U.N. = U.S.
Within the broader antiwar movement in the United States, more moderate voices have raised
the idea of substituting United Nations troops for the Anglo-American
occupation forces in Iraq.
This gesture supposedly would constitute a blow against the “unilateralism”
that inspired the war and would express a more “multilateral” foreign policy
that supposedly is a hallmark of the Democratic Party.
Even somebody as principled in his opposition to U.S. foreign policy as Ralph Nader endorsed this
idea in calling for an international peace-keeping force drawn from neutral and
Islamic nations under the auspices of the United Nations that would “replace
all US
troops and civilian military contractors doing many jobs the Army used to do
more efficiently.”1
There was support for United Nations intervention from even
more radical quarters in Australia.
While it is undoubtedly one of the more principled and far-sighted groups on
the far left, the Democratic Socialist Party had no problems calling for U.N.
intervention in East Timor. On September 6, 1999, they
declared that:
The Democratic Socialist Party calls on all supporters of
democracy to mobilise to demand that the Australian
government insist that the United Nations authorise
the immediate dispatch of Australian troops to East Timor.
The task of these troops must be to assist the East Timorese resistance forces
to stop the current bloodbath being organised by the
Indonesian armed forces (TNI) and police (Polri).
This can only be achieved through the disarming of the pro-Jakarta terror
gangs. In addition, these troops must supervise the rapid withdrawal of all
Indonesian military and police personnel from East Timor
so as to enable the East Timorese to take full control of their nation's
affairs.2
Looking back at the history of our movement, there is scant
evidence for confidence in earlier international “peace-keeping” bodies. In an
October 15, 1920 speech, Lenin spoke derisively of the League of Nations, which
had demanded that the Red Army cease its offensive against
counter-revolutionary Polish troops and enter into peace negotiations: “To this
proposal we replied that we recognised no League of
Nations, since we had seen its insignificance and the disregard that even its
members had for its decisions.”3 He added that it had become plain “that the League of Nations was non-existent, that the alliance of
the capitalist powers is sheer fraud, and that in
actual fact it is an alliance of robbers, each trying to snatch something from
the others.” This allusion to an alliance of robbers has been alternatively
translated as a “den of thieves,” the more famous citation.
One major difference between the League of Nations and the
United Nations was the presence of the Soviet Union.
Additionally, the inclusion of postcolonial states in the General Assembly and
their frequently courageous and principled stands give the U.N. a certain
cachet that the League of Nations lacked. With
the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, and the continuing inability of the
General Assembly to actually make an impact on policies drawn up in the far
more powerful Security Council, there should be no lingering illusions in the
U.N.’s ability to act on behalf of peace and social justice—no should there
have been when the organization was born, for that matter.
When the United Nations was created, the overwhelming
preoccupation of the founders was to minimize challenges to the World War Two
victors, who feared imperialist rivalries of the sort that had led to two
costly world wars. The Soviet Union had its
own interests at heart, which revolved around the need to create a barrier
between European capitalist powers and its own project of “building socialism.”
Initially, Stalin did not really see the need for a U.N. but hoped that a
coalition of the U.S., Great Britain and the U.S.S.R. could negotiate conflicts
and divide up spheres of influence between themselves as they had already at
Yalta and Potsdam.
In conventional historical accounts, Franklin Roosevelt is
seen as the thoroughgoing Wilsonian “multilateralist” who believed that the
U.N. could succeed where the League of Nations
had failed. Such idealist preening was of course bolstered by his allies in the
Communist Party who had high hopes in 1945 that the wartime alliance would continue
into the next century, if not forever. For Communist Party leader Earl Browder,
the war was a fight between “a slave world and a free world.” He stated, “Just
as the United States
could not remain half slave and half free in 1862, so in 1942 the world must
make its decision for a complete victory one way or the other.” Somehow, it
must have escaped his attention that Black Americans served in segregated
companies in the army and lacked the right to vote in the deep south.
Gabriel Kolko’s “The Politics of
War,” a classic “revisionist” study of U.S. foreign policy, debunks the
notion of American altruism motivating the creation of the United Nations. He
paints a picture of top American diplomats conspiring to turn the proposed
organization into a tool of its foreign policy objectives. By putting forward a
“globalist” perspective, the United States would be able to
project power across the world in the name of peace-keeping while at the same
time retaining its own spheres of influence.
