By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, International Coordinating Committee
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
13 September, 2005
The UN World Summit on September 14 to 16 has a pretentious and deceptive agenda, from supposedly solving global poverty, debt and development to reforming the UN’s two major organs – the Security Council (SC) and the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). However, the real objective of US imperialism and its allies is to give United Nations (UN) imprimatur to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan through the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission. This is consistent with the role that the UN has played throughout much of its sixty-year history: an instrument to window-dress the bullying by the “great powers,” notably the United States, of small and weaker developing states.
The Peacebuilding Commission is purportedly a mechanism to bring together “all stakeholders in and outside” the UN to “marshal resources and advise… comprehensive strategies for peacebuilding and conflict recovery” concerning “countries emerging from conflicts.” In fact, it seeks to provide the United States with a political and economic mechanism that allows it to appear as exiting from Iraq but at the same time to retain military bases for directing the puppet regime and controlling the oil resources and all major business enterprises and contracts.
The “coalition of the willing” cobbled by the US has practically disintegrated and the US now finds itself sinking in the quagmire in Iraq. It has already achieved its primary objective in invading Iraq, which is to weaken and subjugate it on a long term basis. Before 1991 Iraq used to be a relatively strong client-state economically and strategically but it repeatedly showed disobedience to US dictates. Now, Iraq is in danger of disintegration as a nation-state and fragmentation into three smaller and weaker entities organized along sectarian lines. The US finds it convenient to use the UN in a futile attempt to cover and share with other countries the rising political and material costs of occupation and to counter the increasingly effective, broad-based resistance of the Iraqi people against US imperialist domination.
The US has no intention of relinquishing its paramount role in determining the strategic direction of post-Saddam Iraq. Through a powerful Organizational Committee that includes all the permanent members of the Security Council, the US is assured of a leading role in the Commission. Moreover, since membership in the Organizational Committee is based solely on the amount of regular and special contributions to the UN, this Commission, despite its pretended holy intentions, merely augments and reinforces the Security Council as an instrument of aggression and plunder in the Middle East and farther afield. The Peacebuilding Commission is intended to further unify the imperialist countries against the people within the frame of the US-instigated schemes of neoliberal globalization and escalating repression and aggression under the pretext of “war on terror”. The US wants to avert the recurrence of recriminations among the Permanent Members in the runup to the US-UK invasion of Iraq.
The US has so wantonly violated the norms and instruments of international law and the principles and charter of the United Nations. The invasion of Iraq is only one of a long list of cumulative examples of such outlawry. The standing of the United Nations is at its lowest point in its sixty-year history. The much-hyped UN World Summit is touted as part of the attempt to rehabilitate the UN. But the Peacebuilding Commission is precisely nothing but the discredited Security Council in a more malignant and obnoxious form. It is in fact the corporate board of a Holy Crusade by the imperialist countries headed by the US in the 21^st century in order to further dominate the Middle East and the rest of the world under the shibboleths of neoliberalism and sham democracy.###