BY STEVE CLARK  
As the pamphlet shows, the U.S. government has utilized the United Nations Security Council to camouflage the fact that the massive war mobilization against the Iraqi people has been engineered by Washington from the outset. Credence has been lent to this fakery by the council's four other permanent members--the governments of Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China--which have unanimously backed each one of the U.S.-initiated resolutions.

The Security Council's prominence throughout this mammoth military buildup has prompted discussion about the political character and aims of the UN.

"Since the United Nations was born," Cuba's UN ambassador Ricardo Alarcón said during a Security Council debate August 9, "we have seen how certain great powers have sought to use the Council as a tool for their own strategic interests rather than as a body working for the maintenance of international peace and security." He pointed to the Security Council's decisions on the Iraq-Kuwait situation and U.S. war moves as a clear-cut example.  
 
'Mechanism for international peace'?
Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze also addressed this question when he was in New York recently to take part in several UN sessions. Speaking before the Security Council September 25, Shevardnadze pointed to its handling of the Middle East situation as confirmation "that the United Nations has assumed the role intended for it when it was founded, the transformation of the Security Council into an effective mechanism for the maintenance of international peace and security."

Earlier that same day, addressing the General Assembly, the Soviet foreign minister warned the Iraqi government that "the United Nations has the power to suppress acts of aggression" and suggested that the Security Council might find it necessary to establish a "rapid response force" composed of units "designated by different countries, including all five permanent members of the Security Council."

Contrary to Shevardnadze's assertion, however, the United Nations has never been a mechanism--"effective" or otherwise--for the maintenance of international peace and security.

Of course, that is how Washington and other imperialist powers seek to present the UN. But as Cuban President Fidel Castro explained in a December 1988 speech, we "know how imperialism can conceive of peace. Imperialism developed its armed forces for world domination; it has military bases in every corner of the earth, powerful naval and air fleets, millions of soldiers. Imperialism's military conception was designed to impose its order on the world, to impose its peace, like the one called Pax Romana in ancient times."

That is why, Castro explained, "There are two types of survival and two types of peace: survival for the rich and survival for the poor, peace for the rich and peace for the poor.... As long as injustice prevails in the world, as long as neocolonialist and imperialist oppression exists in the world, as long as plundering exists, there will be two types of survival and two types of peace."

The United Nations--like its predecessor the League of Nations, which Lenin and other leaders of the Russian Revolution condemned as a "Thieves' Kitchen"--was established on the basis of the outcome of a bloody interimperialist war.  
 
Post-World War II status quo
The Allied imperialist regimes of the United States, Britain, and France had emerged victorious over the Axis imperialist governments of Germany, Japan, and Italy. And despite the reactionary course of the Stalinist regime in Moscow, also part of the Allied coalition, the workers and farmers of the Soviet Union--at the cost of many millions of lives--had turned back the onslaught by German imperialism aimed at subjugating them once again to direct capi-talist exploitation.

As the Allied powers neared victory in April 1945, the UN was set up at a conference in San Francisco to give a stamp of legitimacy to the postwar international status quo. Prior to that gathering, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had met in Yalta in the Soviet Union to divvy up the world into spheres of influence. Behind closed doors, the national self-determination of peoples and countries and the interests of workers and farmers the world over were trampled into the dust.

The peoples of Korea and Vietnam, who were winning liberation from Japanese imperialist domination, were denied the fruits of their victories; Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill agreed to tear Korea in half at the 38th parallel, and endorsed the French colonial reconquest of Indochina. The "Big Three," as they were known at the time, also dismembered Germany and Austria against the will of the people of those countries and moved boundaries throughout Central and Eastern Europe to serve the needs of the victorious imperialist ruling classes and privileged bureaucratic caste that dominated the Soviet workers state.

These three powerful governments were the true "United Nations" at its birth. Their mutual veto privileges in the Security Council established a framework in which they could continue--as they had done throughout the war--to advance their common interests, while blocking each other where their interests diverged.

Subsequently the initial Big Three was expanded to a Big Five, including the governments of France and China. In the latter case, the government of Taiwan held China's UN seat until 1971, when the People's Republic of China was admitted to the UN. (Following the 1949 Chinese revolution, the forces of the former rightist U.S.-backed regime fled to the island of Taiwan, where they declared themselves China's true government. For more than a quarter century Washington backed this so-called Republic of China's claim to the UN seat, and blocked the Chinese government's admission.)  
 
Korean War
Despite Stalin's best efforts to extend the wartime alliance with U.S. imperialism indefinitely, Washington had other needs. In the aftermath of the war, imperialist interests were challenged by workers and farmers in substantial portions of Europe, as well as in China, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. The prime concern of the U.S. rulers was to preserve imperialist domination and capitalist property relations in face of these struggles.

In the introduction to the new Pathfinder pamphlet, Mary-Alice Waters briefly explains how Washington took advantage of miscalculations by the Soviet government to advance imperialist goals under the pretense of Security Council action.

"Forty years ago," Waters explains, "Washington used UN cover to organize what was in fact a U.S. invasion of Korea to maintain the partition of that country in violation of the national rights of the Korean people. The division had been established by joint agreement of the U.S. and Soviet governments at the end of World War II.