This consisted at the outset of islands seized from the
Japanese and its traditional domination of Latin America
through the Monroe Doctrine and the more recent “Good Neighbor” policy. Winston
Churchill was amenable to all this, as long as British interests were not
threatened: “If the Americans want to take Japanese islands which they have
conquered, let them do so with our blessing and any form of words that may be
agreeable to them. But ‘Hands Off the British Empire’
is our maxim.”
In a phone conversation between Henry Stimson, FDR’s
Secretary of War and his undersecretary John McCloy
that is contained in Stimson’s papers at Yale University,
we get a flavor for the power politics hidden beneath the surface. (Dumbarton
Oaks, referred to below frequently, was the site of the founding conference of
the U.N.):
Stimson: Then there is this side. I think both those are
important. Russia will,
consider this, Russia will probably act that way
anyhow no matter what the Dumbarton Oaks does…
McCloy: Yes. But I think you will have
a great outcry of public opinion in the country against such a broadening of
the regional arrangement. They will say that the Security Council and the World
Organization has been defeated. And I'm not at all sure that it wouldn't be...
McCloy: The proponents of Dumbarton
Oaks say 'Well, we will be free to act if there is any aggression against this
continent.' We certainly will be free to send, as Hay did, send the fleet down
there in spite of this provision because that comes under self-defense and the
aggressor would be acting inconsistent with the provisions of the Charter
itself if he set in motion the aggression against this continent…
Secretary: Well I think that's probably true and that may be a
good reason for not insisting on the second thing; as for the first one, which
may be very important in moderate interventions in this country, we have been a
pretty active old Uncle Sam in stopping things, and I think we ought to
continue to be. I think you ought to be able to prevent Russia from
using that thing in her parallel, alleged parallel position. It isn't parallel
to it. She's not such an overwhelmingly gigantic power from the ones which
she's probably going to make a row about as we are here and on the other hand
our fussing around among those little fellow[s] there doesn't upset any balance
in Europe at all. That's the main answer. It doesn't upset any balance there
where she may upset a balance that affects us. That's the difference. I think I
would stand on that. I think you ought to maintain that, although it seems to
be a little thing, it's been a pretty well developed thing and I think you can
say that it isn't parallel to what she threatens to do.
Additional confirmation of the U.S.’s Machiavellianism can
be found in Peter Gowan’s 2003 New Left Review
article titled appropriately enough “US: UN”. This is based on his reading of
Stephen Schlesinger’s “Act of Creation” and Robert Hilderbrand’s
“Dumbarton Oaks: the Origins of the United Nations,” two mainstream, scholarly
accounts, as well as other material. Gowan sums up Roosevelt’s intentions:
Roosevelt, though not immune to self-deception himself—he too
vaguely believed that good relations between Moscow
and Washington
could continue after the war, if not on an equal footing—had altogether wider
horizons. American power was global, not regional, and required an
institutional framework to fit it. The UN that
Stalin allowed him to construct in due course fulfilled the original Soviet
fears. Over the next half century, it is difficult to think of a single
material benefit the USSR derived from the
institution in which, to adapt Hilderbrand’s phrase,
the Soviets soon “found themselves feeling increasingly isolated and
vulnerable, truly the black sheep in the family of nations”.4
Words such as “isolated” and “vulnerable” certainly describe
the status of North Korea,
one of the Kremlin’s main allies as it would be confronted by the onslaught of
a bloody United Nations backed intervention not five years after its formation.
On June
26, 1950, the U.S.
presented a resolution condemning “North Korean aggression” in terms that would
reappear again in the wars against Iraq. A civil war was magically
transformed into an invasion by one country against the other, just as it was
in Vietnam
as well. Although many liberal “doves” had little trouble understanding the
internal character of the Vietnam
conflict, they failed to see Iraq-Kuwait from the same perspective. Modern day Kuwait was established in 1923 by waving the
same colonial wand that produced Iraq. If self-determination had
been allowed back then, Iraq’s
borders would have included Kuwait.
Although this might have seen logical to somebody like Saddam Hussein, it
failed to pass muster in “peace-loving” circles.
North
Korea, another pariah state, fell victim to
the same sort of hypocrisy in 1950. When the war broke out, it was besides the
point to ask ‘who attacked first,’ just as was the case with the American civil
war when Fort Sumter was fired upon. It was the
business of Americans to settle their conflict, just as it should have been
Korean’s whose 38th parallel boundary was an artificial legacy of
WWII.
By a vote of 46-6, the U.N. Security Council refused to hear
the North Korean side of the story. Wasting no time, President Truman sent the
navy and air force into action, thus presenting the U.N. with a fait accompli.
