My Rant on the UN and World Court

I think the UN is showing its holes right now...its exposed.

The UN isn't being exposed unless you expected a body that has no actual enforcement authority to be perfect. Sure, you have situations like Iraq that don't work. On the other hand, you have situations like Bosnia or the disarmament in South Africa that DO work.

Is it perfect? Hell no - you'll never get perfection when you have a body that doesn't have absolute authority to act because none of the nations want to give it that authority. We want it to have absolutely authority to force Iraq to do something, but then no authority to force the US to do anything. Doesn't work that way. If it did, every minor nation would simply drop out. The reason it is truly a world organization is that it gives every nation a voice so they can interact with the world.

If there was no U.N., millions of people would be dead all over the world from a lack of aid. No one would ever have taken the initiative in places like Bosnia to provide peacekeeping or Rwanda to provide aid.

If there was no U.N., the Cuban Missile Crisis may have ended very, very differently with a chunk of the world dead. No one would have been able to negotiate with & monitor South African disarmament with any unbiased credibility.

If there was no U.N., there would have been no Gulf War coalition, no support in the Middle East for our actions, and millions more people around the world would have grown up hating the US and thinking its an imperialist country.

If you think the U.N. has little or no purpose or is some kind of failure at meeting its objectives, your expectations are ridiculously unfair in my opinion.

 

really? it's ridiculously unfair to expect that people will back up their word? it's ridiculously unfair to assume that it will take less than 17 orders and 12 years before the member-nations take the disarmament of iraq seriously?

It's ridiculous to expect the rest of the world to decide that war is suddenly necessary because America now says it is. Why didn't we say it was absolutely necessary last year? Or two years ago? Why is the world required to act on our timetable?

If France wanted to go to war with Iraq over this issue 3 years ago and the American people didn't want to, you think we'd have just said "OK, we'll do it because you want us to"? Why should we expect any differently from other nations?

by the way...if it's such a powerless institution, why is everyone so hell-bent on running everything through them then?

Perhaps because over the past 50 years, its accomplished numerous things that unilateral diplomacy didn't and likely couldn't have (examples provided in my previous post). And its done it with a moral legitimacy that justifies it in the eyes of the world and doesn't piss off hundreds of millions of people in ways that unilateral foreign policy does.

i mean if our expectations for this group are really that low, why are we running major foreign policy decisions (even the decision to go to war) through them?

I don't see why not expecting perfection is equivalent to having really low expectations?

why are we concerning ourselves with all that bullcrap? checking our foreign policy by such a group seems worthless, major...

Since when is working with people on things bad? In case you haven't noticed, it was our unilateral action that created Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and a number of other issues in the first place. Regardless of the reasoning behind it, the ultimate result of our policies were that we propped these people up and gave them the resources to be what they have now become. Our unilateral foreign policy history isn't exactly perfect either.

I think working with the world and trying to build consensus -- which has a history of getting some solid results even if it doesn't work every single time -- instead of pissing off every nation in the world has some benefits, personally.

whether by your analysis or by mine.

Maybe yours, not mine.

 

the simple answer is that you cannot expect the rest of the world to agree with america all the time. america simply has not convinced the world that going to war is the right thing to do.

and if the u.n. is to have any credibility at all, its most powerful members, and in this particular case the US, needs to know how to take no for an answer.

the u.n. is workly exactly as its conservative founders envisioned, based on consensus, due process, and using the great powers themselves to counterbalance each other to ensure impartiality.

you might ask why the world fails to see 'injustice' and 'dangers' so obvious to yourself. perhaps the rest of the world defines these in shades of gray these things which you see in black and white.

perhaps the world thinks that iraq reneging on its commitments and hiding its arms in the name of iraqi security and national interests is wrong, but not wrong enough to justify the cost of war. in the same way, the US thinks that israel oppressing the palestinians in the name of israeli security and national interests is wrong, but not wrong enough to justify arab or european intervention. resolving these differences in opinions are what makes the u.n. essential and useful.

your same arguments for sovereignty and national rights, though persuasive for fellow americans, can and ARE regularly invoked by the same human rights violaters of iraq, libya, china, yugoslavia, etc. that you detest. if you wish these 'domestic' american issues to not have to be answerable to the international community, then you better be ready for the US to give up policing other nations using the same international instruments. i.e. no court to try Milosevic. no court to try Saddam when we catch him. no court to try future Hitlers. cuz after all, by your logic, don't they have a right to be protected by their own national laws too (even if written by these same men)?

