DELIVER
US FROM EVIL
It is difficult to comprehend the utter shame and degradation of the U.N. It hardly has a program that works. It cannot prevent nations from warring with one another nor from sending troops when and where wanted. As you read this, the French (!) have their force frappe in the Ivory Coast. M. Chirac failed to seek permission from the U.N. to launch his mini-invasion of a sovereign nation. France also neglected such protocol when it sent its forces to Algeria. Great Britain never asked or permission about the Falklands. Can anyone imagine the government of China asking U.N. permission to invade Taiwan? No matter; no country even raised the question. None cares. The U.N. only cares when the United States asks for authority to enforce a U.N. Resolution. The U.N. Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441 last Fall; now, it refuses to enforce it. Nowhere does 1441 require a second resolution for enforcement. No Security Council member, permanent or temporary, believes that Hussein is other than a tyrant. None. But U.N. and Euro diplomats love the status quo; they dislike upsetting the applecart. It is that mental sclerosis to which Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld alluded when he called France, Germany et al “Old Europe”. They are. They are also “old hat”. When considering the U.N. to authorize an action such as the disarming of Iraq, one needs to recall that in its nearly 60 year history, the U.N. has authorized military action but twice: once for the Korean War and once in the Gulf War. That’s it. Remember that next time you hear some blathering fool insist an American President cannot use force without U.N. approval. Neither Kennedy nor Johnson sought U.N. approval for Viet Nam; Clinton failed to request it in regard to Bosnia or Kosovo. Remember, too, that the Korean vote passed only because it was taken just after the Russians had left the chamber. As to the Gulf War, it stopped short of dethroning Hussein. Instead, the U.N. mandated that Bush 41 not depose Hussein. Bush complied and that was real error. Since then, Hussein has spent the last 12 years biting the hand that saved him and made laughingstock of the entire crowd. He also made deals with many of them, the French, who supplied him with nuclear equipment and the Germans who supplied him with chemicals. (Did you ever wonder why Iraq, with all its oil, needed nuclear capabilities?) Many of the countries represented in the U.N. are shams, mere political constructs, that cannot feed, house or even attempt to care for their citizens. (But come to think of it, Mexico doesn’t do that particularly well either.) U.N. member countries are replete with dictators, from Castro to Hussein to Mugabe, to say nothing of China. There are dozens of these frauds prancing around New York denouncing anything American except their cushy assignments in the luxury of Manhattan, paid for by the slaves and peasants in their home countries plus you and other American taxpayers. Consider that these tinhorn “nations” are equal to the world’s larger nations in the General Assembly. Consider, too, that each rotates onto a two-year seat on the Security Council and each has a rotating opportunity to chair each of the panels or committees. Imagine the spectacle of China as the head of the U.N. Human Rights Commission. The Security Council has five permanent members, each with a veto vote which enables any one of the five to block any Council resolution. France is one of the five; it has 60 million people. India has over a billion people and will soon be the world’s most populous country. It will soon have more people than China and France combined. Why is India not sitting where France is? Japan with all its economic woes has one of the world’s largest economies. It runs rings around the economies of Russia (which has a smaller GDP that Holland) and China. Where is its place and recognition as one of the world’s great country’s? It is apparent that the organization of the U.N. is locked into a time warp of World War II vintage. To those winners went the spoils of U.N. control. That war ended 58 years ago. The world is dramatically different. The United Nations is not. Its structure reflects the political spoils of the victors of World War II. But the U.N.’s Security Council structure cannot be changed. No country with veto power will voluntarily give up that power. Adding another layer of bureaucracy will do more harm, cost more and add further mechanisms for slowing decisions or locking them in the embraces of delay, linger and wait. The U.N.’s Security Council must be dismantled or the United States must resign from the U.N. The President has recently said he doesn’t see it that way. For instance, he sees a role for the U.N. in the aftermath of the Iraq action. Perhaps. But the role he speaks of is not a Security Council role. It is an administrative role. We have just witnessed the spectacle of France and Germany using the U.N. to advance their national interests at the expense of American national interests. These efforts were made under the color of the U.N.’s alleged authority. We have written before that rational self-interest is the driving force behind a country’s decisions. We expect that; it is the natural course of human behavior. But to allow the U.N. to assume a political and moral authority and then allow the exercise thereof by vote of the weak is to invite the weak to control the strong. Following the logic of the Security Council, the United States military power is to be used only when and if such use is first approved by France, Russia and China. Is that what you want? If the world’s major countries choose not to be bound militarily by the Security Council, and they have so chosen and will continue to so choose, perhaps the U.N. should disarm itself of its alleged authority as to a member’s employment of its military. That would not disable a volunteer U.N. force cobbled together ad hoc as is sometimes done today. The U.N. could thus officially focus in non-military matters. It could move on any peace-keeping efforts to which its members individually and voluntarily subscribed. Much of the rancor of the Iraq debate would then disappear; the U.N. could become a kind of social and economic organization and forego any claims to sovereign authority over its members. It cannot exercise so sovereign a power as it is not vested with any and no member nation has been willing to grant it such power. Nothing more will work; it has not; it will not; it can not. By removing the ineffective attempt to control nation’s sovereign power, the U.N. will still be corrupt. Some of its members will continue to steal and defraud. But we expect that in government type organizations. It won’t be a surprise and we know how to deal with it. We, or any objecting member, may remove ourselves from those deals with which we disagree. But its evil will be of the lesser kind, the level of the petty thief. One can live with that. What is impossible to live with is the present attempt to impose on major member nations the allegedly collective will of a handful of lesser member nations. This is the “New World Order” spoken of grandly by those who can impose no order on their own but who propose to harness the capacity of other member nation’s capabilities, turning them to their own benefit, for their own interests. No nation of power or consequence has or will accede to that philosophy. It would be international as well as domestic suicide. No country has done it and none is volunteering. Many opponents of the U.S. action in Iraq base their position on the U.N. declaring that only the U.N. can legitimize such action. The danger in that notion is that it leads directly to countries such as Guinea, Cameroon, China or Russia dictating when and where the U.S. military is to be used. And if we, the U.S. disagree? What then? Collective security works only there is a specific common objective: NATO is the great and rare example, the Soviet Union was the objective and it worked. With the Soviets gone, there is no more common objective to NATO. Thus, NATO has become fractious and more irrelevant until one day soon it, too, will disappear. The current phrase - coalition of the willing - is inapposite. It really a coalition of partners, nations having a common goal and willing to pay to achieve that goal, whatever the cost. Various nations will come together for their perceived common good i.e., their rational self-interest. The U.N. cannot achieve that flexibility as it is attempting to deal with all nations. It cannot be done. WHO SAID THIS? (The U.S. government should make it clear) “to every country in this world, you’re either with us or you’re not, and there will be consequences.” Answer: Hilary Clinton Comment: I didn’t believe it either but I looked it up.
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