October 2012, Pages 40-41 United Nations Report Washington Report on Middle East Affairs Will Lakhdar Brahimi's

Credentials and Credibility Help Him With Syria Assignmen t? By Ian Williams Lakhdar Brahimi, the new United Nations peace envoy to Syria, speaks to the pres s following a meeting with French President Franois Hollande at the Elysee Palace in Paris, Aug. 20, 2012. (Patrick Kovarik/AFP/GettyImages) Lakhdar Brahimi has a long record of working on behalf of the United Nations. Th e good-humored and quietly spoken diplomat has a strong track record of cutting through rhetorical obfuscations and getting to the underlying reality. As a form er Algerian freedom fighter, he has an exemplary recordespecially compared with m ost of the sundry hereditary officials around the Arab worldwhich is second to no ne. Indeed, as one of the "Elders," the independent group of global leaders brou ght together in 2007 by Nelson Mandela, Brahimi has a global diplomatic reputati on based on strong principles. Of course, he picks up the Syria baton that his fellow Elder, Kofi Annan, did no t so much drop as cast it aside in disgust. I had always suspected that Annan's intention was to test to the limit the sincerity of Moscow and Beijingand he did. But their shamelessness knows fews bounds. Brahimi is a logical successoran astu te choice by Ban Ki-moon. To affirm Brahimi's diplomatic bona fides one need look no further back than his work in Iraq as U.N. special envoy in the dark days after the U.S. invasion, wh en he was roundly attacked by Israel's U.N. envoy, Dan Gillerman. The occasion was Brahimi's "undiplomatic" lapse into the truth, when he told a F rench radio station that Israeli policies toward Palestinians, and Washington's support for those policies, hindered his search for a transition government in B aghdad. "The problems are linked, there is no doubt about it," he said. "The big poison in the region is the Israeli policy of domination and the suffering impo sed on the Palestinians." Brahimi complained of the difficulty of dealing with Iraqis in the face of "Isra el's completely violent and repressive security policy and determination to occu py more and more Palestinian territory." The more things stay the samethe worse they get! Now of course, Israel has occupi ed even more territory than anyone conceived possible. In Iraq, and previously in Afghanistan, Brahimi's credibility and reputation for integrity enabled him to pull together disparate elements into coalitions of th e grudging, at least. As the endgame in Syria looks far off and bloody, if anyon e can pull off a compromise among the various elements, it has to be himnot least since he is securely insulated against allegations of being part of any terrori st or Zionist plot. It is just possible that his veteran Third World credentialsalmost in at the foun dation of the Non Aligned Movementmight give him more credibility to dissuade the Russians and Chinese from their support for the Syrian regime, which is every b it as unprincipled as Washington's unconditional support for Israel. Target Iran or Target Obama? As Syria disintegrates and Hillary Clinton wrings her hands, the secretary of st ate must console herself that the mass killings there take attention away from I ranwhich Israel is threatening to attack. These are times when it appears that we

