A Thesis Entitled Rogue State? The United States, Unilateralism, and the United Nations By Robert L. MacDonald Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for The Master of Arts in History ________________________ Advisor: Diane Britton ________________________ Graduate School The University of Toledo August 2006 Copyright © 2006 This document is copyrighted material. Under copyright law, no parts of this document may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author. ii Acknowledgements This project could not have succeeded without the help, support, and encouragement of my family, friends, and professors during the past few years. I wish to thank Dr. Diane Britton for her commitment to be my advisor throughout this process and her open-mindedness in finding a link between her interests and research and the topic discussed in the following pages. I wish to thank Drs. Peter Linebaugh, Charles Beatty Medina, and Timothy Messer-Kruse for their willingness to serve as members of my committee and for their thoughtful questions and insightful commentary. I will keep their advice close at hand as I continue to develop my researching and writing skills. I wish to especially thank Dr. Ruth Herndon, who has served as a mentor during both my undergraduate and graduate years at the University of Toledo, for always seeing the best in my work while thoughtfully challenging me to do better. I wish also to thank all of the professors that I have worked with while at the University of Toledo, including of course William Longton, Michael Jakobson, Ron Lora, William O’Neal, Roger Ray, Charles Glaab, Robert Smith, and Alfred Cave. My family, especially my parents, Richard and Debbie MacDonald, has provided enormous support and patience throughout this entire process. I thank them for their love and support and hope that they can be proud of the finished product. I wish to express my love and gratitude to my partner, best-friend, and soul mate, Amanda Dennison, who has provided the motivation and inspiration to keep working, kept me sane during the past few months, and lent her expertise in reading, revising, and commenting on my work. Finally, I wish to thank our cat, Layla Gordon, for constantly trying to help by sitting on the computer, books, or notebooks that I was working with at the time. As with all works, I am deeply indebted to everyone who has iii been involved with this project. Those listed above are responsible for any of its successes. I, on the other hand, am completely responsible for all errors and omissions found therein. Robert MacDonald July 2006 iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents v List of Tables vi List of Maps viii Introduction 1 Chapter One 13 The New American Century Chapter Two 48 Righteous Aggression Chapter Three 100 The Law of the Jungle Chapter Four 151 Israel: Rogue Ally Chapter Five 202 Vetoing the United Nations Conclusion 289 Select Bibliography 294 Appendix I 300 Tables of United Nations General Assembly Resolutions Appendix II 417 Maps v List of Tables TABLE I 309 40 th Session of the United Nations General Assembly: September 24, 1985 – December 18, 1985 TABLE II 317 41 st Session of the United Nations General Assembly: October 10, 1986 – December 19,1986 TABLE III 326 42 nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly: October 7, 1987 – August 17, 1998 TABLE IV 334 43 rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly: October 17, 1988 – April 20, 1989 TABLE V 342 44 th Session of the United Nations General Assembly: September 28, 1989 – September 17, 1990 TABLE VI 349 45 th Session of the United Nations General Assembly: September 18, 1990 – August 27, 1991 TABLE VII 354 46 th Session of the United Nations General Assembly: September 17, 1991 – August 25, 1992 TABLE VIII 358 47 th Session of the United Nations General Assembly: September 22, 1992 – September 14, 1993 TABLE IX 362 48 th Session of the United Nations General Assembly: October 8, 1993 – September 19, 1994 TABLE X 366 49 th Session of the United Nations General Assembly: October 17, 1994 – September 14, 1995 TABLE XI 370 50 th Session of the United Nations General Assembly: October 12, 1995 – September 17, 1996 vi TABLE XII 374 51 st Session of the United Nations General Assembly: October 15, 1996 – September 15, 1997 TABLE XIII 379 52 nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly: October 15, 1997 - September 8, 1998 TABLE XIV 383 53rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly: October 1, 1998 - September 13, 1999 TABLE XV 386 54 th Session of the United Nations General Assembly: September 14, 1999 – September 5, 2000 TABLE XVI 390 55 th Session of the United Nations General Assembly: September 5, 2000 – September 7, 2001 TABLE XVII 394 56 th Session of the United Nations General Assembly: September 15, 2001 – September 9, 2002 TABLE XVIII 398 57 th Session of the United Nations General Assembly: September 10, 2002 – September 15, 2003 TABLE XIX 403 58 th Session of the United Nations General Assembly: October 16, 2003 – September 13, 2004 TABLE XX 408 59 th Session of the United Nations General Assembly: October 11, 2004 – September 13, 2005 TABLE XXI 412 60 th Session of the United Nations General Assembly: September 16, 2005 – July 7, 2006 vii List of Maps MAP I 417 Landownership in Palestine and the UN Partition Plan, 1947; Palestine Villages Depopulated in 1948 and 1967 MAP II 418 The Near East after the 1967 June War MAP III 419 The Wall in the West Bank (2003) MAP IV 420 The Wall and Projected Israeli Unilateral Disengagement (February 2005) MAP V 421 The Wall in Jerusalem (2005) MAP VI 422 The Occupation’s “Convergence Plan” (April 2006) viii Introduction We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We should cease to talk about vague and . unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. George Kennan State Department Policy Planning Study 23 24 February 1948 1 According to the 2002 United States National Security Strategy, rogue states: Brutalize their own people and squander their natural resources for the personal gain of the rulers; display no regard for international law, threaten their neighbors, and callously violate international treaties to which they are party; are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction, along with other advanced military technology, to be used as threats or offensively to achieve the aggressive design of their regimes; sponsor terrorism around the globe; reject basic human values (and hate the United States and everything for which it stands). 2 The primary purpose of this thesis is to illustrate the chasm-like contradictions between the lofty, idealistic rhetoric and the foreign and domestic policies of the corporate and 1 George Kennan, Policy Planning Study 23, cited in Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants (Berkeley: Odonian Press, 1992), 9-10; Policy Planning Study 23 can be found in the official history of the State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States: 1948, Vol. I, Part II, 510-529. For a more complete discussion of the secret policy document, see Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (London: Verso Press, 1991). 2 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, <www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf>. political elite in the United States and prove that the United States government meets every qualification of its own definition of a rogue state, including fearing real democracy and despising the American people. Americans are unfortunately ignorant of history and the mainstream media fail to place any event in context that would encourage critical thinking or any response beside blind patriotism. 3 When a president plans war on false pretexts or infringes upon the civil liberties of American citizens, the press and the pundits and the politicians treat it as an anomaly, a unique situation in American history requiring obedience to and support for the government’s policy. However, if Americans knew that many presidents have lied about the reasons for war, including James Madison and the War of 1812, James Polk and the Mexican War, Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, William McKinley and the war in the Philippines, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, Franklin Roosevelt and World War II, Harry Truman and the Korean War, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon and Vietnam, Ronald Regan and Grenada and Nicaragua, George H.W. Bush and Panama and Iraq, William Clinton and Yugoslavia, and George W. Bush and Afghanistan and Iraq, if they knew that all wars are imperial wars despite the rhetoric, then perhaps they would not be so quick to support the president in another imperialistic venture. If Americans knew that the government has incessantly attempted to curb civil liberties and real democracy (in the form of popular criticism and control of policies) especially during war, through the Alien and Sedition Act, Lincoln’s suspension of habeus corpus and the imprisonment of war dissenters, the Espionage Act during World War I targeting dissenters, the Red 3 For convincing arguments and evidence that the media act as a propaganda machine for the political and economic elite, see for instance Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1989) ; and Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media (New York: St.