[Peace-discuss] More tho'ts/Sadam capture

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Regarding Jenifer and John's reflections on the UN, here's a piece by
Alex Cockburn that concludes with the position that now seems to me
correct: "Please, my friends, no more earnest calls for 'a UN role,' at
least not until the body is radically reconstituted along genuinely
democratic lines. As far as Iraq is concerned, all occupying forces should
leave, with all contracts concerning Iraq's national assets and resources
written across the last nine months repudiated, declared null and void,
illegal under international covenant."  --CGE]
 

The UN: It Should Be Late; It Never Was Great

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his incomparable memoirs that Soviet admirals,
like admirals everywhere, loved battleships, because they could get piped
aboard in great style amid the respectful hurrahs of their crews. It's the
same with the UN, now more than ever reduced to the servile function of
after-sales service provider for the United States, on permanent call as
the mop-up brigade. It would be a great step forward if several big Third
World nations were soon to quit the United Nations, declaring that it has
no political function beyond ratifying the world's present distasteful
political arrangements.

The trouble is that national political elites in pretty much every
UN-member country--now 191 in all--yearn to live in high style for at
least a few years and in some case for decades, on the Upper East side of
Manhattan and to cut a dash in the General Assembly. They have a deep
material stake in continuing membership, even though in the case of small,
poor countries the prodigious outlays on a UN delegation could be far
better used in some decent domestic application, funding orphanages or
local crafts back home.

Barely a day goes by without some Democrat piously demanding "an increased
role" for the UN in whatever misadventure for which the US requires
political cover. Howard Dean has built his candidacy on clarion calls for
the UN's supposedly legitimizing assistance in Iraq. Despite the political
history of the Nineties many leftists still have a tendency to invoke the
UN as a countervailing power. When all other argument fails they fall back
on the International Criminal Court, an outfit that should by all rights
should have the same credibility as a beneficial institution as the World
Bank or Interpol.

On the issue of the UN I can boast a record of matchless consistency. As a
toddler I tried to bar my father's exit from the nursery of our London
flat when he told me he was leaving for several weeks to attend, as
diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Worker, the founding conference of
the UN in San Francisco. Despite my denunciation of all such
absence-prompting conferences (and in my infancy there were many), he did
go.

He wrote later in his autobiography, Crossing the Line, that "The journey
of our special train across the Middle West was at times almost
intolerably moving. Our heavily laden special had some sort of notice
prominently displayed on its sides indicating it was taking people to the
foundation meeting of the United Nations From towns and lonely villages
all across the plains and prairies, people would come out to line the
tracks, standing there with the flags still flying half-mast for Roosevelt
on the buildings behind them, and their eyes fixed on this train with
extraordinary intensity, as though it were part of the technical apparatus
for the performance of a miracle.On several occasions I saw a man or woman
solemnly touch the train, the way a person might touch a talisman."

It was understandable that an organization aspiring to represent All
Mankind and to espouse Peace should have excited fervent hopes in the wake
of terrible war, but the fix was in from the start, as Peter Gowan reminds
us in a spirited essay in the current New Left Review. The Rooseveltian
vision was for an impotent General Assembly with decision-making authority
vested in a Security Council without, in Gowan's words, "the slightest
claim to rest on any representative principle other than brute force", and
of course dominated by the United States and its vassals. FDR did see a
cosmopolitan role for the UN; not so Truman and Acheson who followed
Nelson Rockefeller's body-blow to the nascent UN when, as assistant
secretary of state for Latin American Affairs the latter brokered the
Chapultepec Pact in Mexico City in 1945, formalizing US dominance in the
region through the soon-to-be familiar regional military-security alliance
set up by Dean Acheson in the next period.

These days the UN has the same restraining role on the world's prime
imperial power as did the Roman Senate in the fourth century AD, when
there were still actual senators spending busy lives bustling from one
cocktail party to another, intriguing to have their sons elected quaestor
and so forth, deliberating with great self-importance and sending the
Emperor pompous resolutions on the burning issues of the day.

For a modern evocation of what those senatorial resolutions must have been
like, read the unanimous Security Council resolution on October 15 of this
year, hailing the US-created "Governing Council of Iraq", and trolling out
UN-speak to the effect that the Security Council "welcomes the positive
response of the international community to the establishment of the
broadly representative council"; "supports the Governing Council's efforts
to mobilize the people of Iraq"; "requests that the United States on
behalf of the multinational force report to the Security Council on the
efforts and progress of this force". Signed by France, Russia, China, UK,
US, Germany, Spain, Bulgaria, Chile, Mexico, Guinea, Cameroon, Angola,
Pakistan, Syria. As Gowan remarks, this brazen twaddle evokes "the seating
of Pol Pot's representatives in the UN for fourteen years after his regime
was overthrown by the DRV".

Another way of assaying the UN's role in Iraq is to remember that it made
a profit out of its own blockade and the consequent starvation of hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi babies in the 1990s. As a fee for its part in
administering the oil-for-food program, the UN helped itself to 2 per cent
off the top.(On more than one account members of the UN-approved Governing
Council, whose most conspicuous emblem is the bank-looter Ahmad Chalabi,
are demanding a far heftier skim in the present looting of Iraq's national
assets.)

Two months before the October resolution, the US's chosen instrument for
selling the Governing Council, UN Special Envoy Vieira de Mello, was blown
up in his office in Baghdad by persons with a realistic assessment of the
function of the UN. Please, my friends, no more earnest calls for "a UN
role", at least not until the body is radically reconstituted along
genuinely democratic lines. As for Iraq is concerned, all occupying forces
should leave, with all contracts concerning Iraq's national assets and
resources written across the last nine months repudiated, declared null
and void, illegal under international covenant. 

***