Ted Re..Even ardent internationalists worry that the institution finds itself in a lose-lose situation — ridiculed as a puppet if American pressure forces a reluctant Security Council majority to support a war against Saddam Hussein, or reduced once more to a self-absorbed cipher if France, Russia and Germany lead the Security Council to thumb its nose at the world's superpower.
Boy ain't that paragraph telling the truth. Everybody in the mess has been hurt. The funny part is Gw went to the UN to try and humiliate them into acting responsibly. Now, no one can possibly hope for a good outcome.
For the French, the United Nations is a kind of global legislature that offers a level playing field to superpowers, plain old powers and all the rest of the world.
However, the US pays 30% of the bills, and is the only nation to have the power the power to enforce UN RESOLUTIONS.
This willingness to define the institution by its role in the current crisis seems perverse or myopic to some. "The United Nations is much, much larger than the Iraqi crisis," Secretary General Kofi Annan said on Tuesday.
Really. Maybe we should judge the UN by its actions in Yugoslavia. Or perhaps Rawanda. https://mail.lsit.ucsb.edu/pipermail/gordon-newspost/2001-June/001352.html
>>>>>>This is a very effective, scathing review of a recent book on the Rawandan
genocide. We, the US, don't come out looking good, but the French
government (under a Socialist President), where African policies were
directed by a cabal outside the official government---including Mitterand's
son---looks contemptible, as it has for decades in supporting some of the
grisliest regimes on earth . . . though, oddly, while the French left was
jumping up and down in front of the American embassy for this or that sin in
the third world, no jumping up and down appeared in the French media until
recently. And the UN looks like an especially unseemly, unlikeable, and
ineffective institution for carrying out human rights interventions. Then,
too, the Belgians---another EU country---played a contemptibel role in
dealing with that genocide too.>>>>>>>>
This article will be rewritten for Iraq.
For James S. Sutterlin, a former United Nations executive and the author of "The United Nations and the Maintenance of International Security," the question is not the institution's relevance, but its competence."The centrality of the Security Council was evident in its very failure," in Rwanda and Bosnia, he said. "There was the very serious problem that the central organization responsible for security couldn't do it."
For American conservatives, the past three months have been galvanizing. "The notion that the U.N. is really a problem," William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, said this week, "was a fringe notion until about three months ago. Now serious people, who are not unilateralists, are much more open to alternatives to the U.N."
Which is so true. Which leaves me stunned. Your first article in many days which isn't a condemnation of Gw. Don't you hate GW anymore? |
