Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on March 14

Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on June 18 2002

Sir Jeremy Greenstock
Ambassador of the United Kingdom to the United Nations

Fighting Terrorism: The United Nations Essential Role

Thank you very much. Mr. President, Mr. Chairman, Consul General, ladies and gentlemen, it's very good to be with the World Affairs Council. I've never spoken to you before but I've been with ambassadors who have, so I will try to learn from them and give you something about the world as it is at the moment — obviously through a UK perspective. In that regard, it's very good to be able to share the platform once again with the British American Business Council, which I worked very closely with when I was on the tour of the embassy in the mid-’90s and which I value very highly as the organization which brings together the two countries that have invested in each other's economies to a greater extent than any two powers ever in history before — the United States and the United Kingdom. That cross-investment relationship is historically unique and a huge factor in the role which the United Kingdom is playing behind the United States in light of what I'm going to talk about.

I've set myself up for perhaps a bit of a fall in giving you the facts that I have, which is “Fighting Terrorism: The United Nation's Essential Role”, but I'm going to show you that it is essential while remembering a favorite story of the British Civil Service. A young civil servant who'd worked quite a long time with his minister and who wrote all his speeches so well that the minister trusted him explicitly, never got a word of thanks for it and he got pretty fed up with this continual being taken for granted. He finally was urged to move on to another position and he wrote his last speech for this minister. And, as usual, the minister grabbed it, took off to the podium and started speaking. He said, "Today I have something very important to talk to you about. The world is changing, and from my position, I can see that it's changing in six remarkable ways, which I am going to explain to you in great detail," and he turned the page over and he read the words, "And now you're on your own, you bastard."

I hope I won't entirely be on my own, but I do want to cover with you the following things: The aftermath to the horrific events of 9/11 and what we, the United States, the United Kingdom and the United Nations, have been doing about it. And, as part of that, and as diversions from that, I want to cover what is going on in Afghanistan and around that area, very briefly what is going on in and around Iraq and whether that is connected, and I want to talk to you about the creation of a global coalition against terrorism without which the United States cannot succeed in its fight against terrorism into the future. But I want to put it into a context, which is extremely important for global citizens with a reach beyond their own hometowns to understand. By definition you, in this audience, are that. I think most of the people in the Los Angeles area are that because you are a trading community here, the ninth-largest economy in the world is Southern California.

Well, things are happening in the world that not everybody is keeping up with. First proposition: Globalization is unstoppable and ubiquitous in its manifestations, some of which are quite unpredictable. Second proposition, governments are gradually losing the capacity to control in the traditional sense what goes on within their jurisdiction. Third proposition, there is no level of political decision-making in the world of globalization higher than the national level. There is no global government. The United Nations is certainly not that. I'll talk a bit about the United Nations in a moment. And, therefore, global good order has to depend on voluntary cooperation between the sovereign systems and, at the other end of the spectrum, country cooperation between billions of individuals, each with their own freedom of choice. There is a degree of unpredictability and chaos which is potential not yet actual, but a degree of potential chaos which we have to pay attention to and try and resolve.

Why do I bring it down to the role of the individual? With the spread of democracy and, in a large part of the world, reasonable security, individuals have a far wider range of choice than ever before. In many respects this is not contained by national boundaries or national limits or national regulations. You, as global citizens, have the choice to do your business, to travel privately, to make your connections, to communicate physically or through the Internet with the world without government control. Kofi Annan, in his leadership of the United Nations Secretariat, has recognized this in two remarkable ways. He's made the U.N. reach out beyond governments, to parliaments, to religious groups, to civil society, to the corporate sector, all the way to the individuals. Human rights are now understood within the United Nation's system as rights of the individual as well as rights of communities or governments. Second, a huge proportion of the work of the United Nations is dedicated to restoring or including the rights and the conditions of the people who are most disadvantaged in the world. It goes all the way through to individuals. Against that background we have to take account of the fact that national governments are there to do national business and they're in competition with other national governments, certainly with other political parties within their system, but also with the role of the individual. It is an element of competition for national governments that the role of the individual is so strong. The need for global good order has to be a method that is resolved, not just between national governments who know well how to interact through the United Nations and other international institutions, but also for a very wide range of individuals, companies, communities, groups, and cultural organizations which are making their own decisions in their own framework about what they must do in the world and how they will contribute to global security.

