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

[John Baldridge]

C. G. Estabrook wrote:

>[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. 
>
>***
>
>
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