Interview with James Paul, Global Policy Forum, Director

June 30th, 2004
Transcription by Bill Iltzsche

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So why don't you introduce yourself and what you do here at the Global Policy Forum.
JAMES PAUL: Okay. I'm Jim Paul, and I'm the executive director of Global Policy Forum. And among other things, we monitor the UN Security Council quite closely. We have meetings virtually every week with council ambassadors, and we kind of know what's going on there pretty well.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Can you kind of give me an overview of the diplomatic process of what happened during the build-up to the war in Iraq?
PAUL: Well, of course already there had been many years of diplomatic jousting between the United States and the UK on the one hand, and most other council missions on the other. The reason for that had to do with the sanctions policy. And the sanctions had been in place since the previous war. And so there was a very clear sense that the US and the UK had a very, very special commitment to maintaining the sanctions in spite of all the humanitarian reasons and so on. So -- What was happening in the build-up to the war was really a continuation of that battle, except in a more intense manner.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And so -- Why don't you describe to me the Bush administration's perspective on the United Nations, and your evaluation of whether or not they really wanted the inspections process to work?
PAUL: Well, its quite clear that the Bush administration was not interested in working with the United Nations on this. But at the same time the Bush administration wanted, as administrations typically do in Washington, to have some sort of fig leaf of international legitimacy. And so when the President came to the UN in September of 2002, and made his speech to the General Assembly during the high-level part of the General Assembly meetings, he was calling for UN support for the US position -- which was essentially to have a war against Iraq and to essentially authorize the UN -- have the UN authorize the US position that there were weapons of mass destruction, and that there was -- that Saddam Hussein did pose a threat to international peace and security. So it was that pressure. And the US position was always that "If the United Nations supported the United States, then the United Nations would actually be effective. Whereas if the United Nations did not support the United States, it would be ineffective, and it would be proven to be so." And of course, this is what they -- When they eventually went to war, they said, "The US is doing what the United Nations should have been doing." And they claimed that they were even "enforcing United Nations Security Council resolutions," which was really quite ridiculous.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So can you talk about who has the authority to enforce those resolutions? The United States claimed that they had unilateral authority to enforce it.
PAUL: Well, only the Security Council has authority to enforce the resolution, and to decide on whether or not there was a breach in the resolution. Interestingly, in the resolution -- Sorry, I forget the resolution number -- 14 -- What was it?
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: 1441.
PAUL: 1441.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. Hold. Well just -- Let's take it from the top. So -- Go ahead.
PAUL: All right. -- Only the Security Council has the authority to enforce the resolution, and the Security Council must decide whether or not any of its resolutions have been breached and what to do. And in the discussion leading up to Resolution 1441, the member states that were opposed to the US/UK position insisted that it be very clear that that resolution did not authorize any automatic military action. In fact, they called this "automaticity," and they insisted that automaticity not be part of the resolution. And the US and the UK in the statements after the vote and on the record, made it clear that they did not consider this to be an automatic authorization -- that was largely forgotten later.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So can you talk to -- you know, one thing that I noticed is Negroponte also, at the same time said, "There's nothing to prevent us from acting with -- to protect our, you know -- acting in self-defense." And he said that statement and the US news media picked up on that as if it was a blank check for military action. So could you speak to that?
PAUL: Well, self-defense is, of course, allowed under the UN charter, but the concept of self-defense in international law is relatively narrow. And it doesn't, except under very immediate circumstances, allow for any kind of preemptive action of this type. There was this famous case between the United States and Canada, where -- going back into the early 19th century -- where there was evidently some British or Canadian mobilization of forces that appeared to be leading directly to an attack on the United States, and the United States forces attacked them. This is the kind of thing where an "imminent attack" is expected. In order to head that off, the Brits released this information claiming that Iraq had the capacity to launch an attack within a very short period of time -- I believe it was 48 hours. And this was patently false. And so -- I don't believe either the United States or the British government had any -- any expectation or belief that there was any imminent threat on them or anyone else -- including Iraq's neighbors.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. 48 hours? Or was it 45 minutes?
PAUL: Oh sorry, it was 45 minutes.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. Can you just repeat that? And talk just specifically on Iraq and the imminent threat of self-defense -- So go ahead.
PAUL: Yeah -- The idea that there was under international law, that an imminent threat is required was really not -- it wasn't proven at all. And when the Brits claimed that there was a 45-minute capacity by Saddam Hussein to strike -- including to strike at London, I believe he insisted -- this was patently false. And I think nobody in the international community believed this claim. And it's certainly has been proven to be false later.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And one of the claims of the Administration is they never actually quote said, "imminent threat" So can you make a distinction of what the law says from an international perspective, and what -- you know, the administration never actually saying the two words together, "imminent threat."
PAUL: Well, I'm not sure that I followed it really that closely in terms of the exact nuances of what was being said here. In fact -- Yeah, I'm not sure that I'm in a good position to discuss that -- I mean -- The question had to do --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Well, can you just speak to the -- speak to the -- From the perspective of international law, I think is where the media kind of blurred it. But there's very -- You said there's a lot -- I just want to get that again that there's a much narrower perspective from international law according to like the imminent -- the definition of the "imminent" is different from the perspective of international law.
PAUL: Yes, well -- The international law perspective on "self-defense" and "imminent attack" is that that attack would be something that could be expected almost instantly -- and certainly within, let's say, 12 or 24 hours, and where the build-up of forces were on a border and all this kind of thing. That's the notion. And certainly the -- neither the US or the UK were able to show anything of that kind at all on the side of Iraq. There was no build-up of forces on a border. There was no sort of missiles waving in the air ready to be launched, and so on. They knew that perfectly well. They had excellent satellite photography, and they had sufficient human intelligence resources in Iraq to know that this was just a fabrication.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Can you speak to the difference of -- after the war happened, the administration was using a human rights justification. But before, they were giving an entirely different justification to the international community. Can you speak to that?
