Crawling from the Wreckage (48 page)

The old
zaibatsu
were allowed to rebuild because that was the quickest way to get Japan back on its feet economically, and conservative politicians (including some war criminals) were encouraged to form a political party that received full American support, the
LDP
. The government that emerged from this, with considerable help from its yakuza (gangster) allies, beat the kids’ revolt into the ground.

By the time the rest of the developed world had its Sixties the battle had been fought and lost in Japan. During the half-century that followed most people just kept their heads down and stayed out of trouble, and it is still rare for ordinary people to discuss politics in Japan, even though the active repression ended a generation ago.

That is the system and the mindset that the
DPJ
must start to dismantle if Japan is to become a normal democratic country. The iron triangle will fight until the very last ditch to preserve the present system, however badly it has served the country. So the key question becomes: can the Democratic Party of Japan reach and take the last ditch in only four years?

In the past decade, the United Nations has virtually vanished from the public view. The world’s greatest power invaded another country in open defiance of the UN Charter in 2003 (and went unpunished, of course). All efforts to “reform” the UN, mainly by giving emerging great powers like India and Brazil permanent seats on the Security Council, failed miserably. Even the departure of George W. Bush from the White House did little to rebuild the UN’s credibility, although Barack Obama speaks more politely about the institution than his predecessor. Yet this is not just an important international institution; it is the indispensable one. It is our main safeguard against another war between the great powers
.

“The great force on which we must rely is the hatred of the cruelty and waste of war which now exists. As soon as the war is over the process of oblivion sets in …,” Lord Robert Cecil wrote as the First World War drew to an end. “It is only, therefore, while the recollection of all we have been through is burning fresh that we can hope to overcome the inevitable opposition and establish … a new and better organization of the nations of the world.”

The organization that Cecil, a member of Britain’s Imperial War Cabinet, hoped could prevent another such war was the League of Nations. It failed, of course, and so we got the Second World War, which killed five times as many people. By the end of that one, nuclear weapons were being dropped on cities—so the victors had no choice but to clone the League, making some significant improvements, and try again. Sixty years ago this Sunday (June 26), the Charter of the United Nations was signed by fifty nations in San Francisco.

There was not a single idealist among the men and women who signed the Charter. They were badly frightened people who had lived through the worst war in human history and who feared that an even worse one lay in wait for their children. They were so frightened that they were even willing to give up the most important aspect of national sovereignty: the right to wage war against other countries. Six decades later, how is their organization doing?

Two things cannot be denied: the
UN
has already survived three times longer than its ill-starred predecessor, and the great war that it was meant to prevent has not happened. In the various crises that might have ended with the superpowers sliding into a nuclear war—the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Middle East War of 1973, and so on—the
UN
Security Council was an essential forum for negotiations, and the Charter provided a new kind of international law that the rivals could defer to without losing face when they wanted to back away from a major crisis.

So, why is the United Nations so widely disdained today? One reason is that Lord Robert Cecil was right: “the process of oblivion sets in” quickly, and later generations cannot remember why it was so supremely
important to create an organization to prevent future great-power wars. But actually, the
UN
isn’t really all that widely disdained.

It gets a bad press in the United States, but that is mainly because it acts as a brake on the untrammelled exercise of American military power. In fact, it is still quite popular in most of the world, although it continues to annoy nationalists in all the great powers—and at the other extreme, it frustrates and infuriates all the idealists who want it to be about justice and democracy and maybe even brotherly love.

It’s not. As Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican senator and ambassador to the United Nations, said in 1955: “This organization is created to keep you from going to Hell. It isn’t created to take you to Heaven.” For all the fine words of the Charter, the
UN
is still mainly about preventing another major war between the great powers (and as many other wars as possible).

Does the
UN
need to be “reformed”? Certainly. It has acquired some bad habits, and its structures have not kept up with the realities of a rapidly changing world. The current main focus of reformers concerns the Security Council, whose permanent, veto-wielding members are still the five victorious great powers of 1945. Three-quarters of the countries that now comprise the
UN
were not even independent then, so clearly some adjustment is overdue.

However, the only imaginable solution is an expansion of the number of permanent members, because demoting any of the existing permanent members is unthinkable (and would simply be vetoed). But then come the questions—how many new members, which ones, and do they get veto powers, too?—so reform will not happen soon.

The United Nations is an attempt to change the way that inter national politics works because the only alternative is to accept perpetual war, and since 1945 this has no longer been an acceptable option. Not even the optimists imagined that it could succeed in less than a century or so, and, sixty years on, it may not yet be even halfway to its goal. No need to despair. As its most influential secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, said: “None of us are ever going to see the world order we dream of appear in our lifetime. Nevertheless, the effort to build that order is the difference between anarchy and a tolerable degree of chaos.”

Let us be quite clear about this. The United Nations Charter, signed by (and largely ghost-written by) the United States and the United Kingdom
,
makes the invasion and occupation of another country a crime, unless for some reason it is authorized by the UN Security Council. The invasion of Iraq was not so authorized, and the heads of government who ordered it are therefore war criminals. That is the law
.

Alan Watkins is my favourite British journalist. Well into his seventies now, each week he still produces an elegant and knowing column, usually about British politics. And with a casual understatement that you might easily mistake for irony, he has for the past six years regularly referred to former prime minister Tony Blair as “the young war criminal.”

