What moynihan and kirpatrick saw
A number of remarkable men and women have served as the United States Ambassador to the UN. These include Arthur Goldberg, who previously had served as an associate Justice; Adlai Stevenson, a two time candidate for President; George H. W. Bush, who served as President; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later a United States Senator; the recently deceased Jeane Kirkpatrick; and the recently retired John Bolton. Two of them - Moynihan and Kirkpatrick - wrote important articles about the shenanigans of the institution. In March 1981, Commentary published “Joining the Jackals - The United States at the UN 1977-1980″ by Senator Moynihan. Moynihan wrote, not of his own time at Turtle Bay but of the Carter administration’s approach to the UN, which had followed his own tenure. (Though a Democrat, Moynihan had served during the Ford administration.) Using the President Carter’s loss to the Senatory Ted Kennedy as a starting point, Moynihan explains how the Carter administration viewed the UN; and how it tried to act within that institution. In March 1980, the Security Council passed resolution 465 that was extremely anti-Israel. The American ambassador to the UN, Donald McHenry voted in favor of the resolution. The administration, realizing how damaging it was to have voted for the resolution underwent contortions to downplay the significance of the vote. But the damage had been done and the Carter administration’s support of the resolution played a role in chasing away Jewish voters during the New York Primary, giving Senator Kennedy a much needed victory. Thus Moynihad describes the Carter administration’s view of its efforts in the UN like this:
What is important, however, is that the administration had looked upon its United Nations record as a huge success. Other policies had failed, and that proved costly. But this had succeeded and proved costly. . . . I do not conceal my judgment that so long as the ideas underlying the Carter administration’s UN policy are dominant within the Democratic party, we Democrats will be out of power.
Coming into power the Carter administration felt that the United States had been, in the past, too confrontational and that it must be more concilliatory to other nations whose views may not coincide with its own. Moynihan observed:
There was a fateful avoidance of reality in the new administration’s view: a denial that there is genuine hostility twoard the United States in the world and true conflicts of interest between this nation and others - an illusion that a surface reasonableness and civility are the the same as true cooperation.
In general this new concilliation brought the United States nothing. Moynihan observed that votes in the UN didn’t reflect new cooperation, unless the United States adopted the views of its adversaries. Nowhere was the conflict between the United States and the majority of the UN more clear than regarding the Middle East. And the United States didn’t always stand up for its ally in votes.
I state as a matter of plain and universally understood fact that for the United States to abstain on a Security Council resolution concerning Israel is the equivalent of acquiescing.
Moynihan, though, describes how the malignant influence of the Soviet Union increased after the signing of the Camp David Accords. One would have assumed that Israel’s diplomatic position would have been more secure once it made peace with its biggest Arab neighbor. One would be wrong. The Soviet Union, upset that it had been shut out of the Middle East, conspired with the Arab rejectionists to condemn Israel in ever stronger terms in order to upset the nascent peace process. It wasn’t simply a matter of criticizing Israel, but of declaring Israel illegitimate, as Moynihan explained.
…On March 1, 1980 a resolution (465) was submitted to the Council that was as viciously anti-Israel - and as destructive of the Camp David accords - as any that has ever been encountered or could readily be devised. Iserael was found to be in “flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention”: the first nation in history to be found guilty of behaving as the government of Nazi Germany had behaved …In a word according to resolution 465, Israel is an outlaw state, guilty of war crimes. (Not the Vietnamese invaders of Cambodia, or the Soviets in Afghanistan. Israel!) Its alleged capital is not its capital at all - “Jerusalem or any part thereof” - and it is in illegal occupation of territory now for the first time designated “Palestinian.” Here, then, was the triumph of everything the Soviets and the “Rejectionists had stood for: the repudiation of everything Sadat, and for that matter Begin and Carter, had sought. Yet the United States had voted in favor of this resolution.
So the Carter administration in its zeal to please everyone, voted for an effort designed to undermined its greatest achievement, the Camp David Accords. In the end Moynihan hoped that the lessons of the past had been learned.
Still with the experience of these four years, we should at least have learned that foreign policy cannot be conducted under the pretense that we have no enemies in the world - or at any rate none whose enmity we have not merited by our own conduct.
Unfortunately, as Jeane Kirkpatrick, in July 1989, wrote “How the PLO was legitimized” showed that the lessons were not learned. (It was originally published in Commentary, the site of her more famous “Dictatorships and Double Standards” in 1979.) Moynihan’s focus was on the delegitimization of Israel. In contrast, Kirkpatrick focused on the the legitmization of the PLO.
