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Contributors
Bruce S. Thornton - Contributor
Bruce Thornton
is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and co-author
of Bonfire
of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished
Age and author of Greek
Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter
Books). His most recent book is Searching
for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (Encounter
Books). [go to Thornton index]
 Why
The UN?
American interests are ill-serviced by the failed institution…
[Bruce S. Thornton] 6/10/05
Every crisis is an opportunity, a time when the fissures and
cracks of received wisdom and worn-out habits of thought are
exposed. The years since the terrorist attacks on 9/11 have been
such a time for the United States. Decades of intellectual corruption,
moral flabbiness, and blithe indifference to the reality of a
dangerous, unpredictable world all culminated on 9/11. Yet despite
the gruesome severity of that lesson, the same bad habits persist.
Nothing demonstrates this truth more clearly than the unwillingness
of many Americans, including the current administration, to accept
once and for all that the United Nations has outlived whatever
use it may have had as an institution for defusing crises and
managing conflict.
The UN's failures just in the last twenty years are legion--in
Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, and currently in Sudan, hundreds of
thousands have been brutalized, mutilated, raped, and slaughtered,
often right under the noses of UN forces and observers. This
failure to prevent violence and keep the peace reflects the false
assumption that created the United Nations. Like its earlier
incarnation, the League of Nations, the UN was the fruit of an
old Enlightenment dream: that negotiation, diplomacy, and rational
discussion could manage crises and avoid the use of force in
settling conflict. Such global parliaments had been the stuff
of numerous utopias over the years, a dream particularly attractive
for those horrified by the nationalist-inspired carnage of modern
warfare and enamored of the idea that humans could progress beyond
war and violence, which were considered primitive vestiges of
a less civilized world rather than eternal realities of human
nature.
But that dream is itself based on a questionable assumption:
that rational negotiation, discussion, and appeals to self-interest
and material benefits can trump force. In fact, rational discussion
and negotiation work only when everybody at the table respects
them, bargains in good faith, and sincerely desires peaceful
coexistence. Unfortunately, history teaches us that for those
who respect only force and see it as an instrument for realizing
their ambitions, or for those driven by irrational motives like
fear or the lust for domination, such discussion, diplomacy,
and negotiation will be mere tactics for furthering those strategic
goals. Finally, negotiated settlements and resolutions are only
as good as the credible threat of force backing them. Lacking
that credible threat, and cursed with these false assumptions
about human nature and the self-interested behavior of states,
the UN could only degenerate into a politicized body in which
every state sought to advance its own interests.
The sorry history of the UN demonstrates precisely this truism.
When it hasn't been a cash-cow for venal international bureaucrats,
a venue for the machinations of corrupt autocracies, an anti-Semitic
and anti-American megaphone, or a tool for furthering the totalitarian
designs of Communist nations, the UN has been good only for issuing
high-minded resolutions that it can't or won't back up, all the
while corrupt regimes pursue their oppressive ends. Nothing shows
this corrupt hypocrisy more than the UN's obsessive demonization
of tiny Israel. Because of this obsession, the UN's Commission
on Human Rights forbids Israel's membership but currently includes
notorious violators of human rights such as Cuba, China, Pakistan,
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe. And remember, despite rescinding,
without comment or apology, its despicable Resolution 3379 equating
Zionism with racism, that lie resurfaced at a UN conference in
Durban in 2001, and periodically is repeated by Arab nations
like Syria. Indeed, the UN's hostility to Israel--almost 30%
of its resolutions have been devoted to that tiny beleaguered
state--at a time when oppression and slaughter have drenched
the world in blood, demonstrates more than anything its moral
bankruptcy and uselessness.
The UN's failure as a force for order and justice in the world
was clearly manifest in its indulgence of Saddam Hussein and
its paralysis in dealing with his obvious ambitions to acquire
weapons of mass destruction. For more than a decade, Hussein
violated UN resolution after UN resolution, sixteen in all. He
demonstrated his scorn and contempt for the UN and its ideals,
booting out the weapons inspectors after years of harassing and
deceiving them. And he corrupted the UN's Food for Oil program,
which attempted to ease the suffering of the Iraqi people caused
by Hussein's intransigence and brutal disregard for his own people,
whom he watched suffer and starve as he spent billions on vulgar
palaces, gaudy mosques, weapons, and bribes to UN officials.
You would think, then, that the UN would have been eager and
grateful for action that would show its resolutions really mean
something and are to be ignored only at great cost, particularly
since the United States would be carrying most of the military
and financial load. Instead, the UN worked against such a demonstration,
even though its own credibility was at stake. The UN's alternative?
Pass yet another toothless resolution giving a failed inspection
process more time, ignoring the obvious question why Hussein,
having ignored several previous resolutions in the past, would
have respected any new ones.
