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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (55356)	10/29/2002 1:30:56 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

There are other options for the UN. There is an alternative to the US-dominated Security Council: The "Uniting for Peace" precedent allows the General Assembly to step in when the Council is unable to take appropriate action on an issue involving international peace and security. The first use of this precedent was at the outset of the Korean War, when the United States, exploiting a moment of Soviet absence from the Council, maneuvered to move the question onto the General Assembly agenda, claiming that the Council was paralyzed. The Assembly, overwhelmingly in thrall to the United States, quickly endorsed the US war. Since then, the precedent has been used for more appropriate goals, including Assembly efforts to investigate and condemn Israel's violations of the Geneva Conventions by its settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territories. A new effort to involve the General Assembly in the Iraq crisis may have already begun. On October 16 the Non-Aligned countries, under South African leadership, demanded an open meeting of the Council to discuss the issue. Under the Uniting for Peace precedent, if a majority of the 191 member states of the vetoless General Assembly, acting in the name of "the peoples of the United Nations," agrees, that body will take up the issue. Such a move would redefine the real relevance of the UN--standing defiant against Washington's unilateralism and upholding international law, at the center of the growing global challenge to the legitimacy of Bush's war. Considering that the majority of the General Assembly members are dictators, the principle of one country, one vote makes the GC a dictator's club, with a resulting solicitude of dictators (no matter how horrible) that one might expect. In wishing to hand international power into such hands, liberalism is sailing into some very peculiar waters.