Mohamed Sid-Ahmed wonders whether Bush's unilateral decision to go to war has dealt the death blow to the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 is suffering the same fate as Resolution 242, which, though unanimously accepted, has not been implemented because it is based on an ambiguity. The Arab interpretation of 242 was that it required Israel to withdraw from all the Arab territories it had occupied in 1967, while Israel read the resolution as requiring it to withdraw from only parts of those territories. There is a similar sort of ambiguity surrounding Resolution 1441, which is interpreted by some as requiring the United States to obtain a second Security Council resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq, and by Washington as requiring it only to "consult" the Security Council without the need for a second resolution before war is declared. Now that what Bush has termed the "moment of truth" is upon us, the decision to launch war on Iraq, with or without the blessing of the Security Council, has been taken. After the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the bipolar world order, it was assumed that all conflicts could be resolved by political means, that Security Council resolutions could be issued by consensus and that, accordingly, the veto had become a redundant mechanism. But this assumption came up against the fact that key resolutions of the Security Council often carry within them ambiguities and inconsistencies. Resolutions 242 and 1441 were unanimously adopted by the Security Council, but it turned out that in both cases unanimity was more illusory than real, the deliberately ambiguous wording serving to gloss over differences that might have blocked their passage. Apparent unanimity conceals the real reasons for the dispute instead of actually settling them. This type of deception is sometimes called "constructive ambiguity", which its proponents claim is a useful conflict-resolution device that can help narrow differences and pave the way for a peaceful resolution of the matter in controversy. Nothing could be further from the truth: precisely because of its ambiguous wording, Resolution 242 remains unimplemented 35 years after it was unanimously adopted. Last Tuesday, Bush announced that the diplomatic window was now closed and that the only way war could be averted was for Saddam to go into exile. It was in fact clear for some time that diplomacy had reached a dead end on the question of Iraq and that war was unavoidable. Indeed, it was clear that diplomacy itself was in crisis, not only at the global but also at the regional level, where Arab regimes were unable to play any effective role in coming up with a viable political alternative to military action. The most important resolution adopted by the Sharm El-Sheikh summit was to send a high-level Arab delegation to meet with top American, Iraqi and European officials in an attempt to find a peaceful way out of the impasse. But the delegation, which included five foreign ministers as well as the secretary-general of the Arab League, was welcomed neither by Washington nor Baghdad, and its mission was terminated. While the Americans and the Iraqis gave no reasons for their refusal to meet the delegation, one can guess why they may have been reluctant to do so. Washington probably believed the delegation would ask it to guarantee Saddam's personal safety if he stepped down, and to offer him and his family full immunity, an eventuality it had no interest in discussing. As for Baghdad, it may have suspected that certain members of the delegation would broach the subject of Saddam's exile, an option no Iraqi official had any intention of discussing. The delegation's inability to perform the mission assigned to it was a further slap in the face for diplomacy, a sign that diplomacy itself was beginning to be regarded as superfluous. Any talk of diplomacy as a mechanism by which to solve conflicts by peaceful means necessarily leads us to talk about the UN Charter, the structure of world order, contemporary international legitimacy and, ultimately, about the veto prerogatives of the great powers. The veto is actually the cornerstone of the Charter. The five countries which emerged victorious in World War II -- the US, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China -- were granted the right to use their veto power to block any Security Council resolution they perceived as contrary to their interests. Thus the post-World War II global order granted a privileged status to five specific powers which were regarded as "above" the constraints of world legitimacy. But justification of this privileged status has been gradually eroded. The Charter was drawn up by the victorious Allies in the aftermath of the war to consecrate their victory over the Axis powers. All too soon, however, the Cold War which broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union took precedence over their wartime alliance. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia, which replaced it on the Security Council, was not regarded as the ideological enemy, the mainstay of the world communist movement. Moreover, the enemies of the previous period, Germany and Japan, had become among the most powerful states of the Western alliance. And, finally, the bipolar world order of the Cold War period had been replaced by a unipolar world order. These and other developments removed any justification there might once have been for allowing specific states to enjoy special prerogatives in their capacity as "victorious" states. It had become as nonsensical to talk of the Soviet Union as a victorious state as it was to talk of Germany and Japan as vanquished states. There was no longer any justification to consider five specific nations to be "great powers" with veto prerogatives. Moreover, the Cold War had transformed the multipolar world order into a bipolar world order with only two key actors: the United States and the Soviet Union. The arms race between them gave rise to an equation of a special character based on nuclear terror and mutual deterrence, which actually helped prevent a nuclear cataclysm. The situation changed drastically with the collapse of the Soviet Union, whose disappearance as a counter-pole to America in the field of weapons of mass destruction allowed the latter to emerge as the unique superpower. thanks to its formidable -- and now unchallenged -- military, technological and economic superiority, America was now in a position to launch wars with impunity, introducing a fundamental element of disequilibrium in the world system. The UN Charter authorises the "five big" to use their veto prerogatives to reduce the chances of war, in an age where weapons of mass destruction are being produced on a level unprecedented in history. But with the proliferation of such weapons and the emergence of a new unipolar world order, the veto is no longer sufficient to prevent the outbreak of war. France and Russia have declared they will resort to the veto, but this has not prevented Washington from going to war. The veto prerogative in the present world system is no longer able to solve the problems of war and peace. The US is fighting vigorously to consolidate the unipolar world order which it leads, while other great powers with veto prerogatives, such as France and Russia, are fighting for a multipolar world order. The changes underway at the summit of the international community are accompanied by no less important changes at its base. The global outcry against a US-led war on Iraq, which took the form of massive demonstrations in every corner of the world, from Indonesia in the east to California in the west, has proved that politicians who are insensitive to this unprecedented movement and who are isolating themselves from civil society do not hold all the cards, however great their military, technological and economic superiority. Surely Bush's surprise announcement that the Palestinian issue should not be neglected and that negotiations for a viable Palestinian state must be reactivated is living proof that his policies towards Iraq are not producing the required results, and that his overall strategy needs a facelift.
