Posted on 03/20/2003 10:31:58 AM PST by walford
While the UN has on occasion been able to grudgingly acquiesce to defending against aggression, removing the offending dictatorship has always been beyond consideration. Peace and dictatorship cannot coexist; thus there must be another way.
This idea has legs.
The myopic support for the UN in some parts of the US is a testament to the sad state of schooling in this country. I think a big part of the attachment to the UN is the allegiance everyone is taught to principles of democracy, platitudes such as "one man, one vote" and "majority rules".
Translated into global principles, this means to some numbskulls that the world should be governed by majority vote of the nations, and that those who don't accept what the other governments decree (as in Kyoto) are simply schoolyard bullies, refusing to submit to the civilized rules of a polite society, one that has debated and decided, and whose will must then be obeyed.
Let's break that thinking down, shall we:
In Libya, say, a young fellow not smart enough to promote himself from Colonel to General takes power from one strongman in a violent coup, and becomes a new strongman. What is a strongman? A nicety for a dictator, a person who is the only and ultimate political force within a polity. All political decisions, from the organization of the economic structures, ownership of property, allocation of government resources, conduct of military affairs, law, rights and issues of whether someone can continue to live, flow from this individual's will and no one else's.
This person, call him Daffy if you wish, is the person who determines what his country's vote within the UN. His will is no more a reflection of his country's will than any other person's, yet it is the one that counts within the UN.
By contrast, in another country, call it Freedistan, the President is elected by vote of the people. He is responsible for directing his country's foreign policy, including within the UN, but is constrained by the fact that he must be subjected periodically to the voters, and he does not pass the nation's laws, allocate its funds, or even determine the size of its military. All of those issues must be approved by a large body of haggling turkeys to whom the President must defer to and consult with if he wants to get anything through.
When that person then sets a policy at the UN, it may or may not reflect the thinking of his nation's will, but it usually does, and if it does not fairly reflect the polity from which it springs, the nation has methods of ensuring a change in regime.
By what muddled form of thinking does the will of one man, a tyrant who tortures those who disagree with him, merit the legitimacy of a "vote" at a body of Nations, a vote equal to the say of a person who has been chosen to represent a nation like Freelandia? I say the entire structure makes no sense, and not only is structured badly, but is a great force for evil, by perpetuating in easily misled minds that the will of such a body is worthy of consideration, and thus interfering with the beneficial efforts of representative and law-abiding societies to protect their interests in the world from the tyrants.
No nation deserves a "substantive" say in any international body unless that nation has passed a grueling set of tests that ensures that the position it takes within that body are the result of a political process designed to fairly reflect the views and beliefs of the people of that nation. Collections of national diplomatic corps which mingle democracies with dictators are fine for exchanging views, or organizing humanitarian efforts, but as a way to try to bind fair and free societies, they are anathema and should be avoided.
Instead, we need to educate the people of what I call "legitimate" governments to the notion that the UN is, for the most part, a collection of thugs and criminals, whose opinions are not relevant to, and certainly not binding upon, free societies. We should then begin the process of forming a "League of Free Peoples" (the LFP) or "Coalition of Legitimate Governments" (the CLG) or some such group, and only the actions of that body would merit any weight.
Its rules would reflect more accurately the weight that individual governments' views should be given (Iceland's vote would be worth less than ours, for example) and its actions would carry the actual imprimatur of international consensus. Initially, it would be composed of the US, Britain, Australia, Japan, the states of New Europe, as well as weasel democracies like France, Germany and Canada. If Russia, Chile and other semi-democratic states pass the tests of "legitimacy" they could be admitted.
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