PAUL: In the build-up to the war, the US administration and the UK were using justifications having to do with weapons of mass destruction. And then afterwards, this shifted towards human rights as it became clear that weapons of mass destruction were not to be found. The reason for this is quite clear. Because within the UN context, a sort of human rights-based intervention in Iraq was not at all possible. It had to be based on a violation of existing United Nations Security Council resolutions, and that's what they -- that's why they insisted on that so strongly. It's clear afterwards that the weapons of mass destruction excuse was something that they came up with in Washington, and knowing very well that they couldn't prove that, but hoping that they could insist on it.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And so when you say that the human rights justification doesn't fly. Some people would say "Well, what about the genocides that he committed 10 years ago?" Can you speak to that?
PAUL: Well, there's two issues here. One has to do the -- Saddam Hussein's repression within Iraq, and the many people that were killed in Kurdistan and elsewhere. The reason for doubts about this as an inadequate justification are precisely that the United States was his ally at that time. And so the notion that somehow the United States could intervene to stop this monster, when in fact they were supplying him with coordinates for bombing, and intelligence, and naval support, and arms and even chemical and biological weapons precursors at that time, makes the claim that he was a human rights abuser rather ridiculous coming from the United States. He was, however, a human rights abuser, this is true. And -- There's a larger question there having to do with humanitarian intervention and whether this is a good idea. And if so, "Who does it?" and so on. That's a debate that sort of rages today. And unfortunately that becomes an excuse very often for the United States to act when it sees fit to do so, and is able to mobilize information about genocide or ethnic cleansing and so on. Whereas in other cases, the United States doesn't want intervention, it doesn't happen at all. Rwanda is, of course, the perfect case because there, the United States -- it was the worst genocide in recent history, and the United States was not ready. In fact, opposed the intervention of the United Nations and opposed the Security Council resolution that would have allowed that to go forward.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And can you talk to the -- Are there any standards within the United Nations for humanitarian intervention? Or is it more of a blurred line? Is that the reason why they didn't use that justification at the international community?
PAUL: No. I think it's true that humanitarian intervention is something about which there's a great deal of debate at the UN right now. But a war on Iraq using that excuse would never have succeeded, because of, for one thing, the whole history before of sanctions. And because of the US alliance with Saddam Hussein, and because of the oil interest that was quite obvious to one and all, and so on. So -- Even though Tony Blair has made a specially big effort to defend the war as being based on humanitarian intervention, this -- in the view of some of those who like the idea of some form of humanitarian intervention have gotten -- been very, very critical of Blair because they feel he's sort of sullying the idea and weakening it and discrediting it really by associating it with this particular intervention.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And can you talk about what the actual French position was leading up to the war in Iraq? I think you heard a lot of attacks on France for not supporting the US. But they never really got into the substance of what they were actually saying -- building up before the intervention and during the time period of from January to March of '03.
PAUL: Well, the French position was, of course, opposed to a war at that time. And I think you might say there's two ways to look at the French position. One is to understand that France's position [Interruption] -- Sorry, I should have turned this thing off -- There. All right. We'll go again --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: All right. Just start from the top, and just say, 'The French position leading up to the war in Iraq -- "
PAUL: The French position leading up to the war in Iraq can be seen in two different ways. One is the material interests that were driving France's position that were not entirely dissimilar to those that were interesting the United States and the UK -- that is the primacy of oil. France's big oil company had a big stake there and so on. But France's view -- France's own special interest there made it's position on the war the opposite of that of the US and the UK, because they knew they had a favorable situation for Iraq's oil reserves if the sanctions collapsed and if Saddam Hussein remained in power, or if there was some sort of a transition towards another type of Iraqi government that was not dominated by the United States. At the same time, however, the French -- and this does happen in history -- the French were, because of their particular material interest, also able to defend international law in this circumstance, and they did so actually very, very effectively. They had an outstanding ambassador, Jean-David Levitte at the UN, who is one of the best that we've seen around here in a long time. And the -- And able to take on his nemesis, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK ambassador. It was kind of a battle between those two in a funny way, diplomatically, at the UN. France was defending the international law in the sense that they insisted that the Security Council have the final say in this. And they insisted that there not be any assumptions about "automaticity" in the council, and this kind of thing. They played a very, very active role diplomatically in what I would call "neutralizing the pressure of the United States." France brought it's own pressure to bear, it's own financial resources, and so on -- enabling the African countries and the Latin American countries to stand up against a huge amount of US pressure that was being brought to bear at that time. And all the US arm-twisting, and threats and so on were never mentioned in the media, but this was the main background to the debates within the UN Security Council. It was all that -- those positions of France that led France to be sort of the hero of the international community, although it's not always the hero by any means. But -- So when the French foreign minister, Villepin, made his famous statement in the Security Council -- and I was there actually at that time -- that the applause that burst out in the council was absolutely extraordinary. I've never sat in the council chamber where there's been applause. And it was spontaneous and it was against the rules, but almost everyone in the gallery was full of other delegations and other diplomats, and it showed something about the importance of the French position at that time. And -- Not only just defending France's own narrow ["raison de e'tat" ???], but also defending the interests of the international community more generally.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And can you -- There seemed to be a lot of -- the international community was against going to war without this explicit authorization, and trying to uphold international law. Can you speak to why international law matters? A lot of people in the United States say, "Why does it matter if we just do what we want?
