How Dean Acheson could come back to haunt Barack Obama

If there isn't a diplomatic breakthrough, Palestinians and their supporters will seek a resolution supporting recognition of a Palestinian state this fall at the United Nations. President Obama has already said that "symbolic" resolutions won't produce a Palestinian state, a statement which all but promises an American veto. The script appears to be already written. States supportive of Palestine will introduce a resolution. Washington will veto it, and everyone else will yell and scream as they always do when America uses its veto to back Israel at the UN.
But that should be the end of the story, right? After all, the United Nations Charter makes clear that both the Security Council and the General Assembly must be involved in the admission of new members to the organization. Article 4, paragraph 2 is explicit: "The admission of any such state to membership in the United Nations will be effected by a decision of the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council." And in the Security Council, past precedent makes clear that the veto can be used on admission decisions. In fact, both the United States and the Soviet Union used the veto frequently for this purpose in the 1950s and 1960s.
There is a wrinkle however. Palestinian diplomats are now suggesting that they'll use a tactic called "Uniting for Peace" to bypass the expected American veto in the Security Council and have the General Assembly decide the matter of Palestine's admission:

The Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said Wednesday that the Palestinians will seek an emergency session of the General Assembly known as "Uniting for Peace" to override any veto.

Ridiculous, right? You can't rewrite the UN Charter simply by passing a resolution in the General Assembly. It is ridiculous. Unfortunately for Washington, it was the United States that thought up the Uniting for Peace resolution. It was the brainchild of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson and his State Department lawyers, who were searching for a way around the Soviet Union's Security Council veto during the Korean War. 
At the time, the Americans wanted some way for the United Nations to express its continued support for the UN intervention in defense of South Korea (that intervention was authorized by the Security Council while the Soviet ambassador was boycotting the body). The Americans hit upon the idea using the General Assembly and they argued that the assembly--which was, at the time, quite pro-Western--could take up matters under consideration by the Security Council when the Council was paralyzed by the veto.
It was a terrible reading of the UN Charter--and the Soviets howled--but it served the immediate purpose. The General Assembly passed  a clutch of resolutions supporting the UN's efforts in Korea.  Some American allies at the time, including the British, quietly warned that the tactic might come back to bite the West. But Washington wasn't listening. As U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote, "present difficulties outweighed possible future ones."
Those future difficulties came soon enough. By the 1960s, the composition of the General Assembly had changed dramatically as decolonization proceeded. What had once been a friendly forum for the United States became quite unfriendly. And so the United States quietly let the Uniting for Peace tactic drop. It's been picked up from time to time by other states --and it was last used in 1997, also on Israel-Palestine issues--but there's never been a definitive ruling on its legality or precisely how it can be used. No permanent member of the Security Council will lend support to an idea that challenges their power, and most other states have decided it's not worth challenging the Council's powers--and its powerful members-- so directly. 
Some states might not mind forcing the issue now. The great majority of states resent the use of the veto power in any case, and that specific frustration could now meld with a broader discontent about the continued failure of attempts to reform the Security Council. The precedent of U.S. support for Uniting for Peace  will be  a useful arrow in their quiver. All the passionate American quotes about unreasonable blockages of the Security Council and the true purposes of the UN Charter will be thrown in the face of American diplomats.  President Obama may soon be wishing that Acheson and the State Department's lawyers had kept their bright ideas to themselves.
But there is a small consolation for the United States: if the Palestinian statehood resolution does become a broader fight about the powers and prerogatives of the Security Council, at least Washington won't be alone.
David Bosco @'FP'
(Thanx Son#1!)