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Ted Bromund: We don't need treaties, we need to tackle the dictators
THE war between Israel and Hamas should destroy a lot of illusions. One illusion is obvious: that it is up to President-Elect Obama to bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
The war has proven President Bush right. As long as Hamas speaks for the Palestinians, the Middle East peace process cannot succeed. Without a responsible Palestinian government, Israel has the right and the duty to defend itself from the rockets that Hamas delights in launching.
Those rocket attacks should also destroy another illusion: that the Middle East is just about Israel and Palestine.
The rockets, after all, are made from components supplied by Iran. Yet the illusion somehow lingers that Europe and the US might together be able to sweet-talk Iran into being a responsible member of the international system.
The US shed some little-appreciated light on this particular illusion last year. Together with Zimbabwe, it voted in the UN General Assembly against a proposed Arms Trade Treaty. The outcome, legally empty but humiliating, was 147 in favour with two against.
Being paired with Zimbabwe doesn't look good. And the Treaty's proponents were eager to rub it in. "Landslide UN vote in favour of Arms Trade Treaty," shouted Oxfam. Amnesty International called the US stand "unprincipled" and "shameful".
The diplomats were only a bit more diplomatic. Britain's Ambassador to the UN described the pairing of the US and Zimbabwe as "a rather curious combination". The UN Secretary-General said he anticipates "a new multi-lateralism" after President Bush departs the scene. The US statement in response, that it supports the Treaty's goals, was as abashed as it was unrevealing.
The purported goal of the Treaty, to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists like Hamas, is a worthy one. Certainly, it's a cause near to American, British, and Israeli hearts. In this context, the American vote seemed gratuitously offensive – a final, purposeless insult cast at the UN by a departing Bush administration mindlessly opposed to multilateralism.
In fact, the US opposition, though poorly explained, was neither insulting nor mindless. The Treaty won't do what its backers claim. In fact, it will make things worse.
The Treaty isn't supported by major arms suppliers like Russia and China: they abstained at the UN and allowed the US to take the heat. Nor was it backed by rogues like Iran, Venezuela (which runs guns to terrorists in Colombia), or Pakistan (notorious for its winking relationship with the Taliban).
That's the problem. Reputable arms sellers like Britain don't sell guns to terrorists. Nor do they sell to rogue states: the US has full or partial arms embargoes against 25 countries. Instead, rogue states buy guns from disreputable suppliers and then give them to terrorists.
The problem is that there are far too many bad states out there, supplying, buying, conniving with terrorists, and killing people directly. The war that Hamas is waging on Israel with Iran's support speaks directly to that point.
And the Treaty would do nothing about it. In fact, it will acknowledge that all states – no matter how rotten – have the unquestioned right to import arms. That's a recipe for more component sales to Iran, and more missile attacks on Israel.
In the unreal world of the Treaty's supporters, all states live up to their commitments. But as they occasionally acknowledge, it's not so. One of the Treaty's champions argues that "in the Democratic Republic of Congo we have a UN arms embargo, but it has proved totally ineffective. That is why an Arms Trade Treaty has become so important".
In other words, lots of counties violate their multilateral agreements. Therefore, to fix the problem, we need a new multilateral agreement. The argument chases its own tail.
The problem isn't a lack of treaties. It's a lack of will to make them work. Adding another treaty merely abets the bad states that are breaking the rules of today's system.
No wonder the US voted no: the Treaty will end up making it easier for terrorist-supplying states to buy weapons. If you don't believe that, ask yourself how the UN can back a treaty to stop the flow of arms to terrorists when its member states can't agree on a definition of terrorism.
All of this is typical. The Bush Administration has as usual done a poor job of making an excellent case. And the European states and NGOs pushing the Treaty are focused on looking good, not doing good.
Multi-lateralism is a means, not an end. When it leads states to promote bad but popular agreements simply because they are agreements, it is bad. And new agreements made with countries that have not enforced their old agreements are bad agreements. They substitute aspirations for reality by ignoring the causes of the evils of today, and thus encourage the rise of the evils of tomorrow.
If that means standing apart, that is what the US will do today, and what it should do tomorrow. The war in Gaza shows the consequences of empowering Iran, and states like it, by promoting agreements that fail to recognise the fundamental differences between the world's dictatorships and its democracies.
Ted Bromund is a Senior Research Fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Centre for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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