Diplomatic Impunity

Tony Blair might believe he belongs to an international coalition, but George Bush has other ideas. Bush'sinternational war against terrorism has not stopped him from waging a parallel war against co-operation.

Two weeks ago, the US Ambassador to the UN in Vienna failed, for the first time, to attend a meeting of theComprehensive Test Ban Treaty. This may suggest that America is no longer prepared to abide by the rulesagainst the testing of nuclear warheads. A week ago, the Washington Post revealed that the Pentagon had toldthe CIA to investigate Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, in the hope of undermining his credibility.When the CIA failed to discover any evidence of wrongdoing, the deputy defense secretary is reported to have"hit the ceiling".

On Friday, the United States government succeeded in dislodging Robert Watson, the chair of the UN'sIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Dr Watson had been pressing member nations to take the threat ofglobal warming seriously, to the annoyance of the oil company ExxonMobil. Last year it sent a memo to theWhite House requesting that he be shoved.

Yesterday evening, after a week of arm-twisting and secret meetings, the United States government forcedthe departure of Jose Bustani, director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.As this column predicted last week, this is the first time that the head of an international organisation hasbeen dismissed during his term in office. The tactics the US has deployed in the past few days to oust Bustanioffer a fascinating insight into the way its diplomacy works.

On Friday, the US ambassador organised an illegal meeting with American members of the organisation'sstaff. He explained that he had arrived late as he'd been trying to find a replacement for Mr Bustani (this isalso an illegal manouevre). He told the meeting that the US had been encountering "great difficultyfinding people of the right calibre" because no one wants "to be associated with a dyingorganisation". This was news to the staff, who had previously been told by the US that sacking Bustaniwould revive the OPCW. But the ambassador explained that if the replacement is "like Bustani ... we willsay 'screw the organisation'. We'll dismantle our [chemical] weapons independently and monitor themourselves."

The US had promised that the directorship would pass to another Latin American. But the ambassador was kindenough to note that "Latin Americans are so characterised by sheer incompetence that they won't be ableto make up their minds." He warned the meeting "if any of this gets out of this room, I'll kill theperson responsible".

To help obtain the result it wanted, the US appears to have paid for delegates to attend the "specialsession" of the OPCW it convened. Micronesia said it couldn't come, but that the US delegation could voteon its behalf (another illegal move). On Sunday the US claimed that Bustani himself had offered to resolve thesituation by exchanging his deputy for an American. Yesterday, it was forced to admit that this claim wasfalse.

This month's attempts to damage international law follow America's unilateral abandonment of theanti-ballistic missile treaty, its successful sabotage of the Biological Weapons Convention and its rejectionof the Kyoto protocol on climate change; the UN treaty on gun running; and the international criminal court.America is pulling away from the rest of the world, and dragging our treaties down as it goes. Given that itis in danger of alienating the very nations from whose allegiance it claims to draw its global authority, whyis the US going to such lengths to destroy international cooperation? I think there may be several,overlapping reasons.

The first and most obvious is that there's no point in possessing brute strength if you are not prepared tobe brutal. The US establishes its power by asserting it. Other nations are kept in a constant state ofapprehension about what it might do next, which helps to ensure that they step back from confrontation.

It is also clear that at least three of these recent attempts to undermine international treaties are beingpursued with an eye to the impending war with Iraq. As the American plans for destroying Saddam Hussein appearto involve new "bunker busting" nuclear weapons, the nuclear test ban treaty (which the US has neverratified) must be ignored. The US justification for war with Iraq is that Saddam Hussein may possess weaponsof mass destruction. So the two foremost obstacles to war were Mr Blix and Mr Bustani, who have proposednon-violent methods of getting rid of these weapons. While the US government doubtless has genuine concernsabout weapons of mass destruction, these are not the principal reasons for wishing to conquer Iraq.

War would enable the US to re-establish its authority in an increasingly wayward Middle East, whileasserting control over Iraq's vast oil reserves. Iraq is also daddy's unfinished business: for George W, it'spersonal. War is popular: the more bellicose President Bush becomes, the higher his ratings rise. It justifiesincreasing state support for the politically important defence industry. Arguably, war also serves as a re-legitimisationof the state itself. The Republicans argued so forcefully in the 1990s for a "minimal state" thatthey almost did themselves out of a job, as many Americans began to wonder why they were paying taxes at all.War is the sole irreducible function of the state, and the ultimate justification of the greatly concentratedpowers and resources this "minimal" entity in the US has accumulated.

But the underlying reason for these unilateral breaches of the law is that the rest of the world allowsthem to happen. Hundreds of readers of last week's column sent letters to the British foreign secretary askinghim to stand up to the US. Brian Eno organised a petition signed by celebrities as diverse as Robbie Williams,Damien Hirst, Salman Rushdie and Bianca Jagger, in the hope that, even if it won't listen to anyone else, ourgovernment might at least respond to Cool Brittania. But on Friday, the first member state to co-sponsor theUS resolution to sack Mr Bustani was the United Kingdom.

It is not hard to see why other nations should seek to appease the United States. If the US can bepersuaded to keep supporting global treaties, ministers argue, it will not retreat into dangerousisolationism. But once America sees that other nations will submit to its demands, it will continue to bendthe treaties to suit itself until the entire framework of international law collapses. More dangerous by farthan US isolationism is the unilateral demolition of the world's agreements, forcing every nation to live byits own rules.

Let Mr Bush walk out in a huff if he can't have his way, but let him be sure that if he does so, he can nolonger expect to receive either moral authority or material support for anything he wishes to achieve abroad. For all the US government's talk of splendid isolation, that is the kind of loneliness his administration doesnot seem ready to accept.

(George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at theDepartment of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at theUniversity of East London and the author of CaptiveState: the corporate takeover of Britain, and the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows,Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian, UK)