The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (68 page)

In Bush’s eyes, a Security Council resolution created a well-spring of legitimacy for military action, which ‘eased some of the problems of coalition maintenance’ while also – and crucially – helping to foster domestic support for military action by ‘resolv[ing] the debate about the need for provocation before we could act’.
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Following a US lead, the Council repeatedly married patience with creativity. In Resolution 669, it provided a means for those adversely affected by sanctions to be heard.
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Attempts by the NAM first to create a mediating role for the Secretary-General, and then to move discussion of the crisis to the General Assembly, were contained.
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Unusually violent clashes on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount on 8 October created challenges by drawing attention to apparent double standards in allowing Israel but not Iraq to flout Council decisions. The US proved flexible, voting for Resolution 673 on 24 October deploring Israeli failure to cooperate with the Secretary-General in an investigation of the 8 October violence.
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But Hussein’s rhetoric remained belligerent, and his forces remained in Kuwait. Slowly, the Council moved towards an authorization of the use of force to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Several American voices argued that such an authorization was unnecessary given existing resolutions, foreshadowing argumentation in 2003.
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But Bush saw a Council authorization of force as an opportunity to institute ‘a new world order and a long era of peace’.
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This was to be a world order based on US leadership, values, and power, allowing the US ‘to pursue our national interests, wherever possible, within a framework of concert with our friends and the international community’.
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Bush’s Council-focused strategy soon seemed to bear fruit. Resolution 678, adopted on 29 November by twelve affirmative votes, one abstention (China), and two votes against (Cuba and Yemen), invoked
Chapter VII
, and authorized ‘member states cooperating with the government of Kuwait to use all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660’ if Iraq did not comply with earlier Security Council resolutions by 15 January 1991. The resolution in effect authorized a US-led war to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. On 12 January 1991, the US Congress endorsed SCR 678.
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While the resolution passed through the House of Representatives relatively straightforwardly (250 for, 183 against), its passage through the Democrat-controlled Senate was much tighter (fifty-two for, forty-seven against), with SCR 678 clearly playing a key role in securing Congressional support.

But the US was not alone in seeking to provide political leadership. After French diplomatic overtures to Baghdad failed, France took centre stage in the Council on 15 January, as it did again a dozen years later, suggesting a simple trade: an Iraqi withdrawal in return for an international conference on Palestine. The US and the UK strongly opposed the suggestion, perhaps annoyed at what they perceived – not for the last time on Iraq – as French grandstanding.
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With the Council’s deadline for Iraqi withdrawal passing, in the morning of 16 January 1991 the coalition air campaign, Operation Desert Storm, began.

This bombing campaign lasted almost six weeks, degrading Iraqi defensive infrastructure, and pulverizing strategic sites, including Iraq’s nuclear installations. Iraqi attempts to escalate the conflict by firing Scud missiles at Israel failed, the Israeli government – under strong American pressure – declining to respond with force. The ground campaign was launched on 24 February. Softened up by the relentless coalition bombing, Iraqi front lines rapidly disintegrated. Chemical weapons, such a vital element of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal against Iran, were
never used. By 27 February the Iraqi forces were routed and Kuwait liberated. Once Iraq accepted all relevant Council resolutions later that day, President Bush declared a cessation of hostilities, with coalition troops occupying roughly 15 per cent of Iraqi territory.

Bush indicates in his memoirs that he did not press on to Baghdad in order to overthrow Saddam Hussein because, on the one hand, such an objective had not been authorized by the Security Council and, on the other, he feared for Iraq’s cohesion following the end of a coalition occupation.
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Bush also clearly had an eye to the impact that an occupation would have had on his domestic political standing, especially with an election looming and given the razor-thin majority with which he had secured Congressional authorization for military action in the first place.
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In addition, his administration was concerned to retain regional support, and indeed capitalize upon it as a basis for renewed efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict – which might have been jeopardized, if coalition forces had pushed on to Baghdad. Reread today, all of these concerns seem prescient.

The Council took more than a month after the initial ceasefire to reach agreement on a framework for dealing with the longer-term Iraqi threat. Resolution 687 – drafted in Washington and London – was adopted by twelve affirmative votes, with one negative vote (Cuba), and two abstentions (Ecuador, Yemen).
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It marked a fundamental shift: from a Council using its coercive powers under
Chapter VII
of the UN Charter to generate politico-military responses to threats, to a strategy using these powers to prevent and manage threats through legal-regulatory standards enforced by complex administrative machinery.
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Resolution 687 featured a host of new regulatory mechanisms in support of new objectives: mandatory border demarcation; weapons inspection; judicial determination of reparations claims; imposition of new treaty obligations; and the continuation of economic sanctions as an inducement to internal disarmament. These mechanisms were essentially imposed on a defeated and begrudging sovereign UN member state. As a consequence, Resolution 687 served not to create the framework for a consensual peace, but to transform the dynamic of the conflict between Iraq and
the US-led coalition from overt military confrontation to covert competition for control of Council-backed regulatory institutions.

