When the world's nations gather to debate how best to conduct relations
between themselves, it is only logical that a worldwide meeting place
based on fairness and equality should be the forum. For half a
century, that place has been the United Nations. However, modern times
have shown that the idealistic solution has severe and sometimes
catastrophic limitations.
The spectacular failures of the U.N. have shown that its ability to
counter malicious minded intent to deceive the organization is almost
non-existent. In addition, its fairness doctrine which assume
all nations participate with equal authority does not take into account
that not all nations recognize the need for fairness, indeed some use
that rather naive approach as a weapon for delay and obfuscation.
The result is the cry for reform within the U.N. and indeed, by some,
for abandonment of the old ideal for a much more robust and new
concept. Yet few have much to offer in the way of an adequate
replacement. Still the debate continues, touching on issues that
were voiced at its creation following World War II.
Clearly no nation can or should depend upon the U.N. for its security.
After the decade long ineffective U.N. debate over Iraq and the
inability to disarm or control Iraq, and the subsequent U.S. led
Coalition's ouster of Saddam Hussein, the debate has
crystallized.
U.N. WMD weapons inspections teams appear to have functioned well up
until 1998, and despite claims that they in fact disarmed Iraq, the
locating of ballistic missiles with ranges far beyond those claimed by
Iraq, many still support the classic and erroneous notion that
sanctions were working in Iraq. The inability for the U.N. to
deal with human rights abuses around the world and especially in Iraq
further highlight the irrational believe that the U.N. is a paragon of
success.
The idealist's view is that "almost working" or "pretty good" sanctions
are indeed actual working
sanctions. Therein lies the problem with an idealist's view of
the
world, and why some could believe the U.N. is an effective tool against
the deceitful and malicious nation.
This is also why depending upon the U.N. for critical negotiations in
the areas of WMD is doomed to failure. Take for instance, the
current situation in Iran, and reflect upon the revelations regarding
Libya. If the U.S. had not led the effort to place Libya under
sanctions and continue diplomatic pressure backed with a hand wave at
the Iraqi invasion, in a few years Libya would be in a similar
position as Iran today. Some believe that the U.S. led operation
in Iraq and the War on Terror in response to the 9/11 attacks on the
U.S. forced Libya's hand.
Idealists, of course, assume nothing the U.S. has done is responsible,
and in fact are certain that it was the mighty organization the U.N.
which forced Libya to capitulate. A more rational opinion would
be based on the existence of both pressures, verifying the carrot and
the stick approach utilized in every major policy change in the world
since the end of World War II. The actual reality is far
different than either. The U.S. has used the Iraq invasion as the
stick, and its own direct pressure of diplomacy and not the U.N.
sanctions to bring Libya to the current improvements.
What are the failures of the U.N.? They are numerous and reflect,
perhaps, an overly biased indicator of the body's usefulness. In
the end, however, such a judgment requires an understanding of
idealism and how it reflects upon our world. We should caution
that the U.N. has been tasked to do things it, through its design,
cannot accomplish.
In reality idealism serves an extremely important purpose in the grand
scheme of things. When tempered with milestones and credible progress
to measure reality, idealism sets the goals for what we aspire to
realize. However, idealism must be tempered with reality in order
to be useful. To aspire is wonderful, to fail in duty is
not. They duty to protect the U.S. from attack from the Soviet
Union was an ideal that served well the United States government, both
in terms of intelligence gathering and analysis, as well as the U.S.
military programs intended to fight off the growing threat should it
turn from potential for attack to the reality of attack. However,
that very same ideal did not serve the U.S. when it came to protecting
our homeland from attack by a foe happy to lurk in the shadows, steal
aboard jet aircraft and use them as suicidal missiles. Why then
was the
ideal of countering the Soviet Union so flawed as to allow the worst
attack on the U.S. homeland to occur?
Simply put, the ideal was not constantly tested with reality. In
fact, the reality was that the intelligence services in the U.S. were
designed not even to offset the Soviet Threat, but a future surprise
attack like Pearl Harbor. Indeed, that attack did come, not from
the 1950s scenario of attack from outside the U.S., but from
infiltrators within our borders. Even our much vaunted military failed
in that respect, our fighters heading out to borders over the oceans
instead of being vectored to Washington and Virginia.
The irony of the situation is that infiltrators and
sleeper cells were one of the "new" threats proposed within the
intelligence community later as the Soviet Threat was analyzed.
Unfortunately, the reality of a rising effective and maliciousness of
al-Qaeda had not penetrated the government's threat response
mechanism.
And certainly, nothing the U.N. has done or will ever do in the
future
could have prevented the attacks on the U.S. In fact, the U.N.
cannot and will not be able to counter the threat of al-Qaeda. Is
it
a coincidence that there is no major element of the United Nations that
goes out to fight terrorism? Huge pacifist organizations such as
weapons inspectors and units designed to monitor non-warfare and human
rights abound, but there is yet to be an equally weighted organization
to analyze and repudiate terrorism.
