From: Terry W. Colvin (fortean1@mindspring.com)
Date: Wed Apr 30 2003 - 19:52:15 MDT
The United Nations: Unfit to govern
Mark Steyn
National Post
Monday, April 28, 2003
Iraq: Should the UN have "a" vital role, as Messrs. Bush and Blair
have suggested? Or should it have "the" vital role, as M. Chirac is
demanding?
If you want the short answer to that question, consider the matter of
whether UN sanctions should now be lifted, so that Iraqis can sell
their oil and start rebuilding their country. Here is the official
Russian response:
"This decision cannot be automatic," says the Foreign Minister with a
straight face. "For the Security Council to take this decision, we
need to be certain whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or
not."
Got that? Last month, the Russians were opposed to war on the grounds
that there was no proof Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. This
month, the Russians are opposed to lifting sanctions on the grounds
that there's no proof Iraq doesn't have weapons of mass destruction.
There are a few striped-pants masochists in the State Department who
enjoy this sort of thing and have spent the last four weeks pining
for M. Chirac to walk all over them in steel-tipped stilettos one
more time. But most Americans, given a choice between being locked in
Security Council negotiations with the Russians, French and Germans
or being fed feet-first into one of Saddam's industrial shredders,
would find it a tough call.
You don't have to be a genius to see that, since September 11th, we
have entered a transitional phase in world affairs. But reasonable
people are prone to reasonableness and, as I mentioned the other day,
they're especially vulnerable to the seductive power of inertia in
human affairs. The wish not to have to update one's Rolodex burns
fiercely in the political breast. Brent Scowcroft, George Bush Sr.'s
National Security Advisor, wanted to stick with the Soviet Union even
after the Politburo had given up on it. The European Union was
committed to the preservation of Yugoslavia even when there had
ceased to be a Yugoslavia to preserve. In the Middle East, clinging
to the status quo even as it's melting and dripping on to your shoes
is one reason why the region is now a problem. You may recall G. W.
Hunt's famous 19th-century London music-hall song, the one that
introduced a new word for the kind of militant patriotism most
distasteful to the enlightened soul:
"We don't want to fight, but, by jingo if we do,
We've got the ships, we've got the men,
we've got the money too ..."
What's often overlooked is what all this flag-waving was in aid of:
"We've fought the bear before
And while we're Britons true
The Russians shall not have Constantinople."
Why? Because the British coveted it? Not at all. Her Majesty's
Government was interested in cherrypicking the odd isle and emirate
-- Cyprus here, Oman there -- but, other than that, they were
committed to maintaining the Ottoman Empire: all that jingoistic
rabble-rousing not for British glory but just to keep some other
fellows' simpleton sultan on his throne. The Middle East is in its
present condition in part because the European powers kept propping
up the Turkish Empire decades after it had ceased to be prop-up-able.
It would have been much better for all concerned if Britain had got
its hands on Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia in the 1870s rather than
four decades later. But, even in the later stages of the Great War,
after the British had comprehensively sliced and diced Turkey from
top to toe, London's official position was that somehow the Ottoman
Empire should be glued back together and propped up till the next war.
Now another Middle Eastern war has come and gone, and the
bien-pensants are anxious that once again an obsolescent institution
be glued back together and propped in position. This time it's the
UN. The editors of Britain's Spectator concede it has more than its
share of "irritating do-gooders," but surely even that's a euphemism:
The do-gooders are, in fact, do-badders. The "oil-for-palaces"
program (as Tommy Franks calls it) is a grotesque boondoggle even by
UN standards: It was good for bureaucrats, good for Saddam's European
bankers, good for his British stooge George Galloway, but bad for the
Iraqi people. A humanitarian operation meant to help a dictator's
beleagured subjects has instead enriched the UN by over $1-billion
(officially) in "administrative" costs. There's no oversight, no
auditing, nothing most businesses would recognize as a legitimate
invoice, and, although non-essential items can only be approved by
the Secretary-General himself, Kofi Annan (Mister Legitimacy) has
personally signed off on practically anything Saddam requested,
including "boats," from France.
You don't have to agree (though I do) with George Jonas that the UN
is a fully fledged member of the axis of evil to recognize that
there's little point in going to war to install yet another branch
office of UNSCAM. If the problem is America's image in the Arab
world, in what way does it help to confine the Stars and Stripes
brand to unpleasant things like bombs while insisting all the nice
post-war reconstructive stuff be clearly labelled with the UN flag?
If the answer is that that's the price you pay for healing the rift
with Old Europe, that presupposes Old Europe is interested in healing
it. Tony Blair may be keen, but the Continentals have different
agendas. Will the Belgian government approve the complaint against
Tommy Franks for "genocide"? The petition accuses the General of
"inaction in the face of hospital pillaging," which apparently meets
the Belgian definition of genocide. Unlike the deaths of over three
million people, which is the lowball figure for those who've died in
the current civil war in the Congo -- or, as I still like to think of
it, the Belgian Congo.
The Congo's civil war is everything the NIONists (Not In Our Name)
claimed Bush's war would be: There were more civilian deaths in a few
hours in Ituri province last week than in the entire Iraq campaign;
while the blowhards at Oxfam and co -- the Big Consciences lobby --
insist on pretending that Iraq is a humanitarian disaster, there's an
actual humanitarian disaster going on in the Congo, complete with
millions of children dead from disease and malnutrition. While the
lefties warned that Ariel Sharon would use the cover of the Iraq war
to slaughter the Palestinians, the Congolese are being slaughtered,
and you don't need any cover. Because nobody cares. Because no
arrogant Americans or sinister Zionists are involved.
The Congo is a useful reminder of the laziness of the term "Western
imperialism." There's Belgian imperialism, which, as the Congo
continues to demonstrate, is a sewer. And then there's Anglo-Saxon
nation-building, which, from India to Belize, works quite well, given
the chance. St Lucia, Mauritius, Tuvalu and Papua New Guinea, to
pluck four at random, have enjoyed the attributes of a free society a
lot longer than, say, Greece, Portugal and Spain, which were
dictatorships a quarter-century ago. The argument of my old friend
Ghazi Algosaibi, the Saudi Minister of Water, that freedom is
"European" is not borne out by the facts. If Latin Americans, Pacific
islanders, and even the Muslims of south Asia can live in liberty,
it's surely a little racist to suggest that Arabs are uniquely
incapable of so doing. Had Britain begun administering Mesopotamia in
1877 instead of 1917, we wouldn't even be asking the question.
But if you want to turn a long-shot into a surefire failure, there's
no better way than handing post-war Iraq from the Americans to the UN
-- the successors to the Belgian school of nation-building. At best,
you'll end up with Cambodia, where the UN has colluded in the
nullification of democracy, or the Balkans, where once-functioning
jurisdictions are reduced to the level of geopolitical tenements with
the UN as slum landlord in perpetuity. At worst, you'll wind up with
the West Bank "refugee" "camps,"the most extreme reminder of how the
UN has little interest in solving problems, only in establishing
bureaucracies to manage them. Washington should ignore the French,
dare the Russians to veto, let the Iraqis turn on the spigots, and
pay no attention to "do-gooders."
-- Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@mindspring.com > Alternate: < fortean1@msn.com > Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html > Sites: * Fortean Times * Mystic's Haven * TLCB * U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program ------------ Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List TLCB Web Site: < http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org >[Vietnam veterans, Allies, CIA/NSA, and "steenkeen" contractors are welcome.]
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