It was no surprise that the U.N. would be favorably disposed to U.S.
goals. Trygve Lie, the Norwegian Secretary-General,
was a knee-jerk anti-Communist who received advice from the U.S. State
Department about removing “subversives” from the U.N. staff.
The U.S.S.R., never as adept at diplomatic power politics as
its former ally, was not on hand to veto the Security Council resolution
blessing the war on North
Korea. It was boycotting the organization
over its refusal to seat Mao’s China.
Martin Hart-Landsberg sums up the
close collaboration between the U.S.
and the U.N. as follows:
Three days after the UN passed its second resolution, Truman
upped the ante. He ordered the bombing of specific targets in North Korea, a naval blockade of the entire
Korean coast, and use of U.S.
ground troops. The UN followed on July 7, passing another resolution
recommending that “all Members providing military forces and other assistance .
. . make such forces and other assistance available to a unified command under
the United States.”
It also called upon the United
States to “designate the commander of such
forces.” Amazingly, the UN placed all member country forces under U.S.
control without requiring accountability. In other words, the United States was
given the freedom to fight the war unaccountable to any other member nation,
clothed in the principles and ideals the United Nations claimed to represent.
Truman chose General Douglas MacArthur to head the unified
command. Along with the United States,
fifteen nations including Australia,
Belgium, Canada, Columbia,
Ethiopia, France, Greece,
Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New
Zealand, the Philippines,
the Republic of South
Africa, Thailand,
Turkey, and the United Kingdom
provided soldiers. The United
States, however, provided most of the troops
and paid most of the bills. It was a U.S. show wrapped in a UN flag.5
One might say that the Korean War was the first exercise in the
kind of “multilateralism” that some liberals are anxious to reinstitute.
The Korean War consolidated an anti-communist beachhead in
East Asia that would serve future interventions well, including in Vietnam.
In a similar fashion, U.S.
and U.N. collaborated to overturn Patrice Lumumba’s government in the Congo
in 1960. Mobutu, his successor, was a willing tool of U.S. foreign policy, and worked with apartheid South Africa to
destroy revolutionary movements throughout the continent.
As was the case in the Korean War, the Secretary-General of
the U.N. in 1960 was a Scandinavian and an anti-communist. Dag Hammarskjold, a
Swede, has an ill-deserved reputation as a friend of peace. His death in an
airplane crash in the Congo
(that some blame on the CIA and MI5) in 1961 prompted his fellow Swedes to
posthumously award him the Nobel Peace prize that year.
For an alternative interpretation, one might turn to the
aptly titled “The Congo Betrayal: The U.N.-U.S. and Lumumba” by D. Katete Orwa.6 Orwa lays out in
agonizing detail how Hammarskjold stabbed the Congolese peoples’ hope for
freedom and independence in the back.
Unfortunately, Lumumba made the mistake of inviting the U.N.
to begin with. Although he was a principled nationalist, he had apparently
never absorbed the analysis of the U.N. that had traditionally been presented
in the Marxist movement outside of Stalinist circles. When the mineral-rich Katanga province, led by Moise
Tshombe with backing by Belgian troops, seceded from the Congo, Lumumba asked for U.N. help
in resisting the rebel troops. In other words, he expected the U.N. to come to
the aid of a newly independent state, just as the charter promised.
Gunnar Jahn, Chairman of the Nobel
Committee, put it somewhat disingenuously in his 1961 speech honoring
Hammarskjold:
This form of military aid did not meet the expectations of the Congo government, which had clearly envisaged
the expulsion of Belgian troops by UN forces; whereas the UN's action was taken
on the assumption that Belgium
would comply with the order of the Security Council and withdraw her troops
from the Congo.
Of course, the U.N. had no trouble putting its imprimatur on
a U.S. war against Iraq when it occupied Kuwait. The decision to expel Iraqi
troops and leave Belgian troops in place can only be explained in terms of
geopolitical realities. When Lumumba insisted that the Congolese people have
the right to exploit their own mineral resources for the benefit of the nation,
he became enemy number one on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. and its European
allies had decided that Lumumba was a threat to the capitalist status quo in Africa and adjusted its Wilsonian
principles accordingly.