I want to talk to you about terrorism against that background because there is a tradeoff between the security you have in your society and the freedom you have as individuals. Too much freedom, low security; too much security, low freedom. You have that experience every day that you travel. Going through an airport, you're having more of your time taken away from you, all for security reasons. Of course, it goes much deeper than that. But if your government places too much emphasis on security, your freedom and those of others is reduced. If freedom is the number one priority, your security is threatened. Where do you get that balance? Through the United Nations and discussions of exactly that, a tradeoff between security and freedom, you're beginning to get collectively, amongst the people who are operating through the United Nations, a balance in that tradeoff. I'm going to talk to you when I come to terrorism about the precise language the United Nations is dealing with that aspect of security as it protects the freedoms and the rights of individuals and communities around the world.

There have been two channels of activity since 9/11 in response to those horrific events. The first is going to get those who did it and bring them to justice, and I will explain what's going on in channel one. The second channel of activity, which in the longer term is more important for you, is to set up a system that stops people we don't know and haven't identified, from doing that sort of thing again. And that channel is being run by the United Nations. In channel one, of course, the leader is the United States.

What happened in Afghanistan between October and December of last year was absolutely remarkable. Afghanistan has been a thorn in the flesh of the Islamic community for decades. Within three months the government had been turned out, chased over the hills either into prison or over the borders of Pakistan. The United Nations then came in and instituted a new arrangement between Afghans to have a democratically based government in Afghanistan. That political structure was created amongst Afghans by United Nations work through Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi, who was Kofi Annan's representative at the Bonn talks in December and produced the structure, the results of which in its first phase you've just seen with the election of President Karzai for the transitional stage of the Afghan government into the new structure. Stage One was interim, Stage Two is transitional, and in the next grand assembly or Loya Jurga, in 18 months or two years’ time you will see the establishment of a properly based democracy in Afghanistan which was never going to happen if the Afghans had been left to the attentions of the Taliban or any successive government. The United Nations-established system throughout Afghanistan came on the heels of the U.S. victory over Al Qaeda and the Taliban in December of last year.

Two things are going on at the same time in that country. These new structures are being established with a lot of international help and at the same time the United States is knocking up the rest of the people who were responsible for the system that delivered 9/11. Where are they now? They are scattered across a wide range of territory between Afghanistan and Pakistan; they've been broken down into tiny cells, those who have not been killed or captured. Their sister organizations around the world have also been broken up into tiny cells, each of which potentially could operate independently. Therefore, what's being chased out of Afghanistan, like seeds blowing in the wind, is capable of replanting itself where the wind takes it, and then regenerating the same kind of planting that led to 9/11.

Is Osama alive? We do not know. The last time he was heard on air was December 11. He has not used, as far as those who deal with these things can tell, a mobile phone or communications facility since then. He is probably not lying under a pile of rubble in a mountain cave in Afghanistan. We thought we had found a rather tall set of bones at one stage in March, but they weren't quite tall enough. The British Marines, 1,500 of them and 45 commanders, were doing the work at the top of the mountains with the United States military because we have a unit that is a little bit faster at higher altitudes than the Americans and they invited us in. It shows the kind of partnership that we have with the U.S. military when things get difficult. All the people have been chased over the border into Pakistan, are operating there, probably have a hand in some of the excursions that have happened in India and Pakistan in recent weeks and we are assuming, because it is a safe assumption to make, that Al Qaeda under the probable, silent leadership of Osama bin Laden, is seeking at this moment to stimulate a war between India and Pakistan through the promotion of terrorist incidents that will cause an Indian reaction at a high military level. Chaos in that region, particularly chaos leading to a nuclear war between those two countries, gives them the opportunity to regroup themselves to take the focus away from Afghanistan where they would like to return and to cause chaos to the anti-terrorism activities of the United States and its allies following 9/11.

In early June, India and Pakistan came very close to going to war with each other, but very intensive UK and US diplomacy helped to persuade both sides to back off and that is the current position. But the potential for a high-intensity war over Kashmir remains, and would be grist to the mill of our other enemy, the terrorists involved in the 9/11 incident.

