Mark Steyn on the UN

[manhole]

call me a cynic, but I doubt very much if there are many politicians who really give a rat's a** if two tribes are at each other's throat, or a Greek and a Turk, or (write your own scenario).  They make a decision to send our "peacekeepers" to these places in order to make themselves look good on the world stage.  The men and women who ultinmately go and do the job are a source of pride to our country.  They do the best they can with what they've got (poor equipment, stupid ROE's, etc) and let's not forget being unable to contact anyone with authority to make decisions at the UN at night or on a week-end.  No one doubts the professionalism of our troops but the assignments they are given are questionable in the overall scheme of things.  We do indeed make a difference while we are there but do the governments of the day have the will to step up to the plate to make real change for the good of their nation?

 

[ArmyRick]

I liked the article by Mr Steyn.  It should be mandatory for all Canadians to read it and god knows maybe W5 or 60 minutes could do an expose on the real UN.  The biggest problem IMO with the UN? Everybody that gets a voice in a world audience maybe shouldn't be entitled to a voice.

 

[a_majoor]

Why not peace for the sake of peace is a tautology. If the underlying souce of the conflict is not removed or solved in somne way, then things will fester and lots of bad end results are possible, with the most popular and permanent form of "resolution" being Genocide. I am sure that very few people in Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Somalia, the Congo and so on have much good to say about the UN peacekeeping, and even in Cyprus, a corrosive feeling of hatred, suspicion and mistrust exist to this day, based on political events dating back to the 1960s!

Like I said earlier, although it was an illuminating experience for me to do a tour as a "peacekeeper" (and later as part of a PSO, which is a different animal), was it really worth the blood and treasure the Canadian people have spent over all these years to achieve so little? As fiddlehead said, a large part of the motivation to send troops on a Peacekeeping mission has to do with extrinsic factors like domestic politics, getting a stream of revenue (a big reason third world armies will send battalions, each soldier is worth a certain amount of money, paid by the UN to the government [not the soldiers themselves]) and so on.

Mark Styen has laid out the moral bankruptcy of the UN, and suggests the failures are systemic to the institution and resistent to change or reform. We need EFECTIVE ways to influence events on the world stage, so lets pull the plug and put our resources where they will do more good.

 

[Michael Dorosh]

Why not peace for the sake of peace is a tautology. If the underlying souce of the conflict is not removed or solved in somne way, then things will fester and lots of bad end results are possible, with the most popular and permanent form of "resolution" being Genocide. I am sure that very few people in Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Somalia, the Congo and so on have much good to say about the UN peacekeeping, and even in Cyprus, a corrosive feeling of hatred, suspicion and mistrust exist to this day, based on political events dating back to the 1960s!

But there has been little bloodshed and certainly no genocide on Cyprus.  And bad feelings are somehow the fault of the peacekeepers?  We have bad feelings between Quebec and English Canada or Alberta and Ottawa, including a corrosive feeling of hatred, suspicion and mistrust, based on political events dating back to the 1960s...as one scholar put it....so whose peacekeepers do we get to blame for that? 

...getting a stream of revenue (a big reason third world armies will send battalions, each soldier is worth a certain amount of money, paid by the UN to the government [not the soldiers themselves])

So what?

Mark Styen has laid out the moral bankruptcy of the UN, and suggests the failures are systemic to the institution and resistent to change or reform. We need EFECTIVE ways to influence events on the world stage, so lets pull the plug and put our resources where they will do more good.

So if the UN didn't exist in the 1970s, what would you have done about Cyprus or UNEF? After the Second World War, the Nuremberg trials outlined that it was an international crime to wage aggressive war. An international community is necessary to police these "crimes".  What sort of alternate system would you set up, and how would it be resistant to the same kinds of problems the UN suffers?

 

[Long in the tooth]

I seem to recall that our particiation in UNEF was at the mutual request of Britain, France and the US and scored us major political capital.  Our deployment to Cyprus (within 48 hours, unbelievable now) scored us the Auto pact with the US, just expired.  That act alone gave us millions of man-years in jobs.  My point is that we normally must reconcile the principled with the pragmatic. 

If we were truly principled we'd be preventing slavery, starvation and slaughter in Africa.  Let's not pat ourselves too hard on the back.

 

[Michael Dorosh]

I seem to recall that our particiation in UNEF was at the mutual request of Britain, France and the US and scored us major political capital.  Our deployment to Cyprus (within 48 hours, unbelievable now) scored us the Auto pact with the US, just expired.  That act alone gave us millions of man-years in jobs.  My point is that we normally must reconcile the principled with the pragmatic. 

If we were truly principled we'd be preventing slavery, starvation and slaughter in Africa.  Let's not pat ourselves too hard on the back.

Principles and logistics rarely mix; another precursor to that would be having a million man Army to enforce our principles...

 

[a_majoor]

Micheal, you are saying we got half a loaf in Cyprus and the Sinai, which is OK; I'm just saying getting two half loafs after going to town in so many parts of the world since the 1950's is a hardly sterling record. I would say if you were to have gone to the store and spent a bunch of money 30 or 40 times and can really only say you were "sort of" satisfied with two or three purchases then maybe you should consider shopping somewhere else.

The problem of the UN paying governments to furnish soldiers is in a way an analogue to the UN itself. A thug representing a dictatorship is accorded the same consideration and privileges as the Canadian Ambassador to the UN, and in "Peacekeeping", battalions of untrained and underequipped soldiers from third world nations are still considered an effective contribution on par with a battalion of professional western soldiers. To compound the problem, since the home government gets the money, the soldiers have to make do on their third world pay in theater (assuming the logistical arrangements are even in place), which is probably a huge motivating factor in the criminal activities Mark Steyn pointed out. After all, collectively they are the biggest armed gang in the neighbourhood. This is certainly incentive for the poor third world soldiers to slide into criminal activities.