African-American Ralph Bunche was Under Secretary-General of
the United Nations at the time and the Condoleeza
Rice of his time. At a UCLA conference on Bunche last year, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, professor emeritus of African studies at Howard University
in Washington, DC,
and a former president of the African Studies Association of the United States,
told the gathering:
Bunche arrived with negative attitudes toward Lumumba, negative
toward all radical nationalists including Nasser and Nkrumah. The Belgians
briefed Bunche negatively about Lumumba. He had won a plurality in elections
but was not the first choice of Belgians, who backed Kasavubu, whose party had
only 12 seats compared to more than 30 for Lumumba's party. Once Lumumba became
prime minister he agreed to help Kasavubu as titular head of state. The first
sign of division came on June 30, 1960, with Lumumba's independence
day speech against Belgian colonialism, now a classic speech.7
While the main challenge to Lumumba came from the CIA and
Belgian troops, the U.N. played a crucial role as well. By providing de facto
diplomatic cover for the efforts to overthrow Lumumba, the U.N. was a key
element in a well-orchestrated plan. Since Lumumba was not interested in
affiliating with the Soviet bloc, he was far more vulnerable than Fidel Castro,
who was facing similar obstacles.
After growing increasingly frustrated with U.N. inaction,
Lumumba urged that an Afro-Asian observation team take charge on the ground. He
also took exception to Swedish troops operating in the Congo under the U.N. mandate since
that country was “known to have special affinities with the Belgian royal family.”
A letter made public to Hammarskjold pressing these demands prompted critics to
conclude that he had become “paranoic,” which leads one to cite perhaps the
only sensible words to come out of Henry Kissinger’s mouth: “Even a paranoid
can have enemies.”
As the plotters began finalizing their coup against Lumumba,
U.N. help was critical, as Orwa points out:
Cordier [a U.N. diplomat assigned to
the Congo]
then took steps which prevented Lumumba from wresting power from Kasavubu and Mobutu. First, he ordered
United Nations troops in Leopoldville to
occupy the radio stations; then on September 6, UN technicians rendered it
inoperable. UN forces also closed all airports to prevent the return of General
Lundula and Cleophas Kamitatu, the President of Leopoldville, to the capital
bringing with them troops loyal to Lumumba. This action was extremely
important, because General Lundula would have won the
allegiance of most of the 4,000 soldiers garrisoned in Leopoldville
while Kamitatu would have helped rally the support of
the civilian population in the area. Finally, on September 10, two days after Cordier left for New York
and five days after Dayal's arrival, Major-General
Ben Hammon Kettani, Deputy
Supreme Commander of UN Force, and Mobutu disbursed money to the contingents in
Leopoldville. Mobutu claimed credit for
the payment “to build his prestige among troops.” Dayal,
who was at the scene, wrote that Mobutu had little following among the 4,000
ANC soldiers and that the payment influenced their behaviour in critical days that
followed.
Shortly after an antiwar movement began to take shape prior
to the invasion of Iraq,
some “moderates” initiated “Win Without War” as an
alternative to ANSWER and other more radical formations. In a Nation Magazine
article, David Corn put it this way:
Cortright, who was executive director of SANE from 1977 to 1987
(when it was the largest peace organization in the United
States) and his colleagues in Washington were looking to assemble an
opposition that would possess wider appeal, that would
press a message that extends beyond a no-to-war demand and endorses an
alternative to military action.
The coalition's central demand is, let the UN and its weapons
inspectors do their jobs. But what if Saddam thwarts the inspectors or they
find he has ready-to-go weapons of mass destruction? Would Win Without War back a UN-sanctioned military response? Elements
of the coalition are pacifists, according to Cortright; most are not: “There
might be circumstances where some of our groups would support [military action
against Iraq],
such as if there were explicit authorization from the UN Security Council.”
Greenwald notes that the artists' statement “leaves open the possibility of a
multilateral attack. We felt it was premature to get into that. The biggest
point of agreement among the signers is that the United States should follow the
law, follow the Security Council.”8
Cortright had little disagreement
with U.S.
aims in the region, only how to achieve them. As a believer in the necessity
for sanctions, he simply thought that there were more effective ways to bend Iraq
to the American will than an invasion.
In a November 2001 article in the Nation Magazine titled “A
Hard Look at Iraq Sanctions,” Cortright attacked Bush’s foreign policy from the
vantage point of his own dovish brand of imperialism wrapped in the U.N.’s blue
flag.
