QUESTIONING THE U.N., IT'S PURPOSE, AND EFFECTIVENESS

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By Anotmo, guest contributor

I cannot ignore the recent events involving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

I have a question for our liberal friends. The question I have is quite apart from the more obvious one regarding how they can now continue to view the Israeli's as the bad guys, or at least equally culpable as the Palestinians, when Israel voluntarily gave up the Gaza strip, forced their own people, sometimes at gun point, to evacuate the area; and turned it over to the Palestinians, only to have the Palestinians then use the area as a base of operations from which to continue their attacks on Israel? No, my question for our liberal friends is even more fundamental to their ideology. "“What, exactly, is it that liberals believe their vaunted and revered United Nations can/should/will now do to address and ameliorate this conflict?"” Indeed, as soon as one asks that question, a still more fundamental question arises. "“Why do such things continue to happen while the United Nations remains extant?"” Is it not the purpose of the United Nations to otherwise resolve such issues?

Liberals seem to perceive the United Nations as some deliberative third party arbitrative body of wise and reasonable council who will sit down and intelligently work out a mutually agreeable resolution to world conflicts, much as, (they perceive), a Labor Relations Arbitration Board does for Labor/Management conflicts here in the U.S. Of course, the first thing wrong with that view is that the United Nations has no such arbitration authority except as might be enforced by its own standing army, in which case it would be nothing more than yet another player on the world stage pursuing its own agenda through force of arms. As Benjamin Franklin observed: "“Force shittes upon reasons back"”.

More importantly, however, is that the liberal'’s view of the United Nations is just plain wrong. Its participants are not as described above and their purpose is not to end conflict by arriving at mutually acceptable resolutions. It'’s participants are representatives of their respective nations and their purpose is to pursue their nations agenda using whatever means are available to them within the United Nations just as their nations continue to pursue their agenda using whatever means are available to them on the world stage. The one is just a microcosm of the other with the sole essential difference being that the relative powers of the participating nations within the United Nations are artificially contrived while those within the world at large are dictated by actual economic, military and moral might.

In fact, that is precisely why liberals so venerate the United Nations. Not because it can wisely and peaceably resolve conflicts in the best interests of the world at large but because it negates the real world superior power of the United States and may thereby prevent conflicts from being resolved in the latter'’s favor. Nowhere is this clearer than when Koffi Annan'’s second in command recently lamented that what was needed was for the United States to allow it'’s military to be used to enforce the, (consistently anti U.S.), will of the United Nations. In point of fact, when conflicting nations do choose to negotiate a mutually agreeable resolution, they do so through their own diplomatic, ambassadorial and allied resources, not through the United Nations where the conflicting interests of so many others just complicate matters.

To answer my own questions, then, there is nothing that the United Nations can or will do to resolve the Palestinian/Israel conflict. It has raged and will continue to rage despite and perhaps even because of the existence of the United Nations. That is so for all conflicts, not just the Palestinian/Israel conflict, because its members understand the United Nations to be just a more favorable forum within which to advance their own interests than is the real world and because the United Nations has no enforceable authority by which to resolve conflicts contrary to those interests. History itself bears this out.

The value of the United Nations, from the liberal point of view, is to externally stop the United States of America from doing whatever it is that the liberals do not want the United States of America to do but which they are internally unable to stop. Some grand and high minded purpose that is.