Clearly, the White House endorsed the UN decision to hold an independent investigation into the Israeli atrocities in Jenin only because to have been the sole dissenting voice in the New York vote would have made its Middle East problems even worse. President Bush’s first instincts were to ignore the inevitable outcry and once more back his Zionist manipulators. But wiser heads seem to have convinced him of the dangers of this course of action. The Sharon government also suddenly abandoned its hard line. No one should think for one moment that this is a sudden conversion to the ways of reason and peace. Both Washington and Tel Aviv have almost certainly been acting with the greatest cynicism. When it became apparent to both the governments that they could not hold back the outraged tide of international public opinion demanding to know the truth about what went on in Jenin, they gave way. The retreat is sure to be tactical. We can expect that both the Israelis and Americans will now start to undermine both the UN investigators and the evidence that they assemble.
In other areas also, this policy of tactical retreat is evident. Bush is no longer showing the confrontational style that characterized the opening weeks of his administration. At that time he unilaterally ditched the Kyoto Agreement on global warming because that was what his oil magnate neighbors in Texas wanted him to do. He also bowed to hawkish pressure in the Pentagon and the US armaments industry, by pressing ahead with the missile shield program and thus effectively tearing up the nonproliferation treaties which had kept the world safe from nuclear war for over forty years. He has moved much more cautiously to get rid of Dr. Robert Watson who this week was voted out of the chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on Friday. Watson, a British-born US atmospheric scientist, was one of the harshest critics of his own country’s contribution to global warming. It seems that in the end, Exxon executives demanded the White House give them Watson’s head on a plate and the US administration duly bullied the UN into agreeing to his ouster.
Nevertheless, this bit of international political thuggery will seem insignificant against the more serious bit of skulduggery the White House is planning today. It is expecting to force the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to shed its highly successful, efficient and vigorous director general, Brazilian diplomat Jose Bustani.
The OPCW enforces international chemical conventions, inspecting labs and factories and arsenals. Its job is to see to the destruction of any chemical weapon it finds. Its highest profile work has been in Iraq. In the last five years, Bustani and his inspectors have destroyed over two-thirds of all chemical weapon stockpiles. US Secretary of State Colin Powell last year praised him for his “impressive” work. So why does the White House now want to oust this man? His crime was to demand, as he is entitled, to be given full access to US chemical weapons stockpiles. Washington has refused. Iraq also has denied Bustani inspection access, so Washington wants to attack Saddam. But, of course, when it comes to inspecting US chemical weapons, entirely different rules have to apply.
