A Thinking Reed

Black Helicopter Patrol

Written by

Lee M.

in

I’ve always been a bit puzzled by folks who see the USA as the ne plus ultra of evil in the world, and yet get all dewey-eyed about the prospects of the UN bringing peace and harmony to our benighted globe. To wit.

Question: has the UN ever prevented a war from happening that its member states sought to bring about? Do the Code Pink ladies recall that it was under the cover of the sacred UN that we went to war in the Persian Gulf in 1991 resulting in: large numbers of Iraqi casualties, the destruction of much of Iraq’s infrastructure such as water treatment facilities, the post-war imposition of draconian sanctions (under UN auspices, lest it be forgotten!) which resulted in an estimated 500,000-1 million civilian casualties? And that all of this made a follow-up war with Iraq all but inevitable?

We here at VI repeat our call of a month ago: No to Boltonism! No to Globaloney!

(Code Pink link via Clark Stooksbury)

Comments

5 responses to “Black Helicopter Patrol”

  1. Joshie

    Asking what wars the U.N. has prevented is kind of like asking what children have been prevented by my wife using birth control for as long as we’ve been married. We will never know by virtue of the fact that they were prevented in the first place.

    What can be said for the U.N. is that there have been no major global conflagrations since the U.N. has been created. The seven centuries before this one have all seen major protracted bloody conflicts, each coming faster and bloodier than the previous one. 14th-15th: Hundred Years War, 16th-17th: Wars of Religion/Thirty Years War, 18th: Seven Years War, 19th: Napoleonic Wars, 20th: two World Wars with hundreds of millions dead. Something had to give.

    The U.N., like the U.S. is not perfect and is in need of serious structural reform. But, like marriage in a lotta ways, you only get as much as you put in. The U.N. will fail if it is seen by nations, particularly powerful ones as merely a mechanism for bullying others into doing what the powerful nation wants.

    I am under no illusions as to the shortcomings of the U.N., but the future of the world is as one world, as God created us to be.

    Reply
  2. Lee

    I’m not saying the UN should be junked (if it didn’t exist it would probably be necessary to invent it). Though, by preventing wars I mean cases where a member state or states were explicitly itchin’ for war and were somehow prevented from doing so by the UN. I can think of at least two recent cases (Kosovo, Iraq War II) where precisely the opposite happened.

    Then you have cases where wars were undertaken explicitly with UN approval (Korea, Iraq War I).

    Reasonable people can disagree, of course, as to whether any or all of the above wars were justifiable, but in what sense does the UN act as an institutional brake on war-making if a state is determined to do so? I.e. has any state ever not gone to war b/c it feared the disapproval of the “world community” (rather than b/c it feared retaliation in kind)?

    Also, isn’t it just as likely that the reason there haven’t been any global wars since the founding of the UN is because that period of history also roughly covers the period of nuclear standoff between the USA and USSR?

    As to the last point – just b/c God intends us to be one world doesn’t necessarily favor any particular institutional embodiment of that goal does it? In fact, couldn’t we read the lesson of the Tower of Babel story as a caution against humans trying to create a world unity under their own steam rather than depending on God bringing in his kingdom?

    Reply
  3. Joshie

    The tower of Babel story could also be used to argue that current divisions among peoples is the result of sin. God’s reason for getting ticked off has never been entirely clear to me in that story. It may be as much a dig at Mesopotamians for building big structures as anything else.

    Of course you’re right that world unity is not necassarily to be exclusively sought through one institution in whatever form, but I would argue that the U.N. prevented war from breaking out between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (and China). There were numerous times that the two could have come to open warfare but didn’t over the Cuba issue, Vietnam, Korea, etc.

    But whether anyone agrees with that or not, the very fact that there is an international body where nations can come together and discussion and hopefully address problems is enough of a deturrent in and of itself.

    The fact is that Iraq DID violate international law and invade another country in GW I, no matter how opressive and tiny the country was. Serbia WAS a problem in the ninties and the Balkans had been the birthplace of many a good-size war in the nineteenth century culminating in WW I of course, so I don’t think the Balkan wars of the late 20th century were entirely unjustified.

    I guess my real point is there needs to be an international body of some sort to provide for international discussion and problem solving. And no matter what it is called, we only get out of it what we put into it.

    Reply
  4. Chris Naron

    It’s far more likely that the prospect of nuclear war prevented another world war than the UN. The Soviet Union’s expansions went as far as they could, not up to some limit set by the UN, but to the limit set by MAD. I’m hard pressed to find anything worthwhile that the UN has done that it hasn’t messed up. From the peacekeeping debacle in Rwanda to the current fiasco with AIDS prevention. Perhaps the only agency responsible for more misery in Africa is our own EPA.

    Reply
  5. Joshie

    They went “as far as they could”? What does that mean exactly?

    Reply

Leave a comment

More posts