That may seem a bit harsh, for never has an alleged war criminal sounded more sincere, more open, even more innocent. As he said about his 2003 decision to involve Britain in the American invasion of Iraq in his resignation speech four years later: “Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right.” But
everybody
does what they think is right.

They may mean pragmatically right, or morally right, or even ideologically right, but one way or another people will find ways to justify their actions to themselves: even Pol Pot believed that his actions were justified. When people’s choices lead to the deaths of others, they must eventually be judged by more objective criteria than mere sincerity. That is now happening to Tony Blair.

On December 13 Blair admitted that he would have invaded Iraq even if he had known at the time that the “intelligence” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was wrong. “I would still have thought it was right to remove [Saddam Hussein],” he told
BBC
interviewer Fern Britton. “Obviously, you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.”

Blair seemed completely unaware that he was throwing away the only plausible defence for his actions that might stand up if he were brought before the International Criminal Court. Since 1945, it has been a crime to invade another country: that was the main charge brought against the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. The new rule was written into the United
Nations Charter, principally at the behest of the United States, and there are virtually no exceptions to it.

You have the right to defend yourself if another country attacks you, but you are not allowed to attack another country on the grounds that it has a wicked ruler, or follows policies you disapprove of, or even because you think it might attack you one of these days. No unilateral military action is permitted, and even joint action against a genuinely threatening country is only permissible with the authorization of the
UN
Security Council.

The United States is a very different country now than it was in 1945, and under the junior Bush administration, it announced a “national security” doctrine that directly contradicts this international law, arrogating to the U.S. government the right to attack any country it suspects of harbouring evil intentions towards the United States.

It’s just the sort of thing that Britain might have declared when it was top dog in the nineteenth century, had there been any international law against aggression back then. But this is the twenty-first century, and Britain is no longer top dog, and there is a law now. There is even an International Criminal Court to enforce the law, although in practice it never takes action against the leaders of rich and powerful countries.

Tony Blair will never face the International Criminal Court, but he started a war on false pretenses—there were no weapons of mass destruction—and at least one hundred thousand people died as a result. He has now admitted that he would have started the war even if he knew that the weapons didn’t exist (as he probably did). And he started the war without the authorization of the
UN
Security Council. He is a war criminal. And so is George W. Bush.

The leaders of the great powers all still have “get out of jail free” cards, but war criminals from less powerful countries do occasionally find themselves facing international tribunals that are empowered to enforce the law. The biggest fish to face such a tribunal so far was the man who led Serbia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Slobodan Milošević
.

I never met Adolf Hitler before he became famous. (I never met him afterwards, either, due to the accidents of nationality and birth date.) But I did meet the “Butcher of the Balkans” before he became famous—and I promptly forgot him again.

Slobodan Milošević, the former Serbian leader who was found dead in his prison cell in The Hague last Saturday at the age of sixty-four, was famous because the wars he unleashed in former Yugoslavia killed at least a quarter-million people. He was nothing compared to Hitler, who was responsible for over twenty-five million deaths, but you’d think that he would at least leave a lasting impression. He didn’t.

I first interviewed Milošević during some forgotten conference in Belgrade in 1982, having been refused interviews with all the more important politicians I had requested. All I really remember is his impressive hairstyle and the fact that he was a total apparatchik. He didn’t come across as a rabid Serbian nationalist, or indeed as a man who truly believed in anything at all; just another run-of-the-mill sociopath. I didn’t write the interview up. I didn’t even save the tape.

So imagine my surprise when this bland nonentity resurfaced at the end of the 1980s as the charismatic ultra-nationalist leader who was going to carve a Greater Serbia out of Yugoslavia, even if it required “cleansing” this fantasy homeland of its many non-Serb inhabitants. But then, if I had met the young Hitler in Vienna before the First World War, I probably would not have spotted him as a future war criminal either. Sulky would-be artists can be trying but most of them don’t turn into mass murderers.

Many potential monsters are born for everyone who actually grows up to become a mass murderer: they are creatures of circumstance. And this has some bearing on the controversy that now engulfs the international court that was trying Milošević on sixty-six charges of genocide, of crimes against humanity and of war crimes in connection with the wars he sponsored in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

I don’t mean the “controversy” about how he died. Chief United Nations prosecutor Carla Del Ponte got it exactly right when she told reporters: “You have the choice between normal, natural death and suicide.”

Miloševic had long suffered from heart problems and high blood pressure, so a heart attack makes sense. He had been in prison for five years already and faced the certainty of spending the rest of his life behind bars, so suicide would also have made sense. What does not make sense is the allegation that he was poisoned by the international court’s henchmen because otherwise it would soon have had to admit that the charges were false and release him.

“My husband has been killed by the Hague tribunal,” his widow, Mirjana Markovic, told Belgrade’s
Večernje Novosti
newspaper. “They did it because they were in trouble. Only thirty-seven hours remained, and they did not have anything to convict him.” But those “thirty-seven hours” only mean that Miloševic had already used up most of the 360 hours allotted to him to present his defence. That doesn’t seem an unreasonably brief amount of time.

The court had no motive to want him dead, for it had already heard enough evidence from his former colleagues to ensure a conviction. The real controversy is about the inordinate length of the trial. Five years was a very long time—and, in the end, Miloševic died before he could be convicted.