The French Veto
The radio wing of the BBC World News Service is reporting that France will use its Security Council veto to block any U.S. resolution on Iraq containing the threat of military force. I’m looking for a link on the Net that says the same thing, but haven’t found one yet.
Update: Here’s one that implies the same thing. I’ll keep looking.
What I hope is that something like this has been prepared for in advance by George. There’s an argument to be made that the Bush administration is a master of diplomatic jiu jitsu; Andrew Sullivan makes it everyday, practically. That particular argument not only flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but spits on said face and gives it a good slapping on the way in, but this doesn’t mean that it’s wrong, just that it’s out there on the fringe of current political thought. I hope, strangely enough, that it is correct, and that Condi and Dick and Colin have laid out a course steering for a goal that for years has been the fevered dream of the John Birch Society and its allies; the withdrawal of the U.S. from the U.N. Not because I happen to agree with the JBS’s worries about World Government. Hell, I’m a fan of World Government, as long as it’s run by America and those like us. Perhaps I’d better just say I’m a big fan of the coming Hegemony of the Anglosphere. I’m pulling for the dissolution of the United Nations because not only is it a money pit, it promotes the rights of nations over those of individuals.
Iraq, despite being run by a despot and his murderous clique of relations, is given the same rights as Costa Rica, Liechtenstein and New Zealand; countries whose governments would likely fall for the least of Saddam’s actions. Myanmar is no better, nor is the Sudan. If the United Nations truly wanted to promote a better world, it would have embraced the principle that “if you mistreat your people, we will do whatever necessary to bring you down.” The U.N. didn’t because it was formed at the onset of the Cold War, and Russia wasn’t going to accept that, which brings me to my final reason.
I only keep old things around if they work, or if I have an emotional attachment to them. I think most Americans are like this, it’s why we’re running out of space in the landfills. In point of fact, 99% of the things we have that are 60 years or older are still in our possession because of the emotional attachment thing, not because they still perform their function better than anything that has been developed since. How many people do you think watch Friends on their 1948 Admiral?
That’s why the JBS doesn’t have to worry about the U.N. and its black helicopters. It’s the functional equivalent of the Admiral.
Killing the U.N. will not take place without the requisite wailing and tearing of shirts on the Left. It’s odd really, that a movement so enamored of opposing globalization would be among the loudest of the voices condemning a U.S. withdrawal from a global organization. It’s not really the same to them, though. The anti-globo movement at its heart is about restricting U.S. power through the restraint of trade. The current* Left sees the United Nations as an avenue for the same kind of restriction on a political and diplomatic scale.
That’s too bad, because there is a perfectly good leftist argument to be made for dissolving the U.N. The problem in restricting the use of power, like the U.N. is currently attempting to do to the U.S., is that in cases where said power can be used as a force for improving the lot of the miserable and oppressed, it is slow and unwieldy. People die every day because the U.N. cannot act, and its continued existence acts as an automatic ass covering device for every nation on the planet. It gives them the implicit excuse not to act in the face of disease, poverty and oppression.
“We’d like to, but that’s the U.N.’s job.”
The eradication of the United Nations removes this rationalization. It also frees up the 2.5 billion dollars a year that the U.N. spends to little effect. Restricting the use of power was useful to the U.S. during the Cold War because it helped to control the Soviet Union. The current dinosaur Left wants the U.S. to accede to the wishes of the UN, now and in all things, because they see it as the best restraint on the power of the U.S. They decided long ago that the U.S. was the moral equivalent of the Soviet Union, and as such the exercise of its power can only be in the service of corruption. They had to embrace this equivalency in order to reconcile the romantic view of Communism that infected the Left in the 1930’s with the oppression that form of government engendered. The only way to do so was to make the rationalization that the U.S. was as bad, if not worse, than the Soviet Union. It’s bullshit, and the Soviet Union is gone, but the rationalization remains, as it will until the last of the die-hard Soviet romantics are dead.
I’m not going to pretend that parts of the Shining City on the Hill aren’t built on the bones of people who were mistreated or killed. America isn’t perfect, we don’t pretend to be. In fact, we worry more about what we should be than any other culture on the planet. We’re not perfect, but we damn sure would like to be. We want to be perfect, and we want to be loved. That more that anything else is what will prevent us from doing the evil that the current Left seems to fear from America so much. You can scream “Vietnam” all you want to, but the fact is that the U.S. ended its involvement there because its citizens forced it too, because they realized that what we were doing there was foreign to the American character.
The fact is that the U.N., due to its insistence on the sovereignty of the nation state, is doing a better job restricting the flow of American ideals than in restricting American power. That’s why the Left should hope that France not only vetoes the current U.S. resolution on Iraq, but that we give the Security Council the finger and proceed anyway. Hold your nose, close your ears, do whatever you need to, but support the war on Iraq for the possibility that one of the things it destabilizes is the United Nations, that it comes crashing down, and we can raise something better in its place.
*I say “current Left” because I think that the Left as it is configured now is in its death throes. In 10 years there’ll be a Left that few now would even recognize.