He starts off by gainsaying the findings of the Lancet to
the effect that the sanctions had resulted in the death of 567,000 Iraqi
children. When Madeleine Albright was confronted by this figure, she replied,
“The price is worth it.” Drawing upon critics of the Lancet study, Cortright is
persuaded that the number is only 350,000! After reviewing the suffering that
the Iraqi people have to endure as a result of the sanctions, he concludes by
lecturing the peace movement about the need to stay the course: “It is also
important, peace and human rights groups surely would agree, to maintain
military sanctions until Iraq complies fully with the UN disarmament mandate and
permits a final round of weapons inspection.”9
While Cortright’s dismissal of the
Lancet findings is less obnoxious than Christopher Hitchens’s, it does share
the same sort of ‘revisionist’ animosity towards impeccable sources. In his
debate with George Galloway, Hitchens called the most recent Lancet report
blaming the invasion and occupation for 100,000 additional Iraqi deaths a
“crazed fabrication.” If only Cortright would use such language, we would have
an easier time figuring out who our enemies are.
The notion that such sanctions were compatible with lofty
notions of international peace-keeping were fairly well demolished by Institute
for Policy Studies Fellow Phyllis Bennis, who writes
quite capably about the U.N. from a left perspective despite being seduced by
the idea that it can somehow be “democratized.”
In “Calling the Shots: How Washington
Dominates Today’s U.N.”, she refers to the sanctions against Iraq as the
“Not-Quite Warfare.” These sanctions were supposedly put into place to make
sure that Iraq
got rid of its weapons of mass destruction. She points out that “By October 7, 1994, according
to the report issued that day by the UN’s own Special Commission investigating
Iraqi weapons systems (UNSCOM), all those stipulations had been at least
minimally met.” However, the report did not result in the lifting of the oil
embargo, which had much more to do with destroying the Iraqi economy than
protecting the world from a dictator bent on nuclear conflagration. Even Iraq’s acceptance of the U.N. determined border
of Kuwait
failed to convince the Security Council to lift the ban.
When Rolf Ekeus, the U.N. official
in charge of overseeing the destruction of WMD’s in
Iraq, filed a report in 1994 challenging CIA claims that there were such
weapons and assuring the U.N. that “if Iraq extends…the same level of
cooperation that it has in the past…there can be cause for optimism.” This did
not assuage a U.S. dominated
Security Council that included a by now neoliberal former Soviet
Union. Under instructions from President Clinton,
U.S. diplomats insisted that
Iraq
was still defying U.N. inspectors just as they would under Bush. No wonder Bush
has repeatedly defended his atrocious policies by simply stating that he is
continuing what previous administrations have done.
On August 19, 2003, just 5 months after the invasion of Iraq, a huge bomb destroyed U.N. headquarters in
Baghdad. Among
the killed was U.N. Special Representative Sérgio
Vieira de Mello. His death was viewed in liberal circles as a symptom of the
particularly bloodthirsty character of the Iraqi resistance. Perhaps the men
and women who set off the bomb might have been seeking revenge for the
sanctions-induced death of hundreds of thousands of their countrymen and their
children. Or, perhaps, they had a visceral hatred for outside “peacekeeping”
agencies meddling into Iraqi affairs on behalf of U.S. imperialism. Whatever the
motivation, it removed from the scene a potentially useful tool for a more
“multilateral” American administration headed by somebody like John Kerry or
Hillary Clinton.
By all evidence, de Mello was playing the same sort of role
that Hammarskjold had played before him. Just a month before his death, the
U.N. was all set to endorse Paul Bremer’s Governing Council, an outfit that Kofi Annan described as “a
broadly representative partner with whom the United Nations and the
international community at large can engage.” (Washington Post, July 20, 2003) The
Washington Post also reported that de Mello had met with President Bush just 4
months earlier along with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. The U.N.
diplomat “had been the Bush administration's first choice for the job.”
One can understand why. De Mello had just the kind of
background that was needed to provide the proper progressive sheen on a sordid
colonial operation such as the kind that groundwork was being laid for in Iraq. He had
served as top U.N. representative in “liberated” East
Timor. His friend Peter Galbraith, who was a fellow U.N. overseer
of the affairs of the East Timorese people and who has recently written
articles in the New York Review advocating the break-up of Iraq along the lines
of Yugoslavia where he served as U.S. Ambassador to the secessionist Croatia,
described de Mello’s role in East Timor as follows: He “had absolute power, it
was the most comprehensive mandate” ever granted to such a special
representative. “Full legislative, executive and judicial authority was
invested in him.” (N.Y. Times, May 24, 2003)
Obviously de Mello and Galbraith knew what had to be done in
East Timor:
Australia and
East Timor are edging towards agreement on a
critical new treaty to govern the Timor Gap, paving the way for development of
the substantial gas deposits in the resource-rich waters that divide the two neighbours.
