french sense of humour ;)

Whether any of you folks realize this or not, the US has been the leader of the free world for almost 60 years. You don't always have to agree with us, but you might at least understand fact.

<ahem>

Saddam gassed the Kurds in 1988.

Yeh, when there was a Republican president called Bush in the White House.

And no, he didn't seem to think it was cause for any specific action.

Saddam was still considered a welcome counterweight to Iran back then - WMD or not, gassing his own people or not. Those issues only somehow became relevant fifteen years later.

"In August 1988 [half a year after Saddam gassed these Kurds] the United Nations Sub-Committee on Human Rights voted by 11 votes to 8 not to condemn Iraq for human rights violations. Only the Scandinavian countries, Australia and Canada, together with bodies like the European Parliament and the Socialist International, saved their honour by clearly condemning Iraq."

You will note that those already condemning Iraq then are the same that are now scorned by the US government for opposing the war. And that the US, back then, remained mum. In fact:

"In America, a resolution urging sanctions against Iraq was tabled by Senator Claiborne D. Pell and passed by both Houses of Congress. It was vetoed by President Bush. The White House even granted Baghdad a further loan of a billion dollars."

http://mondediplo.com/1998/03/04iraqkn

Ah, the leader of the free world. You do realize that the 'free world' represents one third of this planet, right? Besides, nobody was disputing this fact. We were disputing the beneficiality of this situation. The Soviet Union considered itself the 'leader of the free world' as well, although I don't intend to liken the western democracies to the communist countries, not at all. But the Soviet Union at equalled the U.S. in its power at least into late seventies and the balance started to tip towards the U.S. only after 1976, and realistically only after 1985. "free world" is not the only world out there. Should the 'rest' be ignored in decision-making and forced to comply with the wishes of the 'free world?"

My post above was in reply to your ignorance about who condoned the attempted genocide against the Kurds, but I think it can also serve as reply to this post of yours. "Leader of the free world", indeed.

Expressions like 'leader of the free world' give me creeps anyway. Why does it have to so covered up with ideological lingo. Just say it, the strongest superpower of the industrialized west. Same thing, just sounds more human.

I retract my statement concerning the date of the gassing, but the fact that Clinton did NOTHING for eight years about Iraq gnaws at the pit of my stomach. If we made some mistakes in the past, it is time to make up for them now. Saddam must go.

If you won't do it, and make statements like "the Iraqi people must remove Saddam themselves", which would appear to be an impossible task, then we'll take care of the problem and you can thank us later.

i find the idea of a people thats ready to go to war to liberate a country about which it apparently knows next to nothing quite scary. you don't know whether those kurds were gassed in 88 or 98, but you know for absolutely sure that you are right about this war - even when all the world tells you this is not the right time and not the right way. i know i'm putting the case very crudely here but it is exactly this bloody-mindedness that scares the bejesus outa me.

Um, you can go deeper, cjhsa. Where was the U.S. when Hungary, or Czechoslovakia were invaded by the Warsaw Pact armies? Or during other acts or aggressions and years of tyranny in countries around the globe? Why is it now suddenly the U.S' duty to dismantle tyrannical regimes when in the past it has not been viewed that way? Would in the eighties anyone predict the fall of communism? Noone helped us to dismantle those regimes, even it may have seemed impossible before. I don't argue against the desirability of Saddam's demise, I just don't see the logic in what you have written.

nimh
This is not a defense of Bush's attack upon Iraq. However, since when are the countries of the world interested in protecting anyone but themselves and their own national interests? The "world" you speak of allowed a Hitler along with many other tyrants to flourish. I should add that is why in my opinion the UN will never be an effective instrument for peace.

au - which one is the reason of the UN ineffectiveness? The world allowing Hitler to flourish, or the pursue of national interests? For neither in my mind contradict with the possibility of UN's efficiency. (League of nations was a very different animal from the UN and one of all nation's interests is security, there is no mutual exclusivity there).

dagmaraka
Two different thoughts. the comment about Hitler was reflecting on the following statement.
< When all the world tells you this is not the right time and not the right way.>
The statement about the UN was an after thought. IMO it is an attempt at a world government and could never become a reality because of national interests.
I agree with Bush IMO the UN is irrelevant

i'd put it a different way: UN is irrelevant because of Bush ;-)

Nation-states by their very nature will put "national interest" first, and as the guiding principle of foreign policy that was fully accepted for decades if not centuries. But it is exactly "Hitler" (i.e., WW2, the Holocaust) that started a change in thinking on this.

Both concepts of consensus and morality have been on the rise, culminating in major wars being fought only with UN approval or multinational troops of a broad alliance of nations and in "humanitarian interventions" like that in Kosovo. Even just twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable to claim the right to intervene in a conflict that was taking place within the borders of another state - territorial sovereignty and all that; let alone on the argument that it was to protect a minority's human rights - and a minority that wasn't ethnical kin of the intervening power at that.

It has also culminated in new concepts of international justice, witnessed by the War Crimes Tribunals and the ICC, which made clear that no longer would there be immunity for crimes perpetrated by a dictator or warlord within his own country.

