United Nations: As the Bush administration struggles to rally international pressure on Iran to halt its nuclear programme, China and Russia are working to take the most powerful diplomatic weapon off the table: the military option.
Moscow and Beijing insist that a United Nations sanctions resolution under negotiation in New York should avoid language that could be used as a pretext for a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. In this they have received the tacit backing of the United States' key European partners, Britain, France and Germany.
But analysts say the 15-nation security council's refusal to preserve the possibility - however remote - of military action has weakened its hand as it confronts one of the most significant challenges of the 21st century: the possible emergence of a radical Middle East government with nuclear weapons.
"What means of enforcement is credible if you start out by saying in the beginning that 'oh, by the way, we're not going to do the one thing that you're most afraid of'? " Patrick Clawson, deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has asked. He insists the council should "have the military option on the table" in the event that the government which threatened to wipe Israel off the map does develop nuclear weapons.
The effort to constrain the US underscores lingering distrust over the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 without explicit security council approval, analysts said. It follows a similar push to prevent the US from adopting UN resolutions that one day could be used to punish Sudan and North Korea.
"People are afraid it's a slippery slope; that if they agree to sanctions today, they give the authority for military intervention tomorrow," says Edward Luck, a Columbia University historian who studies the United Nations.
The UN debate over the use of force in Iran coincides with a realignment of power in the region that is already diminishing the prospects for US military action against Iran, analysts say. US and Nato military setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan are eroding public support in the US for military action in the region.
The Bush administration maintains that though it never takes the military option off the table, its diplomatic campaign to rally support for sanctions against Iran and North Korea is not a cover for launching new conflicts.
But Russian and Chinese diplomats note that the US insisted it was committed to diplomacy in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. When the US and Britain failed to secure UN backing for a more forceful response, they turned to a 12-year-old resolution as the basis for the invasion.
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, Moscow's former ambassador to the UN, told reporters in March that the debate over Iran reminded him of the run-up to the US-led invasion. "That looks so déjà vu," Mr Lavrov said. "I don't believe that we should engage in something which might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are convinced that there is no military solution to this crisis."
Some UN observers, however, fear the feud has undercut the body's ability to bluff, emboldening Iran, North Korea and Sudan to openly defy the security council and get away with it.
"There's a sort of almost tin hollow quality to some of its pronouncements," UN deputy secretary general Mark Malloch Brown said of the security council in a speech last month.
He suggested that Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, had interpreted the council's inaction as a sign of weakness, and rebuffed its demand to allow more than 20,000 UN peacekeepers into Darfur.
"President Bashir looks at us and he thinks he's seen us blink, and that makes it hugely difficult to credibly address this issue of winning his consent to our deployment," he said.
The debate over the use of force in Iran and North Korea has focused on Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, a provision that has traditionally been used to enforce UN demands through the threat of economic sanctions or military action. Russia and China have refused to support the provision, arguing that it could be used to justify future military action.
The Bush administration argues that a Chapter 7 resolution is required to make sanctions compulsory. "It is simply incorrect" that the phrase "somehow authorises the use of force," John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, says.
"There is a suspicion, a misperception that this leads inexorably to the use of force, and it doesn't," British ambassador Emyr Jones Parry added during recent negotiations on North Korea.
- (LA Times- Washington Post service)