A.S.: You have written a lot about the illegality of the war against Iraq. Is the current US pressure on India and other countries to send their troops to Iraq to relieve the USAof the financial burden of occupation, or an effort to legalise the war and the occuption post facto?

P.B.: It is a combination of factors. The cost of the war, not only in money, but in soldiers' lives is much higher than they wanted to pay, not because they care very much about individual soldiers, American or Iraqi civilians for that matter, but because they are very concerned that the constant toll of one or two or three American soldiers dying a day, or on occasion half a dozen of soldiers, is further reducing the already shaky level of support they have for the war.

I don't think that is the only issue. Your point about legality is clearly crucial. By having broader participation, particularly from the global south, and most especially from Muslim countries, they can claim that the war in fact was being waged by the entire world. It will be a false claim, the UN never endorsed this war, but it will be in keeping with what the US succeeded in doing, which is to get a security council resolution that says this war now is legal, essentially by saying that the occupation is legal. The challenge of course is that countries of the south and particularly the Islamic countries have no interest in making their soldiers the bad guys for US policy. Pakistan, for example, the only Muslim country so far that has agreed tentatively to send a small number of troops, has said that they would not put them under US command.

India is under enormous pressure and there are indications that India may provide larger number of troops. It would be, once again, Indian troops serving as the colonial forward soldiers for a colonial empire, in this case the US rather than the UK. I think the US will fail to get Arab countries and I doubt that they will even publicly request Arab countries to send troops. The danger is that in the countries where the governments are eager to back the US, but the population is opposed, and this is particularly true in European countries, argument is going to be some version of "we have an obligation to help rebuild Iraq,we can not stand back". This is the excuse used by Japan, to convince a reluctant public to send, I think it is 2000 Japanese troops, supposedly non-combat. Nonetheless, these are military troops in a military exercise participating in a military occupation. It is a complete violation of article 9 of the Japanese constitution that prohibits the use of military for anything other than self-defence. They had to pass a new law in the parliament, and the way they did it was to argue that we have an obligation to participate in the rebuilding of Iraq. I think Pakistan will make the same argument. European countries, particularly, will use that argument to persuade reluctant parliamentarians and the even more reluctant public to accept sending troops to support the US occupation of Iraq.

A.S.: Do you think that they will win this argument and that the civil society will be temporarily pacified?.

P.B.: I think that's their hope. Now, I don't think that will happen. I think civil society is becoming more and more mobilized, there is more and more anger and outrage growing at the lies the US and the UK relied on to claim legitimacy for this war in the first place.

The lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction, the claims about weapons that were supposedly ready to fire in 45 minutes, as Tony Blair told his people. These all turned out to be lies. People are becoming more and more angry. The problem is we don't know if we have enough time for the outrage to build. That's why the mobilizations of the peace movements in all these countries are so important. The mainstream media in so many countries, particularly in the US, are simply not reflecting the outrage that these lies justify. Bear in mind, this isn't simply a situation where the president lied to the American people. In this case the president lied to the world. And it is the world that is paying the price for those lies.

A.S.: Blair is under big pressure from the parliament and the BBC for lying about the Iraq's supposed possession of the Weapons of Mass Destruction. Do you think he might lose the elections because of this?

P.B.: It is possible that is what might happen with Blair. Unfortunately, the level of outrage that the BBC and the British press have appropriately reflected on this issue, however late they might have been coming to that, we are not seeing in the US. We see the articles analyzing the lies, exposing the lies, but they are carefully, calmly constructed articles on page A9 of the New York Times, page B13 of the Washington Post, and they are simply not generating the kind of outrage that the press coverage in the UK is generating. One result is that Tony Blair is far more vulnerable in his next elections than George Bush is in the US so far. Now, hopefully that will change.

A.S.: Isn't the disregard for the United Nations, waging an illegal war without the UN approval, and after that the UN legalizing the occupation of Iraq, a dangerous precedent. Could it have serious consequences for the future functioning of the United Nations?

P.B.: Unfortunately that is very true, it is very dangerous. The UN ended an extraordinary eight and a half months long period of standing up to the US war drive, refusing to endorse the US war, refusing to participate in giving international legitimacy to that war, standing defiant of the US. That's what the UN was created for, to oppose the scourge of war. That eight and a half month extraordinary period when the UN was part of our global mobilization for peace, that ended with the passage of the new UN resolution 1483. The new resolution, which essentially grants ex post facto legitimacy by saying that now the US and the UK are official occupying powers, without identifying the responsibility of an occupying country first, and that is to end the occupation. That's the first obligation of any occupying power.-to end it, it's never legal. And it is always violent, military occupation is a violent business.

The UN decision, when countries finally caved in, finally gave in to the pressure, brought to an end a period of the UN doing the right thing. Now the UN is no longer part of that global mobilization against the war. The question for civil society, and for some governments, is how do we get it back. How do we get back our UN?

A.S.: Do you think that the global peace movement can bring some changes, if it cannot force occupying forces to pull out of Iraq, it can at least help to keep the truth that it is an occupation, and that what we were told was the basis for war, were lies?

