to tear up its long-standing statement that nuclear bombs are un-Islamic and produce one. So why does Washington go on with its illegal threats?
The
underlying cause of most international tension is the unwillingness of
powerful states to recognise that we live in a multipolar world. The
idea of hegemony, often sanitised as "leadership", is unacceptable. In a
post-colonial era there are multiple centres of authority,
international influence and soft power, and we should rejoice when new
or old states, individually or collectively, have the courage and
ability to challenge another state's ambition to be a superpower. States
will always make common cause or "coalitions of the willing" on
specific issues, but interests fluctuate and priorities change – and we
should junk the cold war-style system of military alliances and
ideological or sectarian camps.
Let us go further and drop the
figment of an "international community", at least in its current western
definition as "the United States and its friends". By the same token,
let's correct the myopia around isolation. When the leaders of 120
nations travelled to Tehran to ratify Iran's presidency of the Non-Aligned Movement last August, it was risible to hear US officials still talking of Iran being "a rogue state".
In
Washington and Whitehall it may seem self-evident that the
international community should arm the opposition to Syria's President
Assad, but that is not the view of the world's largest democracy, India,
or of the most democratic African and Latin American states, South
Africa and Brazil. When their leaders convened with Russia and China (in
the new Brics coalition) in Durban last month, they "re-affirmed our opposition to any further militarisation of the conflict" and called for a political settlement.
Of course, the non-aligned and Brics summits were barely covered by the
US media in its news or comment columns, the normal technique of reality
suppression used by American opinion-formers and policy-makers. Rami
Khouri, the distinguished US-trained Lebanese writer, calls it
"professionally criminal". After a month in the US recently, he found
that coverage of Iran was based on "assumptions, fears, concerns,
accusations and expectations almost never supported by factual and
credible evidence". In as much as these distortions build public support
for a military attack on Iran, he finds it as culpable as the media's
role in the runup to the attack on Iraq a decade ago.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/09/nuclear-us-rogue-state-iran-north-korea
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