When the United States and its ally attack Iraq for its failure to abide by UN resolutions, there may be a little legal hiccup. The main staging area for such an attack is Kuwait. But in its enthusiasm to enforce UN decisions, the White House may have overlooked a little technical detail: a thousand UN peacekeepers placed there (at US insistence, by the way) to guard the border between Iraq and Kuwait.

They belong to UNIKOM, whose mandate is to monitor the DMZ and the waterway between Iraq and Kuwait; "to deter violations of the boundary; and to observe any hostile action mounted from the territory of o­ne State against the other."

In case anyone in the White House, with their limited military experience (after all, most of them supported the Vietnam War from deep in the college-deferred rear) does not know what a "DMZ" is; it is a demilitarized zone.
Since the conceptually challenged also predominate in the administration, it may be worth pointing out the potential incompatibility of a couple of hundred thousand US military personnel and their equipment traversing a demilitarized zone o­n the way to Iraq. It could indeed, superficially at least, be mistaken for "hostile action mounted from the territory of Kuwait against that of Iraq.



Mandate renewal

Most peacekeeping operations need regular renewal of their mandate but the US was having none of that for UNIKOM. The US diplomats of the time made sure that a positive vote of the Security Council is needed to disband the force or alter its mandate.

The intention, as with most of the resolutions about Iraq from that period, was that the US or the UK could veto any attempt by other wobbly council members to go soft o­n Baghdad. But now, Russia or France
could veto ("unreasonably" of course) any attempt to strip UNIKOM of its mandate, which, since 1993, has included the "capacity to take physical action to prevent violations of the DMZ and of the newly demarcated boundary between Iraq and Kuwait."

It is an interesting illustration of the dubious legality of the no-fly zone enforcement, for which the US and Britain claim a UN mandate, that UNIKOM records all the allied aircraft flying above as violations of the DMZ.

However, since the UN force has no air-capability, all it does is to report such incursions to the Security Council. Indeed, it has not even flown its own helicopters o­n the Iraqi side of the border since 1998, when Iraq
actually plagiarized o­ne of my articles (see, it's not o­nly Tony Blair) in a demarche to the Security Council, pointing out the close ties the American contractor for the choppers had with the CIA.

Donald Rumsfeld has been berating the United Nations as if he were the ghost of Jesse Helms past, for its weakness and flabbiness in the face of defiance.

Physical action

It would be ironic if the UNIKOM force, with contingents from over thirty countries, decided to do its duty to their Security Council mandate and were to "take physical action" to resist the o­ncoming hordes who would manifestly be violating the DMZ and the UN-demarked boundary.

The UN troops lack chemical and biological warfare suits, which apparently the UN has been trying to procure, just in case. The main component of the force is Bangladeshi, and everyone was quite happy to leave the Bangladeshi troops hungry and freezing in their summer uniforms when they were defending Bihac in mid-winter against the Serbs in the Bosnian war, but there are British and American troops in UNIKOM as well, so we can be sure that at least some of the peacekeepers will be properly equipped.

Even so, the current general commanding the peacekeeping force is from Poland, and may want to salvage the reputation of the UN, as impugned by Rumsfeld. He could do so by reprising the quixotically heroic charge of the Polish Cavalry against the German tanks in 1939, if and when all those American tanks crash into the DMZ.
Of course, this also calls to mind those far off days when Britain and the US would have been happy for Germany to have a Chancellor who supported international law, opposed pre-emptive strikes and was reluctant to send German troops abroad. This week Rumsfeld returned to his ancestral home in Germany without the sense of respect such a "roots" trip should imply.

Firing line

His comments linking Germany with Cuba and Libya put Berlin in the White House's firing line. But if he were not so contemptuous of the UN, Rumsfeld may want to put his lawyers to work. Article 107 of the UN Charter, unchanged since 1945, says that "nothing. shall invalidate or preclude action, in relation to any state which during the Second World War has been an enemy of any signatory."

In short, it would not be illegal under the Charter for the US and UK to attack Germany and Japan if they do not vote properly. Of course this may be a bit much to accept politically. Even Tony Blair may demur. But I'm sure that if Rumsfeld calls John Ashcroft over at the Department of Justice, where he has lawyers who can justify Enron, or the US Patriot Act, then legalizing an attack o­n Germany should be no more of a stretch than claiming the right to attack Iraq without a new UN resolution.

And about those peacekeepers? Don't worry dear readers. UN insiders expect the organization to live down to Rumsfeld's low expectations about its steadfastness in the face of international scofflaws, and to withdraw UNIKOM at the first whiff of allied depleted uranium shells coming over the sand dunes. - GVNN