Stephen Zunes – Professor of Anti-American Studies
The following is a revised version of this post.—-
Research United Nations Security Council Resolutions and you will inevitably discover the work of Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of San Francisco, and Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project. During the run up to the American invasion of Iraq, Zunes published “United Nations Security Council Resolutions Currently Being Violated by Countries Other than Iraq” which attacks the Bush Administration argument that Iraq’s failure to comply with UN resolutions necessitated military action.
The work immediately attacks Israel, beginning with Resolution 252 which calls upon Israel to cede control of Jerusalem, a city it gained complete control over in the Six Day War of 1967. The list ends with the 2002 Resolution 1435 calling for Israel to leave positions around the West Bank town of Ramallah. Its conclusion is that Israel stands in violation of more UN Security Council Resolutions than any other nation, and that the United States – Israel’s primary foreign backer – cannot remove Saddam Hussein from power using sanctions violations as a casus belli.
However evidence supporting his analysis is as hard to find. Zunes fails to mention that Israel has been party to roughly 270 UN Security Council Resolutions to begin with – about 16% of all resolutions made by institution. Nor does he tell the methodology used to determine whether a state is in compliance with a UN Security Council Resolution, merely stating “I did not include those resolutions which simply criticised a particular action by a government. Nor did I include resolutions where the language is ambiguous enough to make assertions of non-compliance debatable.”
Zunes’s bias begins to creep in when he states, “Since the early 1970s, the United States has used its veto power nearly fifty times, more than all other permanent members during that same period combined.” This is a bit disingenuous, given the fact that since its founding, the Soviet Union and its successor state Russia hold the record for most solo vetoes – 119 compared to 58 by the US acting alone. By compressing date ranges one can use statistics to make any point. What point exactly is Zunes is trying to make?
It’s all America’s Fault
In his essay “U.S. Government Must Take a Consistent Stance Against Terrorism,” Zunes compares a terror attack on the Shiite city of Najaf in Iraq to the assassination of a Hesbollah cleric in 1985 masterminded, he alleges, by the United States: “While no existing government is believed to have been behind the An-Najaf bombing, the Beirut bombing was a classic case of state-sponsored terrorism: a plot organized by the intelligence services of a foreign power. That foreign power was the United States.” He then goes on to criticize the American refusal to extradite to Venezuela four alleged bombers of a Cuban plane in 1976. As for the War in Iraq, Zunes states that America propped up Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, and as a result has no moral authority to remove him from power simply because it was in America’s interests to do so.
Like your garden variety conspiracy buff, Zune sees American power behind every troublespot in the world. Somalia? The prolific Stephen Zunes pens “The Long and Hidden History of the U.S in Somalia”. East Timor? “For example, in 1975, after Morocco’s invasion of Western Sahara and Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, the Security Council passed a series of resolutions demanding immediate withdrawal. However, then-US ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan bragged that “the Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. The task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.” East Timor finally won its freedom in 1999.” Global Warming? Our Fateful Choice: Global Leader or Global Cop.
Anything bad that happens in the world – rest assured that there is some nameless group or corporation of American origin behind it. However he refuses to name names or provide specific examples of these groups, relying instead upon meaningless cliches of American “policymakers”, “elites”, “wealthy class”, and “corporations” in the assumption that proof is not needed and that the reader knows instictively who he is talking about. After all, he is a tenured professor at University of San Francisco – the backup school for Bay Area Catholic kids who didn’t have the grades for Berkeley or UCSF and whose parents didn’t want them partying away their education at San Franscisco State.
Where he differs from Chomsky and much of the rest of the anti-Semitic Left is his viewing of the Jews and Israel as puppets of America, “mercenaries of America to fight the wars of what the ruling persons in America consider to be American interests.” In fact, take any one of his papers, swap the terms Israel for America, Jews or Jewish for American, and the piece reads like your run of the mill anti-Semitic diatribe.
Zunes believes that no country has done more to thwart the authority of the United Nations Security Council and its enforcement mechanisms than has the United States. While the UN Security Council had a strong case to insist that Iraq be more fully compliant with its resolutions, Zunes argues that the United States is the last country to claim the right to enforce alleged non-compliance militarily. Not only does the UN Charter and UN Security Council resolution 1441 explicitly recognise that only the Security Council as a whole – and not any single member – has the legal authority to enforce such resolutions militarily, but the United States is the last member of the world body to claim any kind of moral authority to do so.
By Zunes logic, no country can be held accountable to the UN because some have gotten away it. This is akin to a serial killer saying that he should be freed because Scotland Yard never caught Jack the Ripper.
While criticizing the number of American vetoes of UN Security Council Resolutions, Zunes does not address the number of resolutions passed by that body, meaning that the United States stood in agreement with the permanent members of the council other than to criticize Israel directly (and by association, the United States indirectly) for not implementing them completely. Of the 1,427 resolutions passed between 1970 and August 11, 2006, Israel has been party to 195 of them or roughly 14% of them. While that may sound like a lot, as a percentage it is actually less than the 16% of resolutions it was party to prior to 1970.
Zunes’s “logic” leaves one feeling like one has just been rolling around in the intellectual mud with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other great conspiracy fictions. Reading him one is reminded of the conservative intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s who were seduced by the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini. In fact, little beyond being born 70 years too late separates him from his intellectual peers of that bygone era.
Worse, his logic dehumanizes those he defends. In Zunes world, the Palestinians, Jews, Hezballah, North Koreans – everyone – are merely automatons, reacting to Americans in predictable ways. All their actions are instigated by Americans; they have no will to act on their own. Only Americans are born with the human quality of free will.
Unfortunately for the world according to Zunes, Americans use this free will to choose greed and avarice. In a sense, by imbueing these qualities to Americans alone, Zunes in effect advocates a type of “super nationalism,” where the only nation that matters is America, and like the warriors of old that ate the hearts of their enemies to gain their bravery, its only by overcoming and destroying America that the rest of the world becomes human. This problem is not Zunes alone; it is inherent to the “politics of victimization” where suffering is the only scale that matters while true power remains in the hands of the victimizer.
Zunes advocates this destruction of the United States by using a common tactic of the Left: Denying the right of the United States to pursue its goals, while allowing other nations to pursue their own goals. Zunes criticizes any American action when it pursues a goal to its benefit, for example by denying the United States the right to pursue a strategic victory over Syria or prevent Iran from attaining nuclear weapons. At the same time, Zunes argues that Iran has the right to nuclear weapons because its in its own interest.
Leftists like Zunes are fundamentally terrified by the hegemony America represents, and seek to bind it with Lilliputian threads. It must be frustrating for Zunes, who is so widely quoted in the Leftist media to see his threads ignored as the United States moves forward and follows its strategic interests. Luckily for Zunes, and the Leftists like Chomsky who are his intellectual peers, the nation sees men like him as evidence that the United States is not the nation they believe it is – for the nation that Chomsky and Zunes claim exists would have executed both men long ago and burned their writings. Instead, both are esconced in Academia where they can safely promulgate their vision of a world terrorized by the United States.
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