The UN, in short,
did everything in its power to help Hussein create a face-saving
illusion of "compliance." It was
content to continue being Hussein's chump, subjected to his WMD
bait-and-switch, in the end perhaps thrown a few weapons crumbs--yet
never allowed anywhere near the weapons and facilities Hussein
had been secretly developing, as we knew after 1995 from the
testimony of his son-in-law Hussein Kamel. Meanwhile the veto-bearing
members of the Security Council such as Russia and France could
continue doing multi-billion dollar business with Hussein's regime,
and Saddam could continue his quest for weapons of mass destruction.
The President's tortuous attempts to work through the UN accomplished
nothing except to give Hussein several months in which to destroy
or transport to other countries his WMD's and facilities before
the war began in March 2003.
Given how useless
the UN actually is, then, why do we continue to hear the ritualistic
calls for working within UN "mandates" and "resolutions," for
building "coalitions" of dubious "allies" sanctioned
by the UN, and for avoiding the horror of "unilateralism"?
One answer can be found in the assumption frequently lurking
beneath such demands: that the United States and its power are
untrustworthy and prone to abuse, that America's record of racist,
colonialist, and imperialist interventions and adventures abroad
demands that it be carefully watched by international monitors
and limited by various international agreements and protocols.
Consider the following
statement made by California Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein
in the months before the war against
Hussein began: "I'm one that has been very concerned about
a pre-emptive unilateral attack in terms of America's perceived
'imperialist' culture that this administration has developed." That
is, our foreign policy should be determined by the delusional
perceptions of other countries rather than by our own principles
or interests. What the senator seemed not to realize is that
this melodramatic fable of American "imperialist" wickedness,
apart from being a lie, is itself a useful tool for serving the
interests not just of our enemies, but of our so-called friends
and allies, and so will not be discarded no matter what we do
or which party is in power.
This brings us to another pernicious function of the UN--allowing
weaker states, many of them dysfunctional and tyrannical, to
interfere with and hamstring America's actions in order to serve
various agendas that have nothing to do with America's interests--.
A militarily weak Europe, for example, chafing over its lost
prestige and envious of the success of a nation created by European
riff-raff, finds the UN a perfect instrument for thwarting US
interests and advancing European ones. As with NATO, in the UN
European pretensions to moral superiority can be paraded while
American military muscle does all the heavy lifting, as happened
when American bombers stopped the slaughter in Bosnia that took
place on Europe's doorstep.
Again, the lead-up to the war in Iraq made manifest the duplicity
of Security Council members like Russia and France. Quite simply,
it was not in the economic or political interests of the French
to remove Hussein from power, no matter how brutal or dangerous
he was. Thus the French, led by their foppish foreign minister
Dominique de Villepin, undermined the United States at every
turn, using the threat of its Security Council veto not just
to hinder the United States, but to compromise the Security Council's
own Resolution 1441, which tepidly authorized the use of force
to compel Hussein to live up to his agreements and previous UN
resolutions.
What all this behavior demonstrates is that the UN does not
function on principle but rather on politics and the interests
of the members. This truth renders even more disgusting the assumption
that America needs some international body to watch over US behavior,
as though foreigners are more principled than Americans. But
America does not need to be monitored by unelected European functionaries
or United Nations bureaucrats. The greatest danger to the world
today does not come from American power, the use of which has
historically been remarkably restrained. In actual fact, America's
power represents the best hope the world has for creating stable
political, social, and economic orders that will benefit the
greatest number of people and liberate them from oppression by
thugs and gangs disguised as governments. Grant all the charges
against America ever leveled by every Chomskyean lunatic, and
American power still has done much more good in the world than
ill.
What makes America unique is not the perfection of its people,
who are subject to the same flaws and mistakes as all humans.
Rather, it is America's political principles and institutions--a
government that balances and checks power and interests, civilian
control of the military, a vibrant civic society, and a tradition
of free and open critical inquiry. These and the good sense of
America's citizens will provide the best restraint on the arrogance
and abuse of power, certainly one better than the self-interested
machinations of unelected UN delegates and representatives accountable
to no one other than the regimes that send them to New York.
So instead of seeking the approval and sanction of a weak and
morally exhausted UN, we should be confident that our own political
virtues and institutions will rightly guide America in the pursuit
of our principles, security, and interests. The real issue we
should be discussing, then, is not John Bolton's suitability
for being the US representative to the UN, but the UN's suitability
for advancing the interests of the United States. tOR
copyright
2005 Bruce S. Thornton
Searching for Joaquin
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Greek Ways
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Bonfire of the Humanities
by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton |
Plagues of the Mind
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality
by Bruce S. Thornton |
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