Some Have Remarked on this piece of trash masquerading as a feature on BBConline.
Little surprise then that the centrepiece of that article is very jaded indeed. I found the gist of it described at this site, posted on July 1st. Oh, and Fayetteville, N.C., is a town with five cinemas, and 60,000 inhabitants. Only one of the cinemas showed Fahrenheit 9/11.
StinKerr, I don’t think that trying to build a temporary alliance to deal with Iraq under UN auspices is the kind of fundamental change that is needed. Rather than use the UN as it is currently structured, the needed shift would entail a basic reorganization, or replacement, of that organization creating a body that democratically represented the citizens of its members and that had both the authority and the means to use military force to eliminate outlaw regimes and organizations. At present, the UN meets neither of those requirements.
At present the UN is an organization of ‘outlaw’ regimes that cannot and should not be trusted with a standing military force.
There is already an organization of democratic countries. I have looked but can’t find the name or their website. It’s been around for 10 or 12 years, as I recall. Some have suggested it as a good replacement for the U.N. for democratic countries.
I grew up believing in the idea of the U.N. but seeing what it has become has turned me against the U.N. as it is today.
The UN was one of the first creations of the Cold War. It was created to prevent the post-WW2 powers — essentially the permanent Security Council members — from starting another world war. All the rest — humanitarian missions, human rights issues — are secondary to the primary impetus of preventing world war.
Ironically, it wasn’t the UN that prevented global war for the last 60 years, but primal fear expressed as the strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction.
The Cold War is over, but it left behind quite a mess. (Al-Qaeda and friends, Saddam, corrupt theocracy in Iran, an Africa littered with failed states, etc.)
The UN, as a Cold War vestige, isn’t going to be useful in cleaning up that mess, not the least because it represents and supports sovereign governments, not sovereign peoples. Far too many of those sovereign governments have interests that are fundamentally opposed to democracy.
billg
You are right. The UN is pretty much a waste of space, full of tinpot dictators.
But that’s not the way the BBC sees it. Their slant is that the N is the fount of all wisdom on international affairs. Facile Guardianista twaddle.
Yep, when some of the greatest offenders in the human rights department get elected to the UN Commission on Human Rights it becomes a sickening parody.
There are some other unbelievably ridiculous selections too on other commissions.