The PLO also understood the propaganda value of the violent deed. Hijacking planes; murdering a Jordanian prime minister, Israeli athletes, and countless Israeli and other civilians; killing would-be Palestinian rivals and Arab critics - all this captured worldwide attention and made the PLO’s reputation as a terrorist organization. That reputation is today in doubt, not because the PLO has denounce terorism but because, with patient work and diplomatic skill, the PLO and its allies have nearly persuaded the world to adopt a new definition of terrorism, one which retroactively legitimizes the PLO’s aggressive violence and delegitimizes Israel’s efforts at self-defense. … The issue Arafat knows, is not whether the PLO has used violence against unarmed civilians. It is not over whether the PLO will use violence again. The issue is whether that violence was and is justified.
She starts at the beginning giving naming the documents that started inverting the morality of international law to serve terrorist aims. (More on resolution 2708 and similar resolutions here.)
Where the Charter permitted force by member states only to defend themselves against attack, GA Resolution 2708 XX (1970) created a new category of “legitimate” force which could be used against member states. This new right was confirmed in subsequent resolutions approving the struggle of “liberation” groups again “colonialism” by “all necessary means at their disposal.”
This was followed by the The principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples which stated
Every State has the duty to refrain from any forcible action which deprives peoples referred to above in the elaboration of the present principle of their right to self-determination and freedom and independence. In their actions against, and resistance to, such forcible action in pursuit of the exercise of their right to self-determination, such peoples are entitled to seek and to receive support in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter.
As Dr. Kirkpatrick observed this had a real legal effect.
The General Assembly thus subordinated the principle of the “sovereign inviobility” of states to the struggle of “peoples” against “colonialism” and put important new restrictions on the right of states to self-defense.
(If you recall the kidnapping and killing of the Israeli soldiers across the international border in October, 2000, you might recall that the UN protected Hezbollah. It would appear that the UN’s unconcsionable behavior, protecting a terrorist organization in conflict with a member state was in line with the parody that international has become, as opposed to an aberration.) Dr. Kirkpatrick then goes on to show how the PLO’s Covenant meshes with the new definitions inherent in the UN Charter so that
With its Covenant, the PLO thus claimed all the rights of a people under the redefined UN Charter and denied the state of Israelany rights whatsoever. That claim became more serious as the UN General Assembly began to adopt the PLO Covenant as its own, importing kits key elements into resolutions and citations of resolutions.
(That’s Arafat and his spokesmen were so keen to cite 242 and 338 and all relevant resolutions. Those relevant resolutions invariably denied Israel’s right to exist or defend itself. Those statements were not statements of concilliation, but of confrontation, but confrontation as ratified by the hopelessly corrupt UN.) In recounting this shameful history, Kirkpatrick concluded
Thanks in large part to this relentless campaign, much of the world is now confused about who is the aggressor and who is the victim, wo is the terrorist and who is the victim of terrorism. Such confusion is manifest in the response to the various “concessions” of Yasir Arafat, which are themselves the most recent move in his ongoing effort to legitimize the PLO. The U.S. response in particular is evidence of a growing willingness to give Arafat the benefit of the doubt.
The rest of the essay is devoted to the supposed PLO recognition of Israel in 1988 and the contortions the world community went through to see some sort of breakthrough in Arafat’s weaselly words. In particular Kirkpatrick observed
Obviously, then, when Arafat “renounced” terrorism he did not define it as the U.S. State Department defines it: “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine state agents, normally intended to influence an audience.” Obviously, if violence against unarmed and unprotected civilians is not to be called terrorism, if specialists in that kind of violence like Abu Jihad are not to be called terrorists but victims of terrorism, then we are in the world of doublethink and doublespeak.
The consequences of living in such a world she warned in conclusion would be
The long march through the UN has produced many benfits for the PLO. It has created a people where there was none; a claim where there was none. Now the PLO is seeking to create a state where there already is one. That will take more than resolutions and more than an “international peace conference.” But having succeeded so well over the years in its campaign to legitimize itself and to delegitimize Israel, the PLO might yet also succeed in bringing that campaign to a triumphant conclusion, with consequences for the Jewish state that would be nothing short of catastrophic.
Both Moynihan and Kirkpatrick saw through the noble sounding rhetoric and exposed it for the hatred that it masked. Outgoing Ambassador John Bolton similarly challenged the farce that passed for international law at the UN but not enough Americans saw the importance in allowing him to continue his work. The UN is not a well meaning organization. It is an organization whose depraved morality is dictated by the votes of a majority of dictators, tyrants and their sympathizers who deny votes to their own constituents but parade their bogus majority as morality. Kofi Annan who apparently isn’t being sufficiently rewarded for his obsequiousness and incompetence isn’t simply misguided, as he has been fully complicit in allowing evil - genocide in Rwanda, Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat - to flourish during his tenure. One can only hope that more people and governments will challenge the status quo at the UN as Moynihan and Kirkpatrick did. That is the only way that this institution that was founded with the best of intentions can be saved from its self made path to Hell.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.
Blogdigger tags: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, United Nations, John Bolton, Kofi Annan, PLO, Israel.