are observing a parallel universe in which the laws of logic and reason have be en spun around, in which the Red Queen often believes three impossible things be fore breakfast. The psychopathic wing of the Israeli government wants to attack Iran, no matter what arguments against that reckless and illegal action are produced. Frankly, w ith Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu one cannot be sure whether this is a patho logical hatred of any rival military power in the regionin which case, with Syria and Iraq gone, if Iran were removed from the equation then one could suspect th at Turkey would suddenly move up the pariah ladder. But it is equally probable that the Israeli prime minister wants to ensure that President Barack Obama is not re-elected. Netanyahu has what we can only hope ar e substantial fears that a second-term Obama would remember all the insults and campaigns waged against him by the right-wing Israeli leader, as well as the U.S . president's own tarnished international reputation because he allowed Netanyah u to thwart his earlier outreach to the Arab and Muslim world. We have come a long way since the Zimmerman telegramit is now the hasbara leak. T he current bright ideas emanating from the Israel lobbysorry, I mean senior Middl e East advisers in Washingtonreally tax belief. In an Aug. 17 New York Times op-e d, Dennis Ross, the former Clinton administration Middle East peace coordinator who currently is a "counselor" at the AIPAC spin-off Washington Institute for Ne ar East Policy, advised that the way to stop Israel from attacking Iran was to g ive it the bunker busters, tanker planes and other weaponry necessary for it to attack Iran effectively. So, the way to stop Jack the Ripper was to leave large bags of surgical instrume nts about for him? Along similar lines, the Israeli leak factory Debkafile decla red that Obama was going to pledge that the U.S. will attack Iran later, in orde r to abort Netanyahu attacking earlier. So Israel, which does not have the capability to attack Iran on its own, will re frain from doing so only if the U.S. provides it with the weaponry to do so, or attacks in its place. And the reward would be that Netanyahu would have succeede d in his main aim, which is to make Obama a one-term president. What is missing here is any sense that the Iraq debacle taught America's various pro-Likud factions anything at all about international law, let alone internati onal relations. There is no legal mandate whatsoever for Israel, or indeed the U .S., to attack Iran. On the contrary, the constant threats from Israel would pos sibly constitute a defense for a pre-emptive attack by Iran on Israeli, and mayb e even U.S., military positions. Certainly under the version of international la w espoused by both of them on various occasions, Iran could justify, say, mining Israeli harbors! Of course, in reality Iran is not in a superpower position that could support su ch novel legal interpretations. But consider Obama. He has spent his first term embroiled in two wars, one of which he opposed not least because Bush began it a gainst international law and without U.N. authority, allegedly on the issue of w eapons of mass destruction. U.S. intelligence, and many Israeli intelligence authorities, aver firmly that I ran does not (yet, at least) have a nuclear military program or capability. Inde ed its leading political and religious figure issued a fatwa against such immora l weapons. The U.N. is not going to threaten to issue an ultimatum to Iran to stop a progra m it does not haveso if Obama were to go ahead, his position would be even weaker than that of George W. Bush.

That is, of course, quite apart from the human casualties and financial conseque nces for a fragile U.S.and, indeed, globaleconomy of a war that would threaten muc h of the world's oil supplies. Washington Echoes Tel Aviv's "Advice" In that context, it is reassuring that Ban Ki-moon scorned Netanyahu's "advice" to stay away from September's Non Aligned Summit in Tehran. Indeed, he boldly al so repudiated similar U.S. advice as well. With a straight face, State Departmen t spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters that Iran "is a country that is in violation of all kinds of U.N. obligations and has been a destabilizing force." Most of the Non Aligned, indeed most of the world, might think that a country bu ilding illegal settlements in defiance of U.N. resolutions and constantly threat ening to make war on another country fitted that description better than Iran, n o matter what reservations they had about Tehran's human rights policy or suppor t for Syria. Hillel Neuer, who founded "U.N. Watch" to scrutinize the world organizationalbeit only in relation to Israelcondemned Ban's attendance but urged him to "at the ve ry least, bring with him the latest U.N. General Assembly resolution detailing I ran's massive human rights violations, the report by the Human Rights Council's Iran monitor documenting the country's 'striking pattern of violations of fundam ental human rights guaranteed under international law,' and the six Security Cou ncil resolutions on Iran's illegal nuclear program." In its way, all that is fair enough. But we wonder when U.N. Watch ever called u pon the secretary-general to take the much longer list of resolutions addressing Israeli crimes to Mr. Netanyahu. Tapping the same rich vein of chutzpah, Israel's Soviet-born Foreign Minister Av igdor Lieberman sent a letter to the foreign ministers of the Middle East Quarte t, calling on them to press for new elections in the Palestinian Authority to re place President Mahmoud Abbas. In a whole new dimension of chutzpah, Lieberman d escribed Abbas, seen by many Palestinians as a little too pacific, as "an obstac le to peace." "The Palestinian Authority is a despotic government riddled with corruption," Li eberman wrote. "This pattern of behavior has led to criticism even within his ow n constituency. Due to Abbas' weak standing and his policy of not renewing the n egotiations, which is an obstacle to peace, the time has come to consider a crea tive solution, to think 'outside the box,' in order to strengthen the Palestinia n leadership." As his comrade in buffoonery, Humpty Dumpty, said, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to meanneither more nor less." Lieberman's concern with "st rengthening" the Palestinian leadership is an example of outstandingly Orwellian doublethink, worthy of Goebbels. His government has locked up any strong Palest inian leadership whenever it gets the chanceand, to underscore its contempt, defi ed U.N. and EU censure to announce the building of yet more settlements in East Jerusalem for Jews only. U.N. Watch of course, maintains total silence on that inconvenient issue. Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations who blogs at <www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com>.