From: Christian Weisgerber (naddy@mips.inka.de)
Date: Thu Feb 27 2003 - 17:35:34 MST
Wei Dai <weidai@weidai.com> wrote:
> Are you sure this is an argument that you want to push? Suppose you
> succeed and everyone accepts this argument. Now if the U.S. does go to war
> without a second resolution, the U.N. is finished. On the other hand if
> everyone accepts Holbrooke's "spin" that a second resolution is not
> necessary, the U.N. will survived this episode.
There has also been the suggestion that the veto powers opposed to
a US invasion of Iraq might in the end decide not to veto it in
order to save the credibility of the Security Council, i.e. Iraq
would not be considered worth sacrificing the UN.
> I wonder if there are some in the Bush administration who would rather see
> the Security Council totally discredited so that it can create a new
> Security Council from scratch. The fact that France, a medium-sized
> country in Europe, has veto power doesn't really make sense to me,
France has a bit of military reach and a lot of influence in Africa
due to its colonial past. France has a mature nuke program. The
land based missiles were dismantled after the Soviet threat
disappeared, but there are a couple of French SSBN's floating through
the oceans, and there are nukes launched from air craft that could
be deployed from bases or the Charles de Gaulle. This may all look
very puny from the US perspective, but as seen from the p.o.v. of
the average country on this planet, it is formidable.
> Does anyone have any ideas about how the Security Council might
> be redesigned more rationally?
With nuclear proliferation looking inevitable--after all it *is*
1940's technology--the old structure looks bound to collapse, but
I have no idea how to replace it.
-- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de
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