PAUL: Well, international law matters just as national law matters. Law has to do with some form of protecting the weak against the strong, some form of insuring that regular rules are followed, all this kind of thing. And so -- Law is really what distinguishes chaos and barbarism from some level of civilization, and something other than the worst kind of human relations. International law, however, is quite different from national law in that there is no sovereign authority. Sovereign authority guarantees that -- well, more or less, law is enforced within the national context. We know that law is not enforced always as regularly as we'd like -- that law is, in the national frame, also reflecting power and all this kind of thing. But nonetheless, it does establish a sort of basic framework of relations between people that is relatively predictable. At the international level, in the absence of a sovereign authority, international law is enforced really by the consensus of the international community by the commitment of various nation-states to abide by it, even though it isn't always in their interest, and so on. For this reason, international law is honored often in the breech. It's not -- This isn't the first time that international law was violated. International law tends especially to be supported by the weaker countries. And its the most powerful ones, in the past as well as the present, that tend to violate it because they think they can get away with that kind of violation. And the United States is unique in terms of its power in the present period, and therefore it has a kind of unique interest in and tendency to violate international law, and not pay any attention to it. But what's interesting is that the moral authority of international law remains. And therefore the United States is constantly in a position where it's claiming to uphold international law while violating it. And it's this kind of contradiction that was seen most evidently during this -- the build-up to the Iraq war where even the White House, with all its contempt for the UN and contempt for international law, had to constantly claim that it was enforcing the UN Security Council resolutions, that it was acting under international law, and so on.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So I guess that the problem with the media covering international law is they cover conflict around international law as opposed to the law itself. And so if there is no enforcement or authority onto that law -- I've talked to professors at NYU that say international law doesn't matter. So it -- How do you see that lack of authority brings about this excuse of, "Well, everyone else does it. So we should just do it as well, it doesn't matter"?
PAUL: Well, the media, of course, are not paying attention to international law because the media reporters are, I would say, systematically ignorant of these matters. They tend to be systematically ignorant of international legal matters, and they are also systematically ignorant of what's happening in a particular country. This is not an accident. Media -- The big media do not assign people on any regular basis to these beats. They change them all the time. They're interested in people who look good and who have a nice voice and who are good on camera, and all that sort of thing. And not people who have any serious commitment to learning what's happening. So that's why the propaganda system rolls along, and they go to the Pentagon or they go to the White House, and they ask what are their opinions about the matter. So it's US authorities who are getting on camera to say what they think on the situation, and not anybody who really knows about it. Furthermore, I think there's a lot of professors of international law, unfortunately, who don't have themselves much of a commitment to international law. I'm interested in the shift that's taken place between the generation that included, for instance, Richard Falk of Princeton, Saul Mendlovitz and others within the international law community in the United States who had an enormous, fiery commitment to the principles of international law. And now we have people like, for instance, Ruth Wedgwood of Yale, who have no commitment whatsoever to international law. And appear to be just trying to get themselves a job in Washington. This is a shift between a period, maybe 30 or 40 years ago, and today when -- I would say the United States itself has a different approach to issues of international law, and there's much more contempt for it in Washington. So this shows up in international law faculty and media reporters and writers and intellectuals and so forth, because Washington is always influencing those people.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Talk to -- Why is this happening -- this blurring of international law on many different levels?
PAUL: Well, I think the blurring of international law in this period is usually ascribed to the US unilateralism, to the -- sometimes to the Bush administration's own policies, sometimes to the United States as a world empire in the period after the Cold War. Of course, all these factors are part of the mix, but I think it's also important to understand that you have the emergence of a global economy, and the breaking down of the borders of the nation-states in order that big multinational corporations are able to go and invest and carry out their economic activities within those states without any worry about those states enforcing nationalistic or populistic types of politics on them. And so we have the collapse of economic nationalism in this period, and the battering down of national borders. This is the kind of thing that promotes the need by international companies for some kind of international enforcer of what you might call neoliberalism, and this international enforcer, the UN, does not suffice for this. And the United States government, with its huge military forces, its capacity to intervene almost everywhere, and to threaten a national government with military force if they don't comply, enables the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, international financial institutions and financial service companies to do their thing without reference to the problematic of nationalistically-oriented laws and national sovereignty. And I think at the same time, we are seeing the development of international commercial laws, but interestingly enough also international criminal laws of different kinds. The International Criminal Court, although it's opposed by the United States, has taken root. And so it's a very -- So in terms of law, it is a very interesting period. And the question is, "Who is the sovereign? How despotic will this sovereign be in this period? Are we going back to the despotic sovereigns of the early state period in the West? -- which is to say, sovereigns like Louis XIV, and so on. Or is this going to turn out to be a softer path that is going to go through the United Nations?" I don't know.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Can you talk to -- The United States is claiming that it's promoting democracy, and it seems to me one of the elements of democracy is law. And so it -- But at the same time, by promoting democracy, they're violating the principles of it. Can you kind of summarize that concept, and if you have any thoughts on that?
PAUL: The United States has claimed down -- for many, many years, back to the US military intervention in the Philippines, and in Cuba and in other countries -- that it was supporting democracy while it was overthrowing governments and destroying the sovereign authority of the people in the countries they were taking over. So it's nothing new that the United States is claiming to be supporting democracy, when in fact it's doing the opposite of that. There's two words that are important here: one is the word "freedom", and the other is "democracy". And you have a literature that is emerging in the United States where there is a distinction being made between those two. Fareed Zakaria's book, for instance, who's the person at the Council on Foreign Relations who's thought a lot about this. And "freedom" in this sense really means "capitalism." It means "free enterprise." It means "the ability of US investors and US companies to go anywhere and do anything without any government intervention." Democracy is something else again. And Zakaria says that "We don't want to have too much democracy, because that would spoil the spread of freedom." -- i.e. if individual countries are allowed to be governed democratically, the people may choose to elect governments that may infringe upon the actions of these international companies, and the "freedom" of those companies and those investors. So it's this -- You have to play at different levels. One is the level of propaganda, and the other is at the level of actual action. And the level of action is clear that "freedom" trumps "democracy."