Idealists
cannot admit that terrorism exists as a worldwide threat in their ideal
world where dialog solves the world's problems. After all, terrorists
produce plenty of dialog.
Why does the idealist view not serve to fight terrorism?
Because, unfortunately, the reality is that the only dialog terrorists
have is out bound, that is, they tell us all the rationales for what
they do, and then take their war to the innocents, operating from the
shadows of every nation on the planet. It is not only dialog with
no meaning, it is proclamation of supposed injustice with only
capitulation as the accepted response. And even then, the promise
afforded those who capitulate is temporary and short lived.
Is it any wonder then, that an
organization of states cannot deal with a stateless foe? Of
course not. Reality has intruded upon the ideals of the United Nations,
and frankly, they are more than powerless, the body is less than
useless.
Another indicator is the war between Arab and Jew in the Middle
East.
The United Nations could not possibly prevent any of the conflicts on
the national scale, and Israel was left to defend herself. And
when that small country decided to create buffer zones, a sound
military strategy, again the U.N. was powerless, standing with yapping
mouths while Israel thumbed its nose at the great body. Endless
debate was not nearly as effective as several nation's direct
consultation, including promises of protection and arms. Since
both those prospects did not match the ideals of the idealists, it
never happened. The U.N. was hoisted as a great success while one
of its first acts, the creation of the nation of Israel, was a
tremendous failure.
Faced with an ability to destroy Israel militarily, the Arab nations
ceased overt action and went to covert action. Today, the war between
Palestinian and Israeli is a clash of ideals, fostered by the more
radical elements of Arab society that will never rest until Israel is
utterly destroyed and in the hands of Arabs. Any who doubt this
are suffering from the idealist malady, wishful thinking.
The United Nations, despite 50 years of effort, has been unable to
stabilize the war between Arab and Israeli, and indeed stood at its
awakening with some pride, having declared a patch of land in the heart
of the Muslim world to be the home of the Jewish state, one of the most
naive of all ideals to be put forth in its history, even in the long
history of any written language.
In any case, if the idealists cannot undo their own mistakes, it will
be up to others to step in with some sort of direct action, a
philosophy that Israel has continued to embrace, producing a resulting
response easily predicted by anyone with a teaspoon of brain
power.
With this evidence of U.N. ineffectiveness, and continued challenges
such as Somalia, Haiti, Sudan, and continued violence in the Middle
East
including Iraq, how can anyone believe the U.N. remains a useful tool
for diplomacy? Ironically it is the very fact that it IS a world
forum, in fact one of the only world forums that exists, it has to be
the place to at least air difficulties. As long as no
nation
relies upon the U.N. for its security, as long as independent action is
never relegated to that body, it can serve a useful purpose.
But once again, the idealist will attempt to force that strategy to
fail. Even today, in the war on terror, the idealist wishes to
find a way for the U.N. to change the middle east. Yet the
idealist fails to understand. The U.N. has no effective
intelligence at all. If you see no evil, cannot speak of evil on
your own, must rely upon others to do so, and in committee fashion,
you are doomed to live life without a clue. That is the best way to
describe the idealist's goal to let the U.N. make policy and security
decisions for us.
The drive for unilateral assessment and goal setting is ideally a
wonderful goal for world peace. Unfortunately, there are
malicious people in our world, and many are in or have held positions
of great power in even the smallest states. That means that with
enough wealth, they can purchase what they need to attain to become
worldwide
threats. The case of the Libyan WMD programs and its many decades
of
not only allowing, but fostering terrorist elements upon the rest of
the world should serve to make that crystal clear.
However, not
all that remarkably to those familiar with the idealist malaise, the
case of Libya simply never happened in the idealist's world.
Through a change of heart,
Libya's Mohamar Khadafi decided to meet the requirements levied upon it
by that all powerful idealistic organization the United Nations.
Yet, nothing could be further from the reality, further from the truth.
Over the next year, we will begin to hear idealist drivel. That
Libya is a great indicator of the effectiveness of the U.N., that
without U.N. inspectors, Libya would never have been tamed. The
reality is that the U.N. inspectors will only serve to verify what
Libya has undertaken under pressure from others, pressure created with
the stick and the carrot, not by idealist debate.
Similarly, there is little doubt that Saddam Hussein or one of his sons
would still be in power in Iraq without the direct action of U.S.
leadership and a coalition of idealists who tempered there wishful
thinking with reality. Those who would chastise the U.S.
President for taking the coalition to war for false or malicious
reasons has no clear concept of reality or for that matter the
truth. Their idealist notions
remained untempered by reality, and not only propose isolationism, but
arrogant ignorance of how human nature works.
The inability to find WMD in Iraq is not a failure. Finding
material or equipment is not a failure. It does mean that the U.N.
inspectors did their jobs up until 1998. The idealist will point
to that fact and say there was no necessity to invade and the further
U.N. dependence in the matter was called for.
Unfortunately, that is also U.N.-like idealism without reality.
