The ineffective U.N….
The recent vote on censure against Syria torpedoed by China and Russia only emphasizes how ineffective the U.N. has become. The last U.S. president to ask the U.N. to get behind him when going to war was Papa Bush (the Gulf War). For Iraq, Baby Bush even changed a long standing U.S. tradition and launched a preemptive strike without allies’ or U.N. permission. For Libya, Obama turned to NATO, not the U.N.
What’s happening in Syria is similar to but not the same as what happened in Libya before NATA intervened. Gadhafi’s record as a brutal dictator had few equals. Certainly Syria’s present ruler is not yet in his league, although father and son together come close. Of course, this will all change if Assad makes good on his promise to use WMDs, mostly stockpiled biological and chemical weapons (his fledgling nuclear efforts were taken out by Israel—with help from the CIA?). So far his threat is only directed towards “foreign invaders.”
It would have been better to have the censure from the U.N., but Obama might play his NATO cards again as the Syrian opposition becomes stronger. Many defections and the latest suicide bombing that killed Syria’s defense minister have weakened Assad’s rule and emboldened the rebel forces. It’s not clear what China and Russia have to gain by supporting this Syrian strong man who eventually will fall unless they two superpowers intervene. This is unlikely. It’s possible that the Chinese-Russian position is just a feeble attempt to smack the U.S. around a bit—Mr. Obama has shown strength in foreign policy and counterterrorism and the Chinese, in particular, are suffering an economic downturn.
All these Arab Spring events have played out on a stage where the U.N. is irrelevant. Has Susan Rice, the “other Rice,” wasted her time in the U.N. as it continues to be just a debating society at best? This club of countries sometimes wishing for a peaceful world receives most of its financing from the U.S. Is this a masochistic contribution that enables every other country to complain, deride, and otherwise criticize the organization’s benefactor? Its member representatives point fingers at each other too and rant in many languages all nicely translated into diplomatic double-speak. Resolutions proposed by the U.S. often fail; resolutions against the U.S. often pass, at least in the General Assembly.
We have paid for most of the U.N. from the day it was born like some Phoenix rising from the ash of WW II to become a ponderous bureaucracy of bloviating bureaucrats. If not the worst bureaucracy in the world, it ranks high on the list. Why do we keep supporting it? There seems to be less reason to support it than NATO. One could say that the U.S. either has a penchant for spending money foolishly or an inferiority complex as a young nation relative to the nations of Europe with their centuries of culture. Of course, Europe also had centuries of bloody warfare and probably would have had more without the U.S. covering their butts. This is true about the rest of the world as well.
China, the biggest naysayer in the U.N.’s recent history (Russia is a close second, even measured after the fall of the Soviet Union), has a cultural history longer than Europe’s and more tainted by acts of violent bloodshed which include the latest T parties—Taiwan, Tiananmen, and Tibet. Its history of human rights abuses make their membership in this peacekeeping organization laughable, as happens with many other countries.
But peacekeeping, even the potential for it, is precisely why we must support the U.N. We are investing in the dream of peace. As ineffective as it is, the U.N. is the only place where diplomats from diverse nations, even nations that hate each other, can come together and talk. Both conservatives and progressives in the U.S. tend to recognize this even if they decry the inefficiencies. Other nations don’t recognize it at their peril because talk is always cheaper than war. Financing debates that are often the casualties of heated emotions is a better alternative than going to war with its subsequent loss of lives.
Peace might be an allusive goal but dreams for a peaceful world should always be encouraged. In this 2012 campaign year, let’s get both candidates to pledge continued support of the U.N. Dubya’s administration almost ended our relationship with this august body of bureaucrats. I have written about some of that administration’s concerns above. We should never forget that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor occurred before the U.N. was founded. And we should also never forget that for many Iraqis, we were the ones responsible for their version of Pearl Harbor. That’s a sobering thought.
And so it goes….
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