The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has not yet seen the evidence that the United Nations is not the world's repository of competence and virtue. Yesterday's editorial: Time is right for U.N. role in Iraq
The Bush administration decided that the United States didn't need the United Nations to wage war on Iraq and seems to have also decided that we don't need U.N. help to rebuild Iraq. Both decisions seem increasingly wrong.If the Bush administration had decided that the United States needed the United Nations' approval to remove Saddam Hussein from power, then Saddam Hussein would still be in power. Perhaps that is why the Seattle Post-Intelligencer feels that it was wrong to remove Saddam Hussein from power over the United Nations' objections.
If the United Nations were to rebuild Iraq with the same virtue and competence that it has demonstrated in other troubled parts of the world, we could expect that:
a) UN personnel would be involved in the sex trade, as they were in Bosnia and East Timor
b) UN personnel would moonlight as black marketeers, as they did during the siege of Sarajevo
c) UN "troops" would sit on their hands while hundreds of thousands of civilians are massacred, as happened in Rwanda.
d) UN "troops" would stay on the sidelines and watch a group of terrorists infiltrate a border and kidnap some people. They would also suppress the evidence, as they did in an incident at the Israel-Lebanon border.
e) The UN would keep displaced people and their descendents in "refugee camps" for more than 50 years, and sit and watch while the "refugees" turn the "refugee camps" into terrorist camps, as they have with the Palestinians.
f) The UN would appoint a member of the Ba'ath Party to head its security committee.
g) The UN would appoint a human rights abuser to be its human rights watchdog.
Okay, maybe I'm being too harsh on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Maybe they're not a bunch of ignorant dopes. Maybe they're familiar with the United Nations and approve of all of the above accomplishments.
I'm not sure if it's approval or jealousy,
Posted by: mbruce on August 18, 2003 12:27 PMUnder the tender gaze of the UN, more people died horrible deaths in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. But I forgot, in those three locations the deaths were skillfully administered by hand craftsmanship, and could only by a mighty stretch of logic be blamed on the U.S.
Nothing fits the phrase 'entangling alliances' better than attempting human rights activism in concert with the UN.
Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive on August 18, 2003 12:49 PMI'm sure you'll be glad to sacrifice a soldier a day and a billion a week for it.
Posted by: Arash on August 18, 2003 09:57 PMArash...we sacrificed 3000 Americans and upwards of $95 billion on 9/11.
We did not begin this (please spare me the usual Imperialist, Zionist cant) but we will end it.
Do not take a lesson from Vietnam, it is a false prophet.