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And it seems like the US news media, the way they cover a lot of these issues, is they don't ask "Why?" And that answer right there seems to explain a lot, but it's not even considered by, let's say ABC or CBS or NBC. So there's always this sense of not giving to the root causes of all these actions that have just been left unexplained. Can you talk about how all these things are going on, but it's not being explained why it's happening?
PAUL: Well, the television news is organized in a particular way. The whole world news is crammed into a very short space of time. Each story has a very, very short period within that. There has to be advertisements that are -- because the news programs are very, very profitable. The advertisers want a certain "environment" as they put it for their advertisements, and so anything that would be controversial or troubling and so on has to be kept out of the news. I've been on Internet -- on the big national news programs on every one of the major networks. And the experience was uniformly dismal. They came into my office and filmed for a half an hour, and at the end of the day when I saw what went on the air -- it was sound bites -- sometimes it was only a few seconds long. How can any serious matter be discussed when you have sound bites that are increasingly short? I'm told that the average sound bite, even including the President of the United States is only -- whatever -- it's 10 seconds or 12 seconds, or something like that. And its been going down every year, I understand, for the last 20 years. Nobody, even the President, can't say anything with any subtlety. And the programs certainly don't want to delve into that. This is a very serious problem when it's those shows that are the main way that the public in the United States is understanding international events.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And so -- Talk about how it -- It seems like there's a lot -- there's a lack of imagery as well, and there's a whole broad of complexity to international law. Is that also other reasons for not covering the international law issues because they're too complex and they don't have images?
PAUL: Well, I think that almost anything can be covered if you want to do that. I mean, images can be found that demonstrate certain things. I think it's true that maybe the images don't jump immediately to mind, but I think the whole mindset of news offices is about what's happening today. And because I'm on the air often -- for instance, just last night I was on the air on CNBC Asia, and in the afternoon we talked about certain things that we would be discussing. And by the evening, the latest news had changed, and so they talked about something entirely different. What they talked about was driven by what was on the wires in the last hour or so. They just simply want to be current. And international law just doesn't seem to them to be what is current. And that's the way they've been trained both in journalism school and in their training in the studios, and everything else. So everything in terms of career-building and so on is tilting them in the direction of current news, breaking news, what's on the wire. And -- However, we do notice this -- that if there is something that the propaganda system determines deserves consideration at length, that does happen. Take the Ronald Reagan funeral, for example. I mean, that was not breaking news for a whole week, was it? And yet Ronald Reagan and the coffin and Nancy and everything was on and on and on and on, and commentaries up and down and right and left. So they're capable of lengthy considerations, but the things they consider at length are totally empty -- Or, in this case, I wouldn't say it's empty really because it's about rallying nationalistic sentiment, rewriting the history of the United States, understanding things in terms of the days when "Everything was right. And people felt good about themselves. And the US was standing tall" -- all these kinds of notions -- and images which were totally phony, but the media decided to put forward during that long, agonizing period of coverage.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And one thing that was not covered at all on the major networks was when John Negroponte said the words "no hidden trigger" and "no automaticity." Can you explain that moment on November 8th when he said those words? And what did that mean?
PAUL: Well -- When Ambassador Negroponte made a statement after the passage of the resolution, he did so along with Sir Jeremy Greenstock of the UK, and they did that at the insistence of the other members of the Council -- the 11 members of the Council that were basically doubting the value of that resolution, and opposed to the US/UK position. They had already language in the resolution that made it clear, but they had been forced by the others to make additional clarifications that there was "no automaticity" and no automatic process that would lead them towards war without returning to the council a second time. All those words were ignored by the media as the run up to the war proceeded, and nobody said anything further about it. As the US was claiming almost as soon as the words were out of Negroponte's mouth, that it had the right and indeed the duty to enforce UN Security Council resolutions, and that it had authorization under previous council resolutions, and so on. The UK took a somewhat different position, and there was hesitation on the part of the UK government to go forward until later on.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Can you speak to -- kind of explain, the legal argument that Resolutions 678 and 687 passed in 1990 and 91 actually gave authorization to go to war in 2003? That's according to the letter that Negroponte sent to the UN on March 20th -- that that's their legal argument -- that they already had authorization from 10 years ago.
PAUL: The earlier Iraq resolutions, including Resolution 687, certainly did not give them authorization, and they knew it. Those resolutions were about the first Iraq war itself, and then the second of the two was about defending human rights in northern Iraq, and the issue of over flight, and so on. This was not at all about authorization to go to war in this period. And those -- The first of the two resolutions had no legal effect after the end of the war, and no serious international lawyer thought that it did have that effect. People who were advisors to the US and the UK governments knew that perfectly well. As for the second resolution, it was -- as I recall, it was under Chapter 6 and not Chapter 7. Chapter 7 being required for the authorization of use of force. Secondly [Interruption]
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Hold on. Pause for a second. -- Yeah, just pick up on the -- The distinction that things have to be passed under Chapter 7 in order to even use force.
PAUL: Yes. Within the UN Charter, there are two types of resolutions that the Security Council passes -- The Chapter 6 resolutions, which do not involve the use of force. And Chapter 7 resolutions that do involve the use of force. In this case, the Resolution 687 did not involve -- it was under Chapter 6 and not Chapter 7 -- but also it didn't even refer to the use of force, it didn't refer to anything remotely connected to the second war on Iraq. So it was a huge stretch. And I think that these governments just counted on the fact that no one was going to look into it, that people either didn't know about those resolutions or weren't going to inquire. And the problem was, there were plenty of international lawyers around the world and plenty of people in UN delegations who could have answered those questions very easily and very effectively, and the media just simply never went and talked to them.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So I think you get even media professionals now, they have never even thought that this war was illegal. So in your mind, what is the legitimacy or legality of this war that happened?