P.B.: I think that the global peace movement has enormous potential and enormous possibility. Two days after the huge demonstration on February 15, the New York Times did something they almost never do, which is to tell the truth on the front page. There was a very big article that said there are once again two superpowers in the world, the US and global public opinion.

They were right, there has never been a moment when there has been this unified public opposition to a US war. And that movement is still in formation, it is still growing. There are conferences going on all over the world. International conferences linking Peace and justice movement from all over the world, are coming together to create with more clarity what a global peace and justice movement should look like. So I think we have enormous possibility.

The US has put enormous pressure on the countries of the general assembly and all the countries of the Security Council. It failed to pressure the six undecided countries in the council sufficiently to get them to give in to their war. So Chile and Mexico and Pakistan and Guinea, and Cameroon and Angola, all refused to endorse the US.

But there are also plenty of countries in Europe, or countries like South Africa, Brazil, regional powers that simply are not as vulnerable to the US. What are they afraid of? And their own public opinion and international public opinion needs to challenge these governments to say: you need to lead. South Africa needs to lead the non-aligned countries, the Nordics perhaps need to lead Europe. There needs to be some leadership in the international arena to make sure that this challenge to US war drive can continue.

A.S.: There was a strong support in some countries for US policy, although their citizens opposed it. There was big co-ordination of the international peace movement, and maybe this is the biggest proof that there is a global civil society, acting in the global public space, global arena. Do you think there is an indication for change in the UN so that global citizens can be represented in the UN?

P.B.: That is a huge task ahead, and a very important one. I think that democratization of the UN is a huge task for global civil society. So far, in the NGO movement, we have been struggling just to have a presence at the UN. That has largely been won, now the fight is to have a voice. . The next stage then would be the struggle to have some power, to have a vote, to have something to say about international decision-making. There are some examples we can look to. Collaboration between governments, civil society and NGOs and the UN itself that led to the Ottawa Convention on Banning Anti-personal Landmines. The International Criminal Court itself came about as the result of the collaboration between some NGOs involved with human rights, a few governments in the world, notably South Africa and Germany and couple of others, and the UN, which together formed what came to be the world treaty creating the International Criminal Court. So there are some examples.

I think our first goal needs to be to re-empower the UN General Assembly. We should keep in mind that for the first 40 years of the UN history, it was not the Security Council that was the most important component of the UN, it was the General Assembly. That is when de-colonisation became a reality. That was where the institutions of the south, such as UNCTAD, the Centre on Transnational Corporations, UNIDO, UNESCO, were created. That was when the call for a new international economic order emerged. True, the decisions of the General Assembly don't have the force of international law in the same way that Security Council decisions do, but they are very important. The General Assembly also has the power of the purse at the UN. They can spend money and impose sanctions on countries, like the US, that refuse to pay their dues. There is enormous potential for empowering the General Assembly. One factor that that would be required is pressure from civil society on the individual member states, in their own countries, to push them to take seriously the work of the General Assembly.

A.S.: The US disregarded the UN with the war on Iraq, but it did that before with other international agreements, the Kyoto Protocol, the Treaty for the Prohibitions of the Landmines, the International Criminal Court, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Do you think the US can make its own rules and rule the world as it sees fit, ignoring multilateral institutions?

P.B.: Well, they will have the power to disregard the UN and do what they want. They will not have the legitimacy to do it. And, you can't rule that way for very long. You can do that for a while, but eventually it doesn't work anymore. And, perhaps the more far-visioned types in the Bush administration, if there are any, will recognise that before it is too late, before their empire crumbles in the face of attacks from outside. I think they are learning quickly in Iraq, that while they had the power to destroy, it was easy to overthrow a dictatorship that had lost all of its military capacity anyway, it is not so easy to build a nation. Destruction is a lot easier than reconstruction and rebuilding. That's what they need the UN for, that's what they need the rest of the world for. And if the world refuses to pay for it and makes the US take responsibility, maybe they will think a little more carefully before going out to destroy the next country, not being so quick to believe some ideologically-driven exile that we will be welcomed with flowers and rice on the streets. Well , they are not throwing flowers, they are killing American soldiers, who are being put at risk there by a reckless regime in Washington.

A.S.: Do you think there is still a way for civil society to show that this push to build an empire doesn't have legitimacy, and if the voice is strong enough the process will not advance?

P.B.: I think that is absolutely right, more and more people are becoming aware that the situation in Iraq is becoming worse and worse. Polls in the US very significantly show a huge drop, from 76% to 56% from May 1 until mid June - 6 weeks. On May 1, when Bush announced the war is over, 76% of Americans said things are going well in Iraq, six weeks later only 56% said things are going well. That is a huge drop. If we can keep that kind of pressure up, that would put enormous pressure on those in the Bush administrations who are mainly concerned with winning elections. Maybe the ideologues don't care whether people support them or not, but the political operatives do care, and they are the ones that have to win the second term for George Bush. So if they start getting nervous about what the polls say, and they will if we do our job right as the Peace and Justice Movement in the US and globally, then there will be the change in policy because they will be afraid of losing the elections.