Bush Gets Chilly Congratulations From UN

by Thalif Deen

(IPS) UNITED NATIONS -- UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was quick to congratulate President Bush on his re-election Wednesday but diplomats and UN watchers issued warnings about future U.S.-UN relations.

Annan, who irritated the White House recently by describing the U.S. invasion of Iraq as "illegal," has little or no choice but to welcome four more years of a new Bush administration, according to UN diplomats and officials.

"If the United Nations is to survive as an institution, it has to learn to live with the United States," said an Asian diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Annan was his usual diplomatic self after the news was announced, conveying "warm" wishes to the U.S. president.

After congratulating Bush, the secretary-general said he is "committed to continuing to work with President Bush and his administration on the whole range of issues facing the United Nations and the world."

Since Annan is expected to finish his second five-year term as UN chief only by the end of December 2006, he will have to work with the new Bush team at least for the next two years.

Bush, whose new four-year term will end December 2008, will also play a key role in electing the next UN secretary-general, possibly from Asia.

A long-serving UN official says Annan cannot afford to take a confrontational stand against Washington, "because he will only be doing irreparable damage to the institution".

"Either you cooperate with the White House -- or you just perish," he added.

The reaction was equally strong from U.S. political analysts, academics and UN activists.

"The Bush policies toward the United Nations are likely to remain similar -- viewing the United Nations as a significant tool when useful to Washington and as an irrelevant ritual otherwise," says Norman Solomon, executive director of the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy.

"Likewise, we'll see Washington continue to use the rhetoric of 'multilateralism' when expedient, while taking unilateral action whenever convenient," Solomon told IPS.

Diplomats at the United Nations, he said, would be foolish to take Bush's claims seriously. "The United Nations should impede and oppose -- not assist or tacitly support -- policies from Washington that seek to extend empire," said Solomon, co-author of 'Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You'.

The Bush administration, which went to war in Iraq in March 2003 without UN authorization, has also remained at odds with the United Nations over sending a large team of UN employees to organize elections in the occupied country in January 2005.

Annan has said he will not send UN staffers until and unless the security environment in Iraq shows signs of improvement.

"I think the United States is very eager to get the United Nations on board to provide some semblance of international credibility to these inevitably flawed 'elections under occupation,'" says Phyllis Bennis of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.

But clearly their commitment to getting the United Nations involved in the polls is limited, she added.

"We know from a 'Newsday' leak that it was Washington that rejected the offer of a large multilateral deployment of troops from a number of Muslim countries specifically designed to protect UN election workers, because the force would be under UN, not U.S., command," said Bennis, author of 'Before and After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Sept. 11 Crisis'.

"That means U.S. officials were more concerned with maintaining Pentagon hegemony in Iraq than in creating a scenario under which the United Nations might go in. But it remains politically crucial for the United Nations to continue its refusal to return to Iraq under the terms of the U.S. occupation -- even if the official reason remains the lack of security," she told IPS.

A UN return to Iraq under those conditions would mean legitimating the U.S. occupation of that country -- and thereby delegitimizing the United Nations itself, Bennis added.

According to Nasser Aruri, chancellor professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, "There is no reason to assume that the Bush administration, which has ridiculed the United Nations as an institution whose 'time has passed', is likely to develop a sudden respect for the world body whose basic principles are at odds with the world view of the Bush administration."

The Bush government, he added, has effectively reduced the five permanent members of the Security Council, to just one -- the United States (the others being Britain, France, Russia and China).

Bennis predicted the Bush administration would continue with its "aggressive" foreign policy while totally disregarding the United Nations.

"The world will see a re-empowered American administration claiming a popular mandate, with a strengthened commitment to preventive war in Iraq, intensified support for Israel's occupation of Palestine, renewed military threats against other perceived 'enemies,' the abandonment of nuclear weapons accountability, the sidelining of the United Nations, and the consolidation of a law of empire to match the rejection of international law," she added.