Posted on 04/01/2005 6:53:55 AM PST by bamahead
The debate on Darfur in the UN security council last night is a salutary reminder that the only hope for peoples abandoned by their own governments is an effective international community.
It was a Labour government that hosted the conference in postwar London that gave birth to the UN. Now this Labour government has the opportunity to modernise it by taking up the challenge of Kofi Annan's blueprint for a UN for this century.
The UN was founded in an era when most of its present members were not independent states, and even fewer were industrialised nations. Nearly all permanent members got there because they were the victors of the second world war. To this day Germany and Japan have never overcome their initial exclusion as the losers, and the new industrialised giants such as Brazil or India remain in the waiting room.
Not one permanent member represents the Muslim world, although developing a positive, tolerant relationship between the west and Islam is one of the most pressing security issues of our time. The obvious solution is for Egypt or Indonesia to take one of the four new permanent seats that the Annan package proposes for Africa and Asia.
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The problem is that to Americans their veto in the UN occupies the same talismanic role as our veto in the European Union. The best hope is a self-denying commitment by the permanent five that they will each cast their veto only on matters of immediate national interest. Britain could start the log rolling by making such a unilateral statement on its own, which should not be difficult as we now do not use our veto at all.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
-BAL
We should not only derail the UN, we should throw it out of the country.
I confess to not knowing what a coconut shy is. But whatever it is, I am certain that it must be vastly preferable to a strong United Nations able to effectively impose its "collective decisions" on a formerly sovereign United States.
Then where are the OUTSIDE AUDITS?
The United Kingdom is in the EU. It does not, however, use the Euro.
Even this part is BS-- "In 1945, representatives of 50 countries met in San Francisco at the United Nations Conference on International Organization to draw up the United Nations Charter."
Anything making the US look good (in their eyes) goes into the memory hole. Complete wankers.
I think the surely meant to say US determine to derail the Annan Corruption Express.
How thye looney lefties can excuse the biggest theft in the history of the world is definitely curious.
I guess we won't need to hear amny more about US corporations not paying enough taxes or about Enron type theft if they can excuse the UN's world class corruption, eh?
This statement is manifestly true. What the writer does not understand, however, is that the UN stands squarely in the way of the creation of an effective international community.
At this time, the corrupt, ineffective, completely unreformable UN occupies the moral high ground of all international cooperation. Until it is no longer on the scene, it will be much more difficult nations of goodwill to band together to behave responsibly. The UN is not part of the solution, and is an active part of the problem.
That would be difficult - who would pick it up? It should be abandoned and rebuilt from the ground up, with the US in charge and its strong allies alongside.
The UN was the greatest thing the world had ever seen...in 1945. Fast forward to 2005. It is now irrelevant and needs to be abandoned, however the US needs to look at deals with other countries before leaving (it shouldn't go out alone, as it would create a complete isolationist appearance).
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