The reality is that Iraqi knowledge and experimentation made them the
possessors of the technology and like a more belligerent Pakistan,
could
easily have imported knowledge to other rogue nations. Even that
notion is unacceptable to the idealist, despite 50 years of evidence to
the contrary.
And the
idealist reluctantly and with great anguish, would have allowed the
human rights violations to continue in Iraq, with some idealistic
nations already beginning to call for reduction of sanctions before the
U.S. led invasion. While the very idea is incredible, it is not
surprising, Wishful thinking would dictate that a decade of debate
had done the job, while reality pointed to no cooperation and a
continuation of the status quo. The fact is, the very nations
calling
for reduction in sanctions were those participating in billions of
dollars in graft with Iraq's Oil for Food program. Yet, again, this
never happened in the mind of the idealist,
yet the reality is that France and Russia both profited considerably
from their support of the Saddam Hussein regime. Liberal press
with a huge desire to find no fault in idealistic endeavors that serve
their pacifist, non confrontational politics have underreported the
Libyan capitulation and dropped the Oil For Food story as soon as it
possibly could without being accused of bias.
The idealist looks at North Korea and sees a nation backed into a
corner by a prolonged U.S. antagonism. The realist sees a nation
led by a family of dictators who would stop at nothing to devour its
relative to the south, and export WMD technology to the highest
bidder. Including, unfortunately for the idealist, those
terrorists who cannot exist by U.N. definition since they are indeed
stateless and ubiquitous. And despite the idealist's fair haired
U.N. inspection regimes uncovering North Korean sourced missiles in
rogue regimes worldwide, the hopes for dealing with North Korea remain
mired in diplomatic double speak, much of which is supported and
fostered by the U.N.
Iran, North Korea, Sudan all contribute to the global threat in the
next decade. But what of Syria, Lebanon and that quiet danger,
China?
Characteristically, the U.N. remains not only ineffective but in
denial. U.S. diplomacy, tempered by the belief that the
unilateral approach fostered by the U.N. can be effective in certain
situations, is doomed to fail in these countries.
The most
important reality is that the threat from an increasingly more powerful
China is totally inappropriate to the idealist U.N. It will, by
the end of this decade, be clearly positioned to threaten the entire
region actively, and despite the clear intelligence of this fact, the
U.N. appears to be more focused on ensuring a peaceful Olympics in
Beijing. Meanwhile China imports despite their human rights
violations are approved at an incredible pace and in quantities that
will build more than Olympic venues. Concrete and steel are used
from things other than stadiums, yet the U.N. is blinded by that other
great pacifist ideal, the Olympic Games.
Syria's lies
about Hamas and Hezbollah sanctuary and indeed about Syria's control
over Lebanon continue to "seize" the U.N. with paralysis. When
none of the U.N. nations would even suggest that Syria withdraw from
Lebanon and eject Hamas and Hezbollah, the U.S., through quiet non U.N.
sanctioned diplomacy moved to foster new initiatives to bring Syria's
decades of malfeasance back into the light, ending a decade of idealist
ignorance of the status quo by the U.S. government. And now that
the issue is finally getting some attention in the U.N., the idealist
stands up and says, "see the U.N. does work".
Similarly, U.S. led pressure on the U.N. to take up the issues of
Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs indicates the uselessness of
the U.N. Not because it is fundamentally flawed, but that it
depends on strong leadership by the nations that comprise its
members. When idealists sit and discuss the world, is it any
surprise that no action is taken? Of course not. And the
malicious and deceit carries on within those very nations, it becomes
clear that the body of nations is as corrupt as its
members. When idealists ignore reality, operate under
isolated wishful thinking, the U.N. becomes more than
useless, it becomes a danger to world peace, not a hope.
But rather than simply close the doors, the world needs only to take
into account the fact that the U.N. is not incorruptible, does not have
individual national security in mind, and that it is only a small tool
in the overall set of diplomatic tools, one of which includes non-U.N.
acceptable direct action. It is, after all, an organization
dedicated to peace, without the ability to take direct action without
its members. It is, in other words, powerless and relatively
pacifist in nature. Which sits fine with idealists and pacifists,
but a critical failure in a world on non pacifists and malicious
dictators, as well as corrupt regimes in even the world's most
respected nations.
Once the world's nations begin to use the U.N. as a forum for debate
only, and refuse to allow it to participate in non pacifist activities,
will it realize its usefulness. U.N. inspectors are such a tool,
but only when a willing nation accepts and fosters their
activities. Any other use of U.N. inspectors must be in concert
with strict and at times draconian sanctions which prohibit the input
of the materials you desire the inspectors not to find! Human
rights efforts by the U.N. can only succeed if something forces the
change in behavior by outside forces. The U.N., in its history,
has ever effected change in behavior on its own. Some other
outside force has created the change in conditions, and almost always
through violence, and rarely through economics and even less through
debate. Update, 3/21/2005:
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called for reform in the U.N.
""What is needed now is not more declarations of promises but action to
fulfill the promises already made." 3.