 

1. our unilateral action? when did we act unilaterally that created Saddam Hussein? you really believe it's the US fault that Osama likes to target civilians? come on, major. if you choose to believe that, go right ahead. maniacs, tyrants and murderers have enough inspriration on their own. if it wasn't one thing, it would be another. osama only recently has concerned himself with the cause of the palestinians...why?...because it gives him another justification to kill. don't blame the girl for the rape. and don't attempt to reason with tyrants and terrorists.


We were the ones who enabled these people to become who they are now. We funded and trained OBL. We propped up Saddam's regime while knowing that he was using Chemical weapons on this neighbors. Did we expect this would happen? Hell no. However, as we have drifted from WW2 -- when our foreign policy in Japan and Germany was truly long-term, our foreign policy has almost always been about short-term expediency - long-term be damned. It's still this way in many wars. My point is why do we expect France to just do whatever the U.S. wants when our track record is not exactly perfect?

Perhaps they want to know our intentions post-war? Perhaps they don't believe we will continue to be engaged there and will leave the mess to Europe to fix? Perhaps they see Hussein as containable (his history is that he is, because he is power-hungry rather than a religious fanatic, and he knows he can't invade anyone anymore). There are any number of reasons they may be opposed to military action to solve the Iraq problem - to expect them to agree with us "just because" isn't really fair.

2. as to whether or not we would have acted if france wanted to go to war 3 years ago...i don't know...depends on the fact situations...

If the American people did not want to go to war with Iraq, the chances of us supporting France would be somewhere between miniscule and none. We had trouble getting involved in freaking peacekeeping in Bosnia, less alone a war. The way to get French support here was to go out and make the case to the world and get the French people behind it -- this is why so many of us harped on this issue for so long. We had that opportunity and didn't use it - whether its too late, who knows. A government is not going to get involved in a war the people don't support.

but when french delegates to the UN sign a resolution that says, "disarm by date X or there will be grave consequences," you would assume that means something.

You might assume that, but this was entirely predictable the day the original resolution passed. Read all of my responses in your original thread:

http://bbs.clutchcity.net/php3/showthread.php?s=&threadid=44962

There is no surprise at all here in how France is responding, and that path was made clear the day Resolution 1441 got signed.

3. you see moral legitimacy. i don't see the moral authority when nations like Libya serve on the human rights commission. absurd.

This is not about moral legitimacy to you or me. This is about moral legitimacy to Saudi Arabians or Libyans who may potentially grow up hating us. This is about them seeing this as a U.N. action -- a body which they are a part of -- as opposed to an American action. The reason so many people hate us in the world is that they see us as an imperialist bully -- the point of making this a UN action is to eliminate that issue. It worked extremely well in 1991, and would work here if we actually made any effort to make the case for war over the past 4-6 months.

I think it's extremely important to do everything possible that a new generation of people don't grow up hating us. I don't care to give terror organizations a whole new crop of potential recruits. At some point, we're going to realize that the war on terror isn't going to be won entirely militarily - it hasn't worked against Palestinians, the IRA, the Chechnyans or anyone else. It's only going to be won by changing the minds of the people they attempt to recruit.

4. again...i have no problem seeking cooperation from other nations...but not at the expense of our own national interests. yes, we have to build alliances. and yes, the united states does bargain from a position of power economically and militarily. i don't want us to be imperialistic...i don't want us out seizing oil for the hell of it...but if there's a legitimate national security interest or an interest abroad we deem worthy of protection, then protect it. even if that means going on the offensive. that's job 1 of the federal government for me.

I agree completely here. If we've determined that Iraq is threat to us (and we have), fine - invade them. But we could be doing this far more effectively if we had pursued it through an international strategy rather than starting out with "we're attacking, whether anyone else likes it or not". Speak softly and carry a big stick - other nations don't like to be pushed around. Bush doesn't seem to understand that.

waiting on security councils to keep inspecting when they have solid evidence that inspections are being evaded is useless and dangerous.

Do you think we should be invading North Korea? If not, why not?