PAUL: Well, it's clear that the war was totally illegitimate. It wasn't legitimated by the UN Security Council. It's possible to argue that UN Security Council resolutions after the war gave a certain -- a very small amount of legitimacy to the war, because they legitimized the occupation. That's certainly the position that the US and the UK would insist on. However, it's not possible to really argue within international law that this war was legitimate in any way. It was against the law, and as such it remains against the law. And most international lawyers who are honest would agree with that view of things.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And can you talk to -- You talked to a lot of ambassadors and a lot of different perspectives during this time period. Can you give me a sense of what types of things they were saying, and what their viewpoint might be?
PAUL: Well, in the run-up to the war, the ambassadors at the UN who were on the Security Council and who were critical of the positions of the US and UK were really disgusted by what was going on. I would say that they were clear about the problems of legality that were emerging. They were angry at the pressures that were being brought to bear on them by the United States. Pressures that were not only on their capitals, but pressures that were brought to bear on the ambassadors at a personal level. Sometimes the ambassadors were even recalled through this kind of pressure. The -- Also, there was a fairly clear sense in many delegations, if not all, that oil played a big role in this war. And I think in general discourse in the United States, the concept that this was a war for oil is sort of -- a very tiny minority would insist on that. In fact, it's even considered to be almost impolite to mention this fact. But within the UN, it was considered to be something that was extremely well-known, obvious to all. As for the matter of weapons of mass destruction, everyone around the UN knew that this was a relatively dubious claim. The first sign that we had that it was extremely dubious claim, came with the issuance of the first UK dossier, which I believe was in September of 2002. And that dossier included a lot of material that was obviously false. I mean, material having to do not so much about weapons of mass destruction, because we didn't know whether or not that material was true or not at the time, but material about other things having to do with repression in Iraq and so on. And it was the famous case where that dossier included some material that had been published more than 10 years before in somebody's dissertation, and it was immediately discovered -- I think it was within 24 hours, that people at Cambridge University found that out, and we knew then that something was very, very fishy. But as soon as the UN inspectors went back in, there was an alternative perspective on the question of weapons of mass destruction. What we -- All we had before was information about the UN's inspectors prior to 1998, and the fact that the US and the UK had more or less forced them to leave as more and more evidence accumulated that there was no weapons that posed a serious threat at that time. However, the claim that after 1998 Saddam Hussein might have started to rebuild his weapons was something that we couldn't deny at that time. But as soon as the weapons inspectors went back in, the US and the UK were then in a position to provide information as they'd done in their dossiers, mentioning various weapons factories and all this kind of thing. Hans Blix and his team -- and Mohamed Elbaradei also on the nuclear side -- went to those places and they found nothing. And they had very, very advanced technology that allowed them to find out not -- whether or not there was something there right then, but whether or not chemical weapons had even been stored in the site within the last year or two years because of trace of materials that were found in the air and all that sort of thing. And it became clear then, that really there wasn't going to be anything there. And they were looking very, very hard. So the more that they found nothing, the more the US and the UK souped up their claims. And so, around the -- Within the UN community there was a sense that this was getting more and more false. That it was about oil. That it had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction. That this had to do with great power intervention, and the ambassadors were very well aware of all this.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And so -- You were at Powell's presentation on February 5th. So can you describe to me your reaction, the reaction of the non-governmental organizations at the UN, and also of the ambassadors at that particular moment?
PAUL: Secretary Powell's presentation in the Security Council in February was seen by me and by -- I would say most NGO's around the UN, and by most delegations as a media event, patently false. And there was a large group of NGO's that couldn't get in to the council chamber. I was lucky enough to be there myself. But there was -- In this building, there was maybe 40 or 50 NGO's that had a closed-circuit television, and people were laughing and hooting, and it was obvious that it was just phony from beginning to end. And as I listen to the media today talking about the -- "Perhaps there was an intelligence failure and all this thing" -- And I'm wondering -- "How is it that for me it was perfectly obvious in February, and perfectly obvious in January and December that there was no weapons of mass destruction there? -- Or certainly nothing that was going to be a threat to international peace and security. Yet somehow the vaunted US intelligence services with their -- all their satellites, and all their human intelligence capacity, and the MI-6 with its long presence in Iraq, and all the rest of it -- That they knew nothing about these things? And how did I know and they didn't know? This is completely implausible." Of course on the media side, "How did the vast news gathering capacity of CBS and NBC and ABC and Fox -- How did they miss this when every NGO and every ambassador and delegate around the UN knew it very well?"

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So if they would have just come here on say February 5th or February 6th, their coverage may have been a little bit different is what you're saying, in a way?
PAUL: Well, they did -- They did certainly decide not to ask any delegate --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
PAUL: The US media certainly made -- consciously or unconsciously -- a decision not to inquire about these things, and not to come and ask me or ask any NGO who's active and looking into this matter, and not to ask any delegate about it. And so they remained in blissful ignorance, you might say -- an ignorance that they decided to maintain about this.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. Talk about -- One article in the Constitution says that all treaties that the United States government signs "shall be the supreme law of the land." Is the charter of the UN a treaty? And if so, can you describe that since we signed it, and according to our Constitution it should be the top law?
