Category Archives: Washington

No-fly zones attacks not a material breach

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United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said yes­ter­day that Iraqi fir­ing on allied planes patrolling the no-fly zones in north­ern and south­ern Iraq was not a vio­la­tion of UNSCR 1441, no mat­ter what the United States may say.
“The United States believes that fir­ing upon our air­craft in the no-fly zone, or British air­craft, is a vio­la­tion — it is a mate­r­ial breach,” said Scott McClel­lan, a spokesman for the White House.
Ah, no, said Annan. “Let me say that I don’t think that the Coun­cil will say this is in con­tra­ven­tion of the res­o­lu­tion of the Secu­rity Coun­cil.” The Rus­sians agreed with Annan: “Recent claims that Iraq’s actions in the ‘no-fly’ zones can be seen as a vio­la­tion of the U.N. Secu­rity Coun­cil res­o­lu­tion 1441, have no legal grounds,” the Russ­ian for­eign min­istry said.
UNSCR 1441’s eighth para­graph says, “Iraq should not take or threaten hos­tile acts directed against any rep­re­sen­ta­tive or per­son­nel of the United Nations or of any mem­ber state tak­ing action to uphold any Coun­cil res­o­lu­tion.“
The prob­lem with this word­ing is that there is no Coun­cil res­o­lu­tion explic­itly set­ting up the no-fly zones. They were estab­lished in 1991 after the Gulf War by the United States, France and the United King­dom to pro­tect the Kurds and Shi’ite minori­ties from Saddam’s mur­der­ous reprisals after the Gulf War. (France pulled out after 1998’s Desert Fox oper­a­tion.) I did a search on the legal­ity of the zones and found that the United States usu­ally cites UNSCR 688 in defend­ing the zones. But there’s noth­ing in the res­o­lu­tion autho­riz­ing their set-up. At best, their con­tin­ued exis­tence is a mark of implicit approval by the Coun­cil. Another view, which I’ve come to hold, is that the Coun­cil has rec­og­nized that there’s not a lot it can do about them any­way and U.K. and U.S. vetoes keep Rus­sia and France from intro­duc­ing res­o­lu­tions to end them.
That’s not to say I don’t think they should be there. I was quite happy to have allied war planes high above me when I was in the coun­try, oth­er­wise the Kurds would never have achieved the lev­els of auton­omy they have. Still, they’re a pretty flimsy excuse to try to declare Iraq in mate­r­ial breach, and thank­fully the United Nations sees through that ruse.
Of course, now it just means there is more time to move troops and armor into the region.

Much news and catching up… (LONG POST)

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Hi all. Sorry for the delay in post­ing. Not only have we seemed to enter a “phony war” period regard­ing impend­ing hos­til­i­ties with Iraq with­out any­thing def­i­nite hap­pen­ing, but I also needed to take a lit­tle break.
Be that as it may, there have been some inter­est­ing sto­ries show up in the last few days. First off, United Nations weapons inspec­tors have gone … back to Iraq. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) Hans Blix, the chief of the inspec­tors, holds the fate of Iraq in his hands and he has said he will asses the intent of any delays on the part of the Iraqis as to whether foot-dragging is obfus­ca­tion or sim­ple foul-ups. Con­sid­er­ing that much of my time in Iraq was char­ac­ter­ized by hur­ry­ing up and wait­ing — and I was in friendly territory! — I won­der if the, ah, “flex­i­ble” con­cept of time in soci­eties other than north­ern Euro­pean ones will be taken into account. Blix is Swedish after all; I hear they frown on tar­di­ness. At any rate, Iraq has until Dec. 8 to present UNMOVIC with a full account­ing of its weapons of mass destruc­tion pro­grams or it will be in “mate­r­ial breach” of UNSCR 1441. We’ll see what hap­pens. (P.S. When the Iraqis fire on Allied air­craft patrolling the no-fly zones in the south and the north, does that con­sti­tute a “mate­r­ial breach”? Some in the Bush admin­is­tra­tion want it to be so. Please note, Oper­a­tions North­ern Watch and South­ern Watch have never been sanc­tioned by the UN and Iraq has never accepted them.)

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