"In 1950, in a series of resolutions pushed through the Security Council by the U.S. delegation," the introduction says, "the United Nations lent its authority to one of the largest military operations ever conducted by Washington. The entire 1950–1953 Korean War was fought under the UN flag. The Security Council authorized the U.S. government to command the forces dispatched to Korea from some sixteen countries."

Waters explains that the Soviet government and other UN members have challenged the legitimacy of the 1950 Security Council resolutions, since these measures were adopted without the participation of the Soviet delegation. At the time, the Soviet government was boycotting the Security Council to protest Washington's rejection of seating the People's Republic as China's representative to the UN.

The introduction points out that in 1975 the General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for dissolution of the so-called UN Command in Korea. Since only unanimous decisions of the five permanent Security Council members are binding in such matters, however, the blue flag of the UN still flies over U.S. troops stationed along the border that divides Korea today!  
 
Murder of Patrice Lumumba
The greater clarity shed by recent events on how the UN Security Council functions to promote imperialist interests is important, since revolutionists have paid a heavy price in blood for failing to understand and act on this reality.

In 1960, for example, UN forces were complicit in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the African country of the Congo (now Zaire), who had led that country's independence struggle against Belgium. Faced with a secessionist movement organized by the former Belgian rulers, Lumumba appealed to the UN to send a peacekeeping force to help defend the newly established independent government,

Washington voted for this request for UN troops in the Security Council, as did the four other permanent members. At the very same time, according to a 1975 U.S. Senate report, the CIA was plotting Lumumba's assassination as "an urgent and prime objective," in the words of then-CIA director Allen Dulles. The Senate report accepted as a "reasonable inference" that the order to kill the Congolese leader came directly from President Dwight Eisenhower.

When the UN-sponsored troops--many supplied by the government of imperialist Sweden--arrived in the Congo in the summer of 1960, they refused to take any action against the Katangan rightist forces or their Belgian sponsors. Instead, they disarmed Lumumba's forces and closed down government radio stations. The UN troops then stood by while Lumumba was ousted from the government by pro-U.S. forces. The new regime turned Lumumba over to the Katangan rebels, who murdered him in early 1961.

Ernesto Che Guevara condemned the UN role in this counterrevolutionary operation when he addressed the General Assembly in December 1964 on behalf of the Cuban delegation. "How can we forget the betrayal of the hope that Patrice Lumumba placed in the United Nations?" Guevara said. "How can we forget the machinations and maneuvers that followed in the wake of the occupation of that country by United Nations troops, under whose auspices the assassins of this great African patriot acted with impunity?... Who can deny the sad role that the imperialists compelled the United Nations to play?"

A decade later, when the South African army, egged on by Washington, launched an invasion of Angola on the eve of that country's scheduled independence from Portugal, Angolan freedom fighters did not repeat Lumumba's error. Instead, in November 1975, the Angolan government appealed for assistance from Cuba, which responded by sending thousands of volunteers to help turn back the imperialist assault. This initial victory over South Africa's invading army was followed over the next 12 years by repeated South African incursions of Angolan territory; this conflict culminated in 1988 with the final defeat of South African forces by the Cuban volunteers, the Angolan army, and Namibian independence fighters. That victory opened the way to Namibia's conquest of freedom from South African colonial domination the following year.

Washington's war mobilization against Iraq is the largest military operation to take place under UN Security Council endorsement since the Korean War. The U.S.-initiated aggression in Korea occurred at a time when the Soviet government had decided against participating in Security Council sessions, where it could have exercised its veto privilege had it chosen to do so. The current war moves in the Middle East, on the other hand, are taking place with the unanimous votes of all five permanent members of the Security Council.

The Korea and Iraq examples alone reveal how the structure of the United Nations--from its origins--block the Security Council from ever acting against the interests of U.S. foreign policy.

With its veto privilege (and that of its British and French allies), Washington can and does block any UN measure that advances the interests of workers and farmers anywhere in the world. And when the Stalinist regimes of the Soviet Union and China fall in step behind imperialist ends, the Security Council can be used aggressively to promote those counterrevolutionary policies.

For two years, however, a unique situation exists in the Security Council: between January 1990 and the end of 1991, Cuba has a seat in that body. As shown by the new pamphlet, U.S. Hands Off the Mideast! Cuba Speaks Out at the United Nations, the Cuban government is putting this time and opportunity to good use.

"Mobilizing world public opinion, and U.S. public opinion in particular, as a counterweight to Washington's drive toward a war is the goal of all those concerned about the future of humanity," Mary-Alice Waters explains in the introduction to the pamphlet. "Towards this end, Cuba is once again using the United Nations as a tribune from which to speak out and chart a course of action in defense of the interests of working people around the world."

Opponents of a U.S. war against Iraq will find the pamphlet a valuable source of information and political arguments, both for themselves and for others they are seeking to convince. Its cover and internal layout, designed by Toni Gorton, help make it attractive and accessible. The editors have provided a useful chronology; notes to explain unfamiliar names, documents, and events; and a map.

The pamphlet can be purchased at Pathfinder bookstores around the United States and in other countries, and will be on hand in plentiful supply at the antiwar teach-ins, demonstrations, and other protest actions that will continue to mount as Washington presses forward with its aggression.  
 
 
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