In the other channel of activity, something extraordinary happened last September in the United Nations. More than one thing that was extraordinary happened. The first thing was that every member of the United Nations stood up in support of the United States. That does not happen very often at the United Nations. It did so, and the resolutions in the Security Council and General Assembly confirm the basis for U.S. action against Al Qaeda under the Article of the U.N. Charter that sanctions self-defense as legitimate in such circumstances. It's on that basis that the U.S. has been acting since. But 16 days after that, on September 28, the Security Council took another extraordinary stand. It passed a resolution which mandated under national law every single member of the United Nations to take action against terrorism, to stop funding terrorists, to stop any other kind of support whether physical, moral or political, direct or indirect, and compelled every member of the United Nations to join in a collective effort to share information and action to deal with terrorism. The Security Council appointed a committee to follow up that resolution of the whole Security Council, all 15 members, which I was asked to chair. And what we are doing through that committee is to ask every member state, through a series of meetings with them and in getting them to write reports back to us, about the progress they are making to join in a proactive coalition to suppress terrorism in the territory under their jurisdiction.

Why I bring this to your attention, and why I chose to talk about it on this occasion in this city, is that Americans need to realize that there are huge parts of the world which they cannot reach in order to deal with terrorism. Yes, you can reach it physically if you decide to do it with military action. You have the power that is now equivalent, perhaps, to all the other militaries put together in the world, to go anywhere you like. But you could not do it legally and there's no point in trampling on international law in one area to get rid of an international contravention by terrorists in another area. It is incumbent on the United States to act internationally under international law and therefore the United States needs the action of the U.N. to get every single other member of the world community to make sure that their territory is not a haven, not a vacuum into which terrorists can move. My committee is gradually working through all the international institutions that have anything to do with counter-crime or counter-terrorism. All the regional organizations that want their members to be part of this coalition, which is all of them and every single member state must make sure that no one is left unable or unwilling to bother by setting up a counter-terrorism operation. The dedication, the right government machinery, the right role to perform against terrorists is something that adds to the balance of security by choice by every member of the United Nations. Of course, there are some nations that are not joining this willingly, and that's why I wanted to mention Iraq to you.

Iraq, as far as we know, had nothing to do with 9/11. It didn't supply the people or the money or the materials or the plan, but they know these people, they're prepared to support terrorism in the future. Iraq has biological and chemical capabilities and is improving right now the range of its missiles to deliver those systems. It has a new capability that is latent, it has the intellectual capability and the plans to do it, but it hasn’t the materials in one place to do it, or the industrial capacity to enrich uranium to do it. But it will be nuclear-capable with time. This is a regime that has to be stopped in terms of its ability to deliver weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt in the minds of the leaders of the United Kingdom and there's no doubt in the minds of the leaders of Iraq that President Bush is determined to do that one way or another. The United Nations has some business to do with Iraq. It has failed to implement our resolutions following the end of the Gulf War and our resolutions on the possession of weapons of mass destruction and the UN route, as we call it, is our preferred way of dealing with Iraq, but if Iraq resists UN resolutions then it will have left itself open to another form of having its weapons of mass destruction dealt with and the decision on that is likely to come in perhaps the winter of 2002-2003 into the summer of next year.

President Bush has options in front of him at this moment, but it is not an easy business to deal with Iraq militarily, particularly not while the Middle East's political sensitivity is so high over the Israel-Palestine question. But it is the first duty of a government to provide security for its citizens and Iraq is a threat to that security. The United Kingdom supports the intention of the United States to deal with this problem and it's something which Prime Minister Blair discusses quite frequently with President Bush.

That is only a part history of what is going on at the moment. They are some of the most important things that you should be paying attention to. As American citizens, please remember the first part of my remarks, that the future and the security and the freedom of the United States depends on many things outside your territory and to a great extent on the efficient working of the United Nations in your interests with your participation. But please also follow very carefully this tradeoff between security and freedom, because you cannot assume that the freedom that you enjoy at the moment, which you're used to, which you take for granted, is sustainable unless you contribute not just to a national balance on that issue but to a global one. The only global institution working on this, in fact the only global political institution that exists, is the United Nations. That's why I come from the United Nations to speak to you about this and that's why I thought you should know about the seriousness of our work on these issues.

Thank you very much, and I look forward to your questions.