PAUL: The Charter of the UN has a special place in international law. The United States, of course, was the principal founder of the United Nations, and as such, signed the treaty that called the United Nations into being. It was held -- that conference was held in San Francisco. And the United States really called the shots in a lot of ways, and set up an institution they liked. The United Nations charter, however, in international law, is not just a treaty among many, but a treaty that is, in a sense, higher than other treaties, because it organizes international law more generally. The United States, however, as I understand, the way Washington treats international law, is to take exception to international law, and to insist that national law trumps international law rather than the other way around. This is something that you'd really have to talk to international lawyers about to get the nuances of it. But it's my understanding that they rarely accept -- I mean that the Supreme Court would rarely accept the primacy of international law over a domestic law. And I think this is a problem. In most other countries, international law and the United Nations Charter would predominate. But I think -- The US legal system hasn't -- doesn't have a good history of recognizing international law, although international law does play a role in US domestic law. But I don't know the nuances of it.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. I'll have to check around on that. Well, just summarize that point again -- that the fact that the United States is -- domestic law trumps international law, whereas in other countries international law is the supreme law.
PAUL: Yes. Well -- In the United States, domestic law tends to trump international law, whereas in most other countries international law dominates over domestic law.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And -- Let's see. The no-fly zones -- Can you talk to the legality of the no-fly zones? And specifically, the US news media would never ever question whether or not these no-fly zones were officially sanctioned by the entire body of the United Nations, although they would imply that it was -- or in some cases just said that it was.
PAUL: Well, that was Resolution 687, I believe, that was passed by the Security Council shortly after the first Gulf War. And that resolution, which was passed under Chapter 6, and therefore not authorizing any use of force, nonetheless expressed concern over the human rights condition within Iraq. It was a resolution that was passed in the immediate aftermath of uprisings -- particularly an uprising in southern Iraq, and concern about the safety of the Kurds in northern Iraq. And the US and the UK and France decided to unilaterally institute these no-fly zones and to fly over to state that a certain part of northern Iraq and southern Iraq could not be used by the Iraqi government as free air space. And so they patrolled the airspace of those two zones, which covered a very large proportion of the total landmass of Iraq, I believe it was more than half. And that never had authorization in 687 and never had authorization by the UN Security Council, but no one in the Security Council tried to challenge that. The Russians might have done so, but they -- the Russians and the Chinese -- but because the French were on board in the early period -- they dropped out of the enforcement of no fly zones later on, I think it was in 1997-- but they participated at a low-level in those early years. So it was flagrantly contrary to international law to be flying over and dominating the air space of a sovereign country, but nobody decided to say anything about it, and the practice continued.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And can you talk about -- From your coverage -- or reading to the New York Times or Washington Post to see how they're covering international law issues -- Can you talk about the print media, and how well even the print media is covering these types of diplomatic debates?
PAUL: Well, I would say the print media are better than the major networks, but still --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I'm sorry, better at?
PAUL: Sorry. Yeah. The print media are a lot better at covering international law issues than the major networks, but they're still not very good at it. And they still tend to be very, very much influenced by what's happening in Washington and the official positions. I believe The New York Times -- as some studies of the history of the Times at different other periods have shown -- The New York Times regards itself as sort of a national newspaper in the service of the government. And -- Although once in a while, they break out of that. And Watergate was one of the few cases when that really happened. Often the government will call them -- the Secretary of State or somebody and say "Don't run this story. It's against the national interest," and they wont do it. So they don't see themselves as actually really a watchdog of the international interests or ordinary citizens against government abuse and so on. And you can see that, not only in the run-up to the Iraq war, not only in the international legal issues having to do with sanctions and having to do with the no-fly zones and all the rest of it, they just simply weren't covering those things. And when it comes to other US interventions in other places like Haiti and so on, they don't give that critical scrutiny either. So unfortunately, you have to be very, very selective if you want to find within The New York Times or The Washington Post the kind of stories that would sort of help you to understand what's going on.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And -- The Bush Administration almost changed their position on the need for a second resolution at the end of January. So can you speak to the influence of the UK and the British government on convincing the United States to going through the United Nations?
PAUL: Well, the government of Tony Blair was in a very different situation than the government of George Bush when it came to getting a second resolution. And the main factor there had to do with the huge opposition within the United Kingdom to this war == an opposition that was not only broad within the public at a very high percentage, but also was very much within the intelligentsia within the UK. For instance, leading professors of international law and international organization within the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and so forth, these people were all counseling that this was a bad idea. And so -- The government, therefore, had to proceed much more slowly and cautiously. Indeed, even within the legal ranks of the government itself, it's generally believed that Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General of the United Kingdom, said that unless there was to be a second resolution, this war would be illegal. And that itself put a lot of pressure on the government, naturally. So it was Tony Blair's need for the second resolution that led to pressures from the UK on the US. And clearly Washington eventually decided that they couldn't just ditch the UK and go it alone, that the UK was providing them with very, very important cover in terms of making this look like some sort of an internationally legitimate thing, where allies were in support and where the UK mission at the UN with Jeremy Greenstock running interference for the United States very effectively at the UN. All these things were things they decided they had to have. So for this reason they were ready to come back and make a real effort. And I think they thought they could -- when push comes to shove -- that they could win because they could put so much pressure on the capitals, so much threats of every sort that eventually they would prevail. And as you know, they stepped up the surveillance of the missions at the UN, that they said the surveillance -- they had bugs in the Secretary General's office. They were able to listen in to even the most private meetings between the opposing ambassadors. All the things that they did, they thought they would prevail in the end, as they had in the first Gulf War final resolution. The fact that they didn't was rather extraordinary, and said something about the huge amount of international pressure on those governments, public pressure and the doubt that many of those governments felt about the war -- [Tape Change]

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Just -- your thoughts on that.