The notion that a) there is something like "the international community", that b) has a common responsibility, c) that one of those responsibilities is to prevent humanitarian disasters and genocide and d) that the responsibility extends to a supranational right to persecute war criminals no matter what office they had been called to in their own nation-state - all that has been forged since WW2, painstakingly, and especially in the past ten years.

With that, I do believe we have - or had - a chance for the world to prevent a new Hitler to flourish, and to go beyond the sum of mere national interests. The UN played an important role in these developments, with the number of "bluehelmets" - the personification of the notion of a common supranational responsibility for peacekeeping and conflict-prevention - multiplying in the nineties, and the ICC subscribed by an unexpectedly great number of countries, all the Western countries except the US, in fact.

"The world", as symbolised in the UN, may have been ineffective at times. But it has never spurred a new Hitler, while the nation-states of old, each believing to know the Real Truth and have the Destiny to Lead, keep spawning new mini-Hitlers. The consensus of a majority of countries in the Security Council requires a middle road. I prefer the world to be guided by a slow, but safe consensus than by the unrestrained convictions of one King, PM or President. The only question is how much of the above can still be saved, now that the notion that national interest needs to submit to international law and seek legitimacy in international consensus have been dumped so blatantly.

dagmaraka
People have been questioning it's relevancy long before Bush took office. There biggest claim to fame is the amount of unpaid parking tickets they have amassed

But seriously. I still don't think that national interests would stand in the way of UN's efficiency. UN was designed as an organization, whose members are nation states to begin with. It was build on the principles of collective security and non-interference. (that was later de facto reversed by the SG K. Anan's statement at the millenial summit, taken very seriously, that human rights have a precedence over national sovereignty and principle of no interference). Yet that does not give any member state the right to act outside of it, when the UN as an institution does not reach a position on a necessity to intervene. THat is a breach of international law. Now if some (not only you, au, there are more that voice this opinion on these pages) want to take the disregard for the UN lightly, i find that worrying, because it represents a trend, a trend that i find dangerous for peace and international stability. and again, since based on the idea of COLLECTIVE security, the collective must first play by the rules, otherwise the security is shattered to pieces. That is what i see happening, the consequence of the war if you will, and i believe it is against the national interests of every country involved, the U.S. including.

nimh, once again you have spelled out what i had on my mind, and much more elloquently, may i add.

au - the un is not just the security council, mind you. would you claim the work of thousands of other UN institutions ineffective as well?

nimh
I have only a few minutes at the moments. But let me first note if i am not mistaken the action in the Balkans was a NATO operation and would never have been undertaken if the US had not agreed to join in. As for the UN what peace keeping? Let me ask you did it stop a Stalin or North Korea or China or the killing all over Africa or the Taliban or for that matter killing or wars anywhere. The UN is a paper Tiger. It has a nice sounding charter and some high ideals but unless it's written on soft paper it is not useable.

au, anything can be oversimplified. i could in the same manner describe most of the U.S. interventions as badly thought-out disasters. Should I even start on that path? I do not wish to. And Kosovo? The bombing of Kosovo was very controversial. But if we talk about the overall operation, from beginning to end (not there yet), the major input of people-power came not from the UN, not from the U.S., but from the OSCE. They still are there.

True. That is to say, the blue helmets played an important role from early on in keeping the parties separated once a cease-fire was achieved, first in Croatia, then in Bosnia. But apart from doing no more than guarding the status quo, they did dramatically fail even in that in Bosnia (think Srebrenica). So there the US did have to "get the chestnuts from the fire" in the end, as we say.

But the US did seek and find a broad consensus for its action, and many other countries joined in sending troops to Bosnia. Same for Kosovo. Again, without the US bombs Kosovo would never have been freed, but without international organisations de facto taking over the day-to-day administration after the US were done bombing, conflict would quickly have flared up again. And the US were then still wise enough to realise that if they were going to have to call in the allies to do the peacebuilding afterwards, those should be allowed a say in how the war was fought and started, too.

Why I mentioned these wars in particular is that they introduced the notion of a "humanitarian war" into international politics in a big way. I believe the German government and the US administration - people like Madeleine Albright - were genuinely wedded to establishing human and minority rights as well as political stability as goals for their mission. This was far beyond the world that you describe where only "national interests" ever count.



Well, Stalin was a long time ago, when the UN had only just been founded.

All through the Cold War the UN grew, and its individual programs, like the UNHCR, that helps provide food and shelter to some 20 million refugees and IDP's, the World Health Organisation and UNICEF, made great strides in establishing basic humanitarian care for those hit hardest by conflict and poverty. Politically it did remain a bit of a paper tiger - until the deadlock between US and Soviet Union dissolved after the latter's dissolution.

Since then the UN has helped to stop killing and wars in many places - preventing old conflicts from flaring up again and safeguarding newly established cease-fires. Big veto-carrying countries like China are beyond its grasp, but blue helmets have been stationed between Ethiopia and Eritrea, in East-Timor, the Western Sahara, Cyprus, the Lebanon, Namibia, Mozambique and Cambodia. The UN has facilitated some first free elections, such as the ones in Timor, as well as mere cease-fires.

There were failures, too, of course, but not necessarily any more than among old-fashioned unilateral interventions. Remember the US interventions in Haiti and Somalia - or even the state of Afghanistan, right now?

Dys--thank you!!! Tonight of all nights, I needed a laugh.