| 114th Year, 10th Issue | Thursday, October 17, 2002 | Sparta, North Carolina |
The continuing plaint of the Idiotarians is that the US is being "unilateralist;" that we have an obligation to sell the story to the world before we do something that causes the Arab street to rise up, offends our European friends, violates "International Law" or causes uncontrollable intestinal spasms within the Middle Eastern states. Prime among the demands is the need to achieve United Nations support.
The UN has established itself as the world's premiere definer of rights — and defender of none. During the past ten years, the UN has participated in multiple peace-keeping and humanitarian operations around the globe. Without exception, every operation has been found to be overly bureaucratic and, in too many cases, supporting of corruption. UN missions have sold relief goods to the intended recipients, diverted relief supplies to the black market for personal gain, stood by while tribal massacres took place in areas under their command, actively participated in white slavery and ran prostitution rings in "protected" areas. During the Somalia action, requests for armor support for US troops were delayed for more than 18 hours by bureaucratic wrangling, and unwillingness to take responsibility. But lay aside, for the moment, the institutional inertia of the UN.
Any UN mandate relies on the willingness of the individual members to support the mission. That can conflict with state commercial or ethnic concerns. France has had a long standing commercial relationship with Iraq, including providing the first nuclear reactor to the Iraqi's, providing repair parts, and supporting Iraq's industrial capacity. France has a large resident Muslim population that the state has clearly been attempting to mollify, for fear of internal unrest. Germany has been a leading provider of equipment believed to have been incorporated into Iraq's weapons programs.
Russia has recently entered into a multi-billion dollar, multi-year agreement with Iraq to provide machinery, materials and technical support for various industrial enterprises. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria have historically paid off the terrorist element to maintain peace in their own areas of interest.
The resolve of the individual members to collectively commit to the resolution of a humanitarian crisis also has a bleak history. Rwanda and the Balkans genocide demonstrated the unwillingness of the institution to act.
In both cases, it was US pressure and involvement which ultimately led to a response. And it was British and American personnel and material which, again, carried the major load — as in Desert Storm eight years earlier. To UN bureaucratic inertia; the single largest beneficiary of business with Iraq is the UN itself. The institution is the administrator of the oil-for-food program, selling Iraqi oil and purchasing goods for Iraq, earning a 2.5 percent fee both directions, while holding billions in escrow for which the interest is unaccounted.
The bottom line — the current status of the UN and Iraq adds hundreds of millions of dollars to the UN's coffers.
What incentive, exactly, is there for the UN to support change?
Kenneth Pollack, in a recent article, succinctly expressed the difficulties with the Idiotarians' position when he wrote, "the members of the international community who bleat about the importance of collective security, multilateral diplomacy, and international law have gravely weakened all three (not to mention the U.N. Security Council) by allowing Iraq to flout them while chastising the United States (and our handful of allies) when we objected...." The same individuals, agencies and nations now screaming about our invasion plans are the very ones who undermined the present containment policy.
H.G. Wells, in 1914, addressed the anti-war arguments of today: "In the face of the history of the last forty years, [he] struggles persistently to minimize the... outrage upon civilization and to find excuses... He does this, not because he has any real passion for falsehood, but because by training, circumstance, and disposition he is passionately averse from action with the vulgar majority and from self-sacrifice in a common cause, and because he finds in the justification of [the aggressor] and, failing that, in the blackening of the Allies to an equal blackness, one line of defense against the wave of impulse that threatens to submerge his private self. But when at last that line is forced he is driven back upon others equally extraordinary. You can often find simultaneously in the same Pacifist paper, and sometimes even in the utterances of the same writer, two entirely incompatible statements. The first is that [the aggressor] is so invincible that it is useless to prolong the war since no effort of the Allies is likely to produce any material improvement in their position, and the second is that [the aggressor] is so thoroughly beaten that she is now ready to abandon militarism and make terms and compensations entirely acceptable to the countries she has forced into war."
How many times must we walk this road before we learn?
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