PAUL: Well -- But it's sad that there are these professors today -- and Ruth Wedgwood of Yale is kind of a notorious example, but there's a number of others like her -- who are professors of international law, but don't think international law amounts to anything. And they're constantly going around pooh-poohing it. And I was on, actually, an NPR show, and she was on as well. And I said to her, "Ruth, you don't really believe in international law do you?" And she sort of hummed and hawed, and eventually she -- she essentially admitted that she didn't. And so I wonder, "What's the point of having a professor of international law that doesn't even think this thing exists?" I mean, it's a -- If you were to project this into any other realm, you would see how preposterous it is. Can you have a professor of physics that doesn't believe in physics? I mean, it wouldn't make any sense. So it's clear that these people have been given these important posts precisely for reasons having to do with the broad propaganda system at this time and history in the United States.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay… And wasn't Ruth Wedgwood an advisor to the Pentagon for their legal -- Or somehow, wasn't she advising the legal policies of the United States government?
PAUL: I believe so.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I believe? -- I'm sorry --
PAUL: I believe that Ruth Wedgwood was an advisor in Washington -- and perhaps an advisor to the Pentagon. So this is the kind of thing that we've seen often in the field of political science, and it's now seems to be infecting international law too, where professors, their highest hopes would be to invited to Washington to advise the government. And naturally they're not going to be invited to Washington unless they are sympathetic to the government and understand it's point of view and share it, and so on. So these are -- This is one of the many ways that people are co-opted. But if they were instead to see their role as questioning the government and something else again, they would be worthy of their posts, and worthy of some pretense or a reality of intellectual independence. Instead, they're just nothing but flaks for Washington policy.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Talk to -- In early March, the London Observer had broken that they had got this NSA memo from Frank Koza, and they published it. And talk to -- The memo regarding the espionage and spying on the other UN -- Can you talk about when that broke, what did you think of this revelation that here's some evidence that there's some illicit spying going on? And what that meant? Was it even legal that it's happening?
PAUL: Well, it certainly was completely illegal.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I'm sorry --
PAUL: I'm sorry. The revelations about spying by the UK and by the US on United Nations ambassadors and on the United Nations Secretary General were pretty outrageous, and they certainly were completely illegal. Illegal in a number of different ways. Illegal within the United States, but also illegal because of the special agreements having to do with the United Nations, and its treaty arrangements with the United States to be located here. For all these reasons, we were pretty outraged by this. But there was an effort by the media to portray this as sort of "Nothing new. Ho-hum. What else is new? Of course, this is going on," and so on. And I was interviewed by a number of media who did make this argument to me, and I said to them, "Yes, it's true. If you know about world politics, and you know about the espionage capacities of the United States and the United Kingdom, you might not be entirely surprised at these violations of international law." But I said to them, "Where would you draw the line in terms of violations of international law? For instance, would you be in favor assassinating ambassadors who sit on the UN Security Council because they don't agree with the United States?" And the two conservative hosts that I talked to on shows paused at that point, and I'm glad to tell you that they found it difficult on the air to agree that they would be in favor of the assassination of UN ambassadors in that way. And so I said, "You can see therefore that this has to do with how one goes about drawing the line in international law, and in conduct of international affairs." And I said, "I draw the line in such a way that it is completely unacceptable that this kind of thing go on." And so I think that's the only way we can approach this issue. It's against the law. It's a violation not only of the law, but also of moral principles having to do with privacy and so on that would exist in any society, almost irrespective of whether or not there is something on the statute books. But clearly, this didn't make any difference. And when we found out later on from Clare Short, that not only were they tapping the UN Secretary General's office, but they were passing complete transcripts of his conversations with various people around in the UK inner cabinet. This was really even more disgusting. And it tells us something about the utter lawlessness of the United Kingdom and the United States when it comes to any kind of conduct in international affairs. And of course, the US media once again passed this one by.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Right. And did any of the major networks come to you to interview when that story broke? I heard that Martin Bright was the reporter who broke it, and that they had scheduled to have an interview with him but they just -- they cancelled it.
PAUL: During the entire period around this war -- both leading up to it and afterwards -- the US major networks never interviewed me once. And this might not be astounding, they don't interview me all the time anyway. So -- But previous to that period, I had had occasional interviews, and I would say most especially on CNN where I was interviewed every couple of months or so. And it was quite palpable when that shut down -- I mean, it just -- the phone from those people wasn't ringing. However, at the same time -- which was very gratifying -- the number of interviews that I gave altogether rose astronomically. And I was giving interviews with the media from all over the world all the time. In 2003, I actually gave over 300 interviews, so there certainly was plenty of interest in media elsewhere, including not only just alternative media, but many major media. The big -- I gave interviews with the biggest newspapers in Japan, to major television networks in Germany and France, and so forth. And indeed, to the credit of the UK media system, where there was much more criticism of the United States, there was -- I did give some interviews on the BBC and to the Guardian and so on. But in the United States, nothing.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So from -- Where do you get your news about international affairs? Do you do an audit of international news? Or do you mainly read the US news to see what's getting out there? Or do you just get it from the source here?
PAUL: Well -- We have a very big website. And it's the largest website in the world on the UN and policy here. And we have maybe 120,000 visitors a week coming into the site and a million-plus hits on the site every week. In posting to that site and keeping it up and so on, we're following news very, very closely -- not just news on the regular wires, but news in the major media around the world. News that's coming out from various alternative sources, and of course our own contacts here at the UN with the delegates and the UN Secretariat, and all sorts of ways -- We're quite wired into what's happening. Not to say we don't miss plenty of stuff, but I think -- And also it has to do with our orientation. We have a certain sense about things, and how things have gone in the past and where they're likely to go. So we're interested in things like natural resources, "Are there diamonds involved? Is this an oil issue? What's the lining up of countries?" How's -- We have an instinct for certain aspects of the news that the major media in the United States simply never look at.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And during the build-up to the war, there was an undecided six member states of the Security Council. Can you talk about those undecided members? And the tactics and some of the pressure that they were receiving from the United States and the United Kingdom?
