by George Monbiot, (first Published in The Guardian, this is an edited extract)

For 67 years successive US governments have resisted calls to reform the UN security council.  They’ve defended a system which grants five nations a veto over world affairs, reducing all others to impotent spectators.  They have abused the powers and trust with which they have been vested.  They have collaborated with the other four permanent members (the UK, Russia, China and France) in a colonial carve-up, through which these nations can pursue their own corrupt interests at the expense of peace and global justice.

Eighty-three times the US has exercised its veto.  On 42 of these occasions it has done so to prevent Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians being censured.  On the last occasion, 130 nations supported the resolution but Barack Obama spiked it.  Though veto powers have been used less often since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the US has exercised them 14 times in the interim (in 13 cases to shield Israel), while Russia has used them nine times. Increasingly the permanent members have used the threat of a veto to prevent a resolution being discussed.  They have bullied the rest of the world into silence.

Through this tyrannical dispensation – created at a time when other nations were either broken or voiceless – the great warmongers of the past 60 years remain responsible for global peace.  The biggest weapons traders are tasked with global disarmament.  Those who trample international law control the administration of justice.

Obama warned last week that Syria’s use of poisoned gas “threatens to unravel the international norm against chemical weapons embraced by 189 nations”.  Unravelling the international norm is the US president’s job.

In 1997 the US agreed to decommission the 31,000 tonnes of sarin, VX, mustard gas and other agents it possessed within 10 years.  In 2007 it requested the maximum extension of the deadline permitted by the Chemical Weapons Convention – five years.  Again it failed to keep its promise, and in 2012 it claimed they would be gone by 2021.  Russia yesterday urged Syria to place its chemical weapons under international control.  Perhaps it should press the US to do the same.

In 1998 the Clinton administration pushed a law through Congress which forbade international weapons inspectors from taking samples of chemicals in the US and allowed the president to refuse unannounced inspections.  In 2002 the Bush government forced the sacking of José Maurício Bustani, the director general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.  He had committed two unforgiveable crimes: seeking a rigorous inspection of US facilities; and pressing Saddam Hussein to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, to help prevent the war George Bush was itching to wage.

The US used millions of gallons of chemical weapons in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.  It also used them during its destruction of Falluja in 2004, then lied about it.  The Reagan government helped Saddam Hussein to wage war with Iran in the 1980s while aware that he was using nerve and mustard gas.  (The Bush administration then cited this deployment as an excuse to attack Iraq, 15 years later).