More (Entirely Warranted) UN Bashing
The United Nations has revealed itself to be worse than the League of Nations it replaced. The league, after all, was a dead letter after it failed to stop Italy's invasion of Abyssinia in 1936. The UN is not just failing to stop an aggressor, but is actively thwarting the US insistence on doing so.Or here's George Will:
Every moment that the US continues to indulge the UN and grovel for the vote of such bastions of international legitimacy as Guinea and Cameroon serves only to further legitimize a corrupt system and give Saddam more time to plan ways to kill American troops....
Luckily, speaking of cards, the French seem to have overplayed their hand.... In the aftermath of this debacle, the US should simply rely upon "coalitions of the willing," leaving the UN isolated and not the United States. [Jerusalem Post, 3/14/03]
The United Nations is not a good idea badly implemented, it is a bad idea....If only Will recognized that it's not fundamentally the consent of the governed, but the protection of individual rights, that confers legitimacy on a government.
[The] phrase ... "the international community" ... is oxymoronic because "community" denotes unity based on shared political interests and cultural values....
The United Nations is premodern because it is unaccountable and irresponsible: It claims power not legitimized by the recurring consent of periodically consulted constituencies of the governed. Inebriated by self-approval, the United Nations ... a collection of regimes of less than uniform legitimacy, has anointed itself the sole arbiter of what are legitimate military actions. And it has claimed a duty to leash the only nation that has the power to enforce U.N. resolutions. How long will that nation's public be willing to pay one-quarter of the United Nations' bills? [Washington Post, 3/13/03]
Even Max Kampelman, chairman emeritus of Freedom House and former chairman of the American United Nations Association, is bashing the UN:
To mention Cambodia, Congo, Somalia, China, North Korea, Kosovo, and Chechnya is to list only a portion of the human tragedies in our midst. That list defines the inadequacies and failures of the United Nations.Kampelman's criticisms are valid only insofar as they illustrate the U.N.'s fecklessness; implicit in them, however, is the concession that the U.N.'s mission is a noble one. Later, he writes, "A strong case may be made for the existence of an international body to which all of the world's states, democratic and authoritarian, belong. Discussion and constructive exchange may flow from it."
In 1995, we persuaded the United Nations, after great effort, to concern itself with the Balkans. European stability was being challenged. What we remember from that effort is that the United Nations assured the Bosnian Muslims that they could assemble in Srebrenica, a so-called "safe area." Eight thousand Bosnian Muslims were massacred there while U.N. forces ignored the tragedy a few miles away.
North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong Il, has inflicted a holocause on his people. Defectors and observers have estimated that more than 1 million people have starved to death in brutal Gulag-type camps. This catastrophe has created a flood of refugees into China, where an estimated 360,000 refugees may now be hiding in an effort to escape the brutalities at home. A U.N. Refugee Commission exists which is fully aware of this human catastrophe. China, however, says that these tragic human beings are "economic migrants" and "not refugees." China is clearly in violation of U.N. conventions and protocols. Where is the United Nations? It is certainly not challenging China, a major U.N. power.... [New York Sun, 3/14/03]
To the contrary: This is precisely the root of the U.N.s impracticality and of its moral bankruptcy. It is not possible to allow "all of the world's states" to belong to an organization without conceding the legitimacy of those states. Such an organization thereby confers legitimacy on the very dictatorships it needs be pledged to exterminate, if it were to address the "human catastrophes" Kampelman mentions. Dictatorship is the root cause of these crises; evading the cause means perpetuating the effect.
Cowboys: Make the Most of It, cont’d.
Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday said maybe the image of Bush being a traditional American cowboy as painted by his critics abroad was not such a bad one.
"The notion that the president is a cowboy, I don't know, as a Westerner, I think that's not necessarily a bad idea," Cheney told NBC's "Meet the Press" program. "I think the fact of the matter is, he cuts to the chase, he is very direct, and I find that very refreshing." [Reuters, 3/16/03]
South Korea: Instant Backbone
Thank goodness Don Rumsfeld appears to know something about the principle of the sanction of the victim. After withdrawing our sanction, look what happened:The anti-American demonstrations here have suddenly gone poof. U.S. soldiers are walking the streets of Seoul again without looking over their shoulders. The official line from the South Korean government is: Yankees stay here.
Opposition to U.S. troops in South Korea that seemed to be boiling over has quieted dramatically in recent weeks, because of new threats from North Korea and a suggestion from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that U.S. troops may be cut and repositioned.
Resentment toward the U.S. government, however, has hardly disappeared....But the mainstream South Korean public seemed sobered by Rumsfeld's remarks last week that the Pentagon might reduce its force of 37,000 troops and move some of them away from the front lines at the Demilitarized Zone, the frontier with North Korea.
The Korean critics "went up to the cliff, peered over, and then pulled back," said Scott Snyder, the head in Seoul of the Asia Foundation, a private, nongovernmental, grant-making organization....Whatever the motivation, the prime minister of South Korea's two-week-old government made an unusual public plea to the U.S. ambassador on March 6 not to remove any troops until the current tensions with North Korea over its nuclear program are resolved. [Washington Post, 3/14/03]
Obstructing a just war for oil?
One of the Left's big stupid lies about the upcoming Iraqi war is that it is a war for oil, or as they so cleverly and orginally put it, "No blood for oil." That the US has never gained a value from a war--except to stop an aggressor--and that the US could have clearly taken over the Iraqi, Kuwaiti, and even Saudi fields in 1991, is of course something that the Left refuses to acknowledge, and hopes the rest of retards won't, either. (That is, of course how the Left views average Americans: we've retards to them.)So how about this. . . Obstructing a just war for oil? I don't think that's the motive in play, but it is far more conceivable than accusing the US of going to war for oil.
WASHINGTON, March 14 (UPI) -- French and Russian oil and gas contracts signed with the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq "will not be honored," Barhim Salih, a leading Iraqi Kurdish official, said in Washington Friday, just before a series of high-level meetings with Bush administration officials.
"A new Iraqi government should not honor any of these contracts, signed against the interests of the Iraqi people. The new Iraqi government should respect those who stood by us, and not those who stood beside the dictator," added Salih, who is prime minister in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan government that controls Iraq's eastern Kurdish area.
Russian and French oil corporations have each signed draft contracts with Iraq, to come into force only when the United Nations sanctions are lifted, for exploration, development and exploitation of the country's energy resources -- which geologists believe may be the world's second largest after Saudi Arabia. The value of the draft contracts, if fully taken up, is estimated to have a potential of more than $20 billion.