PAUL: Well, the pressures we can see from --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I'm sorry. --
PAUL: Yeah. Right. The -- The --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Set it up with "During the" --
PAUL: In the, Yeah. Right. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. -- I'm so used to people's voices being on normally.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Right. Right.
PAUL: In the run-up to the war, the United States put huge pressure on delegations and on capitals to sway their policy to bring them into supporting the US drive towards war. And this -- The Mexican ambassador, Adolfo Zinser, put it very well when he said that "This is a policy of bilateralism." And by that he meant that the United States would approach each country individually, not at a multilateral negotiating level, and say to them, "This business is about you and us. And this couldn't be that interesting to you. After all, Chile, you're way down there in Latin America, and Iraq is a very long ways away. Do you really want to spoil your relationship with us -- the most powerful nation in the world? We have here a trade agreement that we're looking at right now -- a free trade agreement. And if you guys don't support us on this, we might just have to forget about this trade agreement." They might say to another country, "What about the aid package we were talking about? What about the World Bank loans you were expecting? We can veto that in a second. What about our military cooperation? What about the investments of US firms in your country that you were hoping for? We can nix that in a second." So there are so many ways, and as Ambassador Zinser pointed out too, the United States is able to influence elements within that are influential in the domestic political scene, For instance in Mexico, the US ambassador went around talking about how terrible it was going to be for Mexican business interests if Mexico didn't have a friendly relations with the United States over the Iraq matter. And so therefore, a number of conservative newspapers and television stations and so on, elements that were part of President Fox's own coalition started howling about how the support for the United States wasn't sufficient, and how opposition to the Iraq war was a big mistake. So you had this split then domestically between the vast majority of people within Mexico who were opposed to this war, and the business interests and other elites who were beginning to put pressure on the government. So this is the "bilateralism methodology" that the US was using in every single case. And all I can say is it was a miracle that they failed. It was absolutely wonderful. And it had something to do with the pressures by France and the diplomacy, and also the deep sense, I think, by those governments that this was a terrible mistake -- that it would end up in destabilizing the world in ways that would actually affect their own international interests. And so -- For all these reasons, they decided to opt for some -- a little in their relations with Washington, and then they continued to hold out.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: A lot of the stuff you're talking about is -- seems like stuff that I've heard for the first time, probably because of the media is so centered on what's happening within our own states. Can you talk to that phenomena of how the media is only focused on what's happening within our borders, irregardless of what's happening in other countries?
PAUL: Well, the media is mostly focused on what's happening in the United States. And for information they go first to Washington and the President or the Pentagon or whatever, perhaps the Congress, and there's a particular culture within the Beltway that excludes most international considerations. But I would say that it's -- In doing this, they're able to benefit from a sense of intellectuals within the United States more generally, that the United States is a sort of self-referential. And unfortunately, in universities and even in magazines of opinion to the left of center -- for instance, I would refer to The Nation as an example -- where often US-centric interpretations of what's happening win out over a broader international sense. To give you an example, I think domestic policy issues within the United States cannot be referred to without an understanding of the broad international economy and what's going on. For instance, homelessness is always referred to in terms of "What did Reagan do? What were the policies of Clinton? How did it happen?" -- and all about Washington. And sometimes when I talk to people about these things, and I say, "But yes. But homelessness increased in the United Kingdom and in France and in Germany at this time. How do we understand that when maybe there was a social democratic government in place in one of those countries? It wasn't just Reagan or Thatcher." And very often, serious policy intellectuals left of center in the United States, their eyes kind of open wide and they say, "Well gosh, I never thought about that before." So I think that we certainly need to fault the media for their failure of responsibility, but I think we have to realize that this is deeper and broader. And it has to do with the size of the United States. The fact that people only speak English. The fact that until relatively recently -- relatively few people went out there in the world and knew about it. And even now they -- intellectuals pop across the pond to a conference and they come right back, and they don't really know much about what's happening. I mean, it's -- This is very deep, and the fact that President Bush had been outside of the United States once or twice before being President was, alas, not such a rare exception, but all too common among members of Congress and others in the United States.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And all this that you seem to be talking about seems to be that both the Democrats and Republicans and the media have this blinder on to not even consider any of the costs or the -- They always talk about the benefits of capitalism, but never the costs of these capitalist policies -- globalization and so forth. And so can you speak to that a little bit? How those blinders on those three institutions -- the Democrats, the Republicans and the media -- kind of resulted in this coverage building up to the war in Iraq?
PAUL: Well -- The Democrats, Republicans, the media, intellectuals, are all very blind to what's happening on the world scene. I think that there are certain pockets of interest that have to do with international policy think tanks and the like that we find in Washington that interest themselves in these things. But if you look even at the progressive approaches, for instance, Foreign Policy In Focus, which I hesitate to knock because they do often very good things. But if you read their mission statement, and if you read their discourse, it's all about making a better US policy. And therefore, it's all centered on the United States of America, and its policy and its so-called leadership in the world as opposed to rooting it in an international reality and the interests and needs of the 6 billion people on the planet. And if you start to think that way, you stop saying "We" when you talk about the United States government, and you start thinking about "We" as being the peoples of the planet. And then things take a very, very different turn. Unfortunately, in the battles between electing the latest candidate for President, and getting senators in office, and seeing these elections as being the end of the world and earth-shattering, you can't believe that it's -- in that, and also at the same time have a perspective on the world that puts US policy in a global perspective.