With hostilities between the coalition and Iraqi forces at an end, Hussein moved to repress uprisings amongst Kurds in the north and by Shi’a militias in the south, both threatening the movement of hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighbouring Turkey and Iran. On 3 April, France tried unsuccessfully to insert a clause regarding the plight of the Kurds into what became Resolution 687.
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President Mitterrand declared that failure to protect the Kurds would severely affect the ‘political and moral authority’ of the Security Council.
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On 5 April, the Council passed Resolution 688, condemning the Iraqi repression and terming the cross-border incursions produced by the resulting refugee flows a threat to international peace and security.
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Resolution 688 garnered only ten affirmative votes.
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Members of the Council were acutely aware of the potential to provide a precedent for forceful humanitarian intervention, presenting a radical challenge to state sovereignty.
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But despite the absence of a
Chapter VII
reference, US and UK officials claimed that either Resolution 688 or customary international law provided either a right or, according to French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, a
duty
, to send troops into Iraq to meet extreme humanitarian need.
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Both Iraq and the UN Secretary-General contested this.
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Yet, the Secretary-General was prepared to look the other way if Western forces chose to act alone: ‘if the countries involved do not require the United Nations flag, then that is quite different.’
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Neither Russia nor China spoke out against Western unilateral enforcement, though India, voicing concerns throughout the developing world that this created a precedent eroding state sovereignty, was vocal in its opposition.

President Bush announced the beginning of a US-led effort involving relief drops in Iraqi airspace above the 36th parallel, from which all Iraqi aircraft would be excluded (a ‘no-fly zone’ – NFZ). The US was quickly joined by the UK and France in this humanitarian effort. By 16 April, they had decided additionally to send in ground troops to provide Kurdish refugees with ‘safe havens’.
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Ultimately, Operation Provide Comfort involved 20,000 troops from thirteen nations and contributions from thirty – a narrower coalition than had been assembled for the earlier military action, but still substantial.
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US troops remained until early July 1991, when the UN High Commissioner for Refugees assumed responsibility for the camps the Western troops had established.
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The NFZ remained in force after the ground troops departed.
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The UN ground presence in Northern Iraq operated under a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Iraq providing unprecedented humanitarian access, including the establishment of a ‘Humanitarian Relief Programme’, going well beyond temporary protection. Humanitarian workers were protected in the north by a Contingent of 500 UN Guards of varied provenance. This operation contained the germ of later UN transitional administration projects in East Timor, Kosovo, and elsewhere.
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But Operation Provide Comfort and the UN Guards Contingent in Iraq both seemed to suggest vulnerable civilian populations could be shielded from local repression by lightly armed personnel, perhaps lulling some within the Security Council into a dangerous complacency, ultimately shattered by events in Rwanda in 1994 and Srebrenica in 1995.
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In addition, these experiences in Iraq foreshadowed much of the blurring between military action and humanitarian assistance that has increasingly bedevilled the Council, particularly as its involvement with internal conflicts has grown.

Initially adopted to force Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, economic sanctions were retained as an incentive for Iraqi compliance with UN weapons inspections and other regulatory mechanisms. The human costs of war quickly became clear. A UN report
on 20 March 1991 described conditions in Iraq as ‘near apocalyptic’.
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The UN Secretariat proposed that the Council regulate Iraq’s sale of oil, calibrating sales to provide revenue for Iraq’s ‘essential civilian needs’ but not for Iraqi re-militarization. This ‘oil-for-food’ formula was adopted by the Council, and a formal Oil-for-Food (OFF) programme established by Resolution 706 on 15 August 1991 – though it did not become operational until 1996, since it relied on Iraqi cooperation.
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OFF established a system whereby all Iraqi commercial transactions with foreign suppliers were overseen by the UN Secretariat, in turn responsible to a committee of the Security Council (the so-called ‘661 Committee’). The unprecedented and highly intrusive OFF Programme involved regulation of a sovereign state’s revenues and direction of its expenditures – not only to benefit its own population, but also to pay costs incurred by the UN in the destruction of Iraqi arms, compensation to third parties, and the boundary settlement process.
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By early 1995, with OFF still unimplemented due to Iraqi non-cooperation, opposition to continuation of the sanctions regime had developed on three fronts: within the Council from France, Russia, and China; from Arab (and some other Muslim) countries, increasingly restless about the humanitarian situation in Iraq; and from domestic constituencies in the US and UK.
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In March 1995, Russia, France, and China circulated a draft resolution that would have lifted sanctions on Iraq.
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Though the draft was not brought to a vote, the fraying of Council consensus on Iraq strategy was clear. In April 1996, the Council passed Resolution 986, giving Iraq the primary responsibility for the distribution of humanitarian goods under the OFF, and allowing it to deal directly with suppliers in the drafting of contracts.
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This was an important concession, since it gave Iraq significant leverage – which Hussein used to pass the costs of sanctions on to the most vulnerable sectors of Iraqi society, while extracting illegal rents that reinforced his hold on power.
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As the later Independent Inquiry Committee under the leadership of former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Paul Volcker (the ‘Volcker Inquiry’) would make clear, over time UN officials, too, became entangled in the corruption of the OFF. Ultimately, this scandal rocked the UN, revealing
‘egregious lapses’ in management throughout the OFF – and the broader UN.
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The shift to a legal-regulatory approach exposed the Council to a variety of risks it had not anticipated.

Over its lifetime, OFF handled US $64 billion worth of Iraqi oil revenues, and served as the main source of sustenance for 60 per cent of Iraq’s twenty-seven million people, reducing malnutrition amongst Iraqi children by 50 per cent, decreasing child mortality, and eradicating polio.
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In addition, it employed more than 2,500 Iraqis.
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Yet despite efforts to improve OFF’s effectiveness, support for the regime within the Council slowly eroded. Saddam Hussein skilfully used evidence of suffering inside Iraq as part of a propaganda campaign against sanctions, and pressure grew to allow the termination of sanctions. Yet the US and UK could block any such attempt through a ‘reverse veto’.
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Opposition grew even greater after it became clear in 1997 that the US now saw sanctions as a tool not for containment but for regime change, which became entrenched policy in the US when, in 1998, Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act.
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