Speedy conclusion of the treaty is vital for East Timor - which
in late 1999 voted to secede from Indonesia - because revenues from
the developments will provide the impoverished new state with its main source
of income.
Based on exploration to date, the Timor Gap fields contain 500m
barrels of oil equivalent, worth some USDollars 17bn
(Pounds 12bn) at today's prices.
East Timor has a budget this
year of USDollars 60m, is entirely reliant on foreign
aid and is being run by a United Nations-led transition government (Untaet) ahead of elections for a national assembly due
later this year.
Negotiations on a new treaty began eight months ago and there
has been concern among oil companies working in the region over delays in
reaching agreement. But Peter Galbraith, Untaet
minister for political affairs and East Timor's
chief negotiator in the talks, said in an interview yesterday there had been
“substantial progress” in the negotiations.10
This would appear to be the same sort of scenario that was
planned for Iraq
until an insurgency broke out. Under the guise of “humanitarianism,” a new
colonial enterprise would be put in place to drain precious mineral wealth from
the country just as was the case in East Timor.
On December 6, 2002, the World Socialist website reported on
a burgeoning movement in East Timor that while
lacking the firepower of the Iraqi insurgency seems bred by the same sort of
resentments:
At least two people have been killed and more than 20 injured in
clashes with police and soldiers during two days of protests and rioting by
students and unemployed youth in the East Timorese capital of Dili. The situation remains tense after the government
imposed an overnight curfew on Wednesday and called for UN troops to help
police guard key buildings and patrol the city’s streets. Most shops and
businesses, as well as the university and high schools, were closed yesterday.
Interior Affairs Minister Rogerio Lobato baldly asserted that the protests were “an
orchestrated manoeuvre to topple the government”. He
and other officials alleged that the CDP-RDTL (Popular Defence
Committee—Democratic Republic of East Timor) was behind the rioting. The group,
which opposes the UN presence and calls for full independence for East Timor, has organised a number
of anti-government protests…
The government is clearly looking for a scapegoat to deflect
attention from the failure of their own policies. There is a huge social divide
between a tiny elite of government officials, businessmen, foreign officials, aid
workers and troops and the vast majority of the population, most of whom are
unemployed and living below the poverty line.
Young people, in particular, are angry that their prospects for
an education and a job are extremely small. Among the businesses ransacked on
Wednesday was the Australian-owned “Hello Mister” supermarket, which specialises in supplying imported goods to UN and other
foreign workers. While UN troops and officials are paid hefty living allowances
of $US100 a day, most East Timorese are struggling to survive from day to day.
The few who have jobs earn an average of about $6 a week.
Estimates of the jobless rate vary between 70 and 80 percent.
Moreover, it has worsened since East Timor
formally declared independence on May 20, as the number of UN personnel has
been reduced. The difficulties facing villagers in rural areas have been
compounded by a severe drought. Even with the official poverty rate set at just
US 50 cents a day, a UN survey last year found that 60 percent of people in rural
areas were living in poverty. Education and health services are rudimentary.
Many East Timorese have begun to feel betrayed as the promises
that accompanied the Australian-led UN military intervention into East Timor have failed to materialise.
Clearly nervous about the situation, Australian Prime Minister John Howard
phoned his counterpart in Dili to pledge financial
assistance—to bolster the police and judiciary, not to alleviate the underlying
social crisis.11
The pattern should be obvious by this point. The evidence
points to the U.N. as serving as a handmaiden to U.S. imperialism and its junior
partners. Hopes for this outfit “democratizing” itself are as vain as hopes
that capitalism can reform itself. While one can understand the yearning of the
ordinary citizen of the planet for some sort of international agency that can
mediate between conflicting nations and act as a tribune on behalf of the weak
and the vulnerable, the United Nations is not such an organization and—more
importantly—was never intended as such.
1. http://www.votenader.org/why_ralph/index.php?cid=55
2. www.dsp.org.au/etimor/02_solidarity-aus01.htm
3. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/oct/15b.htm
4. http://www.newleftreview.net/nlr25801.shtml
5. “Korea:
Division, Reunification, and U.S.
Foreign Policy”, Monthly Review Press, 1998, pp. 115-116
6. Kenya
Literature Bureau, 1985
7. http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=11977
8. http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?bid=3&pid=204
9. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011203/cortright
10. Financial Times (London),
May 17, 2001
11. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/dec2002/tim-d06.shtml