And the UN shows once again why many think it is nothing more than an international parliament of whores:
Secretary General Kofi Annan has combined his finding that hasty elections in Iraq are not feasible before the June 30, the end of American governance, with a determination to leave to Iraqis themselves the decision on the best alternative way of restoring sovereignty, United Nations officials said today.
“The ball is back in the court of the Iraqis and the C.P.A., with the U.N. willing to be called in to help as requested,” Mr. Annan’s spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said, referring to the American-run Coalition Provisional Authority.
Thanks for nothing. At least they are staying somewhat out of the way. Like the Democratic party, every time I see the UN given an opportunity to lead, they just drop the ball.
dg
You say the UN is weak. What do you propose it do? It is just what is says–a union of nations, some with more power than others.
If the powerful nations mock the rules of the UN, then there is no hope. But like it or not, nations have to work together or there will never be peace. What happened after W W 1? The League of Nations collapsed because the nation that tried to form it (US) was the very nation to vote against joining it. And guess what happened? W W 2.
It is best to work within the UN for the most part.
Dean
dg:
That is a horrible oversimplification, at best. Yes, the absence of the United States from the League of Nations dealt it a heavy blow.
But the conduct of the LoN in a number of crises further doomed it. Frex, the utter fecklessness of the LoN in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the imposition of a useless arms embargo on Spain during their civil war (when only the Republican were affected), the inability of the LoN to punish Japan when the latter undertook first the Mukden Incident of 1931 and then the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 1937 (and the intervening period of steady grignotage of Chinese territory), all were equal nails in the LoN’s coffin.
In all those incidents, the United States did not circumvent LoN initiatives, indeed, FDR tried very hard in most to get the League to act.
In this, you can see echoes of today—the inability/unwillingness of France and Britain to act to stop fascism is paralleled by a similar inability/unwillingness by France and Germany (and Russia) to act to stop Islamofascism and Saddam Hussein generally. In both instances, resolutions were passed that were then neither enforced nor supported.
Then, as now, the institution could not be healed by a single state. Only a willingness by all to act together was going to improve the situation. But then, as now, the western democracies proved unwilling to do so.
Ken Hahn
Please tell me one useful thing the UN has done in nearly 60 years. The affection for this corrupt and meaningless organization still confuses me. On the other hand, I’d really like to pull the US out of Haiti. Perhaps the UN could take over there.
Kimmitt
Eradicated smallpox. Next goddamn question.
Dean
Kimmitt:
Are you really going to suggest that the WHO could not exist without the United Nations?? I take it, then, the ICRC, frex, could not have done the job. Or is the ICRC part of the UN?
Note that international air travel developed free and clear of the UN, the Warsaw agreements governing use of English, etc., being developed apart from the UN (and, interestingly, separate from the Cold War, as well).
I’m curious, didn’t the national health services have something to do with it? And if yellow fever or malaria remain uneradicated, does this mean that the UN is failing?
Yes, the UN had something to do w/ it. But to argue that no UN=smallpox lives on is, at best, an oversimplification, don’t you think?
Kimmitt
You asked for something the UN did. I answered. The fact that some other agency could conceivably have solved the same problem is goalpost-moving.
M. Scott Eiland
“Please tell me one useful thing the UN has done in nearly 60 years.”
It gave the US a mechanism by which it could easily move to oppose the invasion of South Korea without getting a declaration of war from Congress, and get some useful–if not indispensible–material assistance in the process. Of course, the only reason this worked was that the Soviet Union was in the midst of a temper tantrum about the refusal of the UN to recognize Red China and had left their UNSC chair empty, so this can’t really be called a case of the UN working as usual–it was a fluke that the US was able to get the vote through without a UNSC veto from the USSR.
Jane
And the Iraqi bloggers are saying: Why the hell did anybody invite the UN to deal with the elections…These are the same people who stood by for years.
Jane
Re small pox: it would be nice if someone could bang some sense into the Nigerians (no the polio vaccine is not an Infidel plot to sterilize all the Muslim children) so that polio could be irradicated by 2005 as planned instead of being on the rise in Nigeria and surrounding countries.
gay and bdsm
Pacta sunt servanda – Agreements are to be kept. (Cicero)