Robust alternative arrangements with like minded nations can take the place of the UN; I really don't care what some thugocracy like Cuba or the Palestinians think of Canada, now that they have revealed their true colours; but I should be very interested in what India thinks of Canada, given the host of shared interests and values. This is just like pre welfare state Canada; people got together to accomplish their goals based on mutual interests, so to with nations.

 

[Michael Dorosh]

Micheal, you are saying we got half a loaf in Cyprus and the Sinai, which is OK; I'm just saying getting two half loafs after going to town in so many parts of the world since the 1950's is a hardly sterling record.

I may have misunderstood the original statement. "Peackekeeping has NEVER worked" made it sound like Canada never got a single crumb.

I would say if you were to have gone to the store and spent a bunch of money 30 or 40 times and can really only say you were "sort of" satisfied with two or three purchases then maybe you should consider shopping somewhere else.

We agree.

The problem of the UN paying governments to furnish soldiers is in a way an analogue to the UN itself. A thug representing a dictatorship is accorded the same consideration and privileges as the Canadian Ambassador to the UN, and in "Peacekeeping", battalions of untrained and underequipped soldiers from third world nations are still considered an effective contribution on par with a battalion of professional western soldiers. To compound the problem, since the home government gets the money, the soldiers have to make do on their third world pay in theater (assuming the logistical arrangements are even in place), which is probably a huge motivating factor in the criminal activities Mark Steyn pointed out. After all, collectively they are the biggest armed gang in the neighbourhood. This is certainly incentive for the poor third world soldiers to slide into criminal activities.

I'd think the answer to that would be more professional soldiers then; how does Canada leaving the UN address that problem?

Robust alternative arrangements with like minded nations can take the place of the UN; I really don't care what some thugocracy like Cuba or the Palestinians think of Canada, now that they have revealed their true colours; but I should be very interested in what India thinks of Canada, given the host of shared interests and values. This is just like pre welfare state Canada; people got together to accomplish their goals based on mutual interests, so to with nations.

But don't nations "like" India also participate with Canada on the same UN missions?

So if we are truly principled, just increase our military, take on all the UN missions that come down the pike, and keep the third world trash within their own borders.

But if Britain had done that in the world wars - kept Canada's third world trash military such as it laughingly was in 1914 or 1939 in Ontario where it belonged - we would never have achieved nationhood.  Is this not the route that these other "have not" nations today want to follow via commitments to the UN?

 

[a_majoor]

I'd think the answer to that would be more professional soldiers then; how does Canada leaving the UN address that problem?

Canada does not have to be involved with the UN to take on PSO's, we joined the air campaign in Kosovo without asking the UN's permission (that other little club we belong to called NATO), which was also the organizing force in the Balkans (my medal for Bosnia is a NATO one) and ISAF. If we feel our national interests are involved in some area that isn't as interesting to our NATO partners, it would be good to "tiger team" with other friends and allies. The Tsunami disaster is a good example, the United States, Australia and Japan were on the scene literally within hours, and India came as soon as they could. While these nations have formal and informal ties, there was nothing like a NATO to pull them together for this task, just the shared ability to do so and a common sense of decency.

As for nations that want to join the club? By all means. I would never expect a contingent from (say) Bangladesh to rival a similar contingent from the UK out of the box right now, but they can establish ties with us, send officers and NCOs here for training, do unit exchanges and so on to bring their military up to speed (kind of like the CEF in 1914-15, say...). Their government can also do similar exchanges for their police, judiciary, and other civil servants, and work out bilateral agreements with us on any number of issues. All we really need to do is be receptive to these approaches, and ensure that our help is going where it is supposed to.

In many of your posts you mention our principles. I don't see our principles being upheld by the UN any longer, there are other ways to get to the same ends which are potentially faster, cheaper and more effective. If Canada really wants to make a difference (and if you want Canada to do so), then it is time to look outside the box labled "UN".

 

[ArmyRick]

100% agree with you, art.

 

[a_majoor]

Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) speaks on the UN

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005985

Time for a Kofi Break
Annan's one virtue: He weakens the U.N.

BY GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS
Sunday, December 5, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

Things are going badly for Kofi Annan. The Oil for Food scandal has revealed U.N. behavior regarding Saddam Hussein's Iraq that ranges from criminally inept to outright corrupt. Rape and pedophilia by U.N. peacekeepers haven't gotten the kind of attention they'd get if American troops were involved, but the scandals have begun to take their toll. And the U.N.'s ability to serve its crowning purpose--the "never again" treatment of genocide that was vowed after the Holocaust, and re-vowed after Cambodia and Rwanda--is looking less and less credible in the wake of its response to ongoing genocide in Darfur. And finally, the U.N. has so far played no significant role in defusing the Ukrainian crisis.

Things have gotten bad enough that some are calling for Mr. Annan's resignation, amid talk of former Czech president Vaclav Havel as successor. ("Havel for Secretary General" bumper stickers are on the Web.) But however you assess Mr. Havel's chances of becoming secretary general, for Mr. Annan the comparison is devastating. Mr. Havel, after all, is a hero on behalf of freedom: a man who helped bring about the end of communist dominance in Eastern Europe, despite imprisonment and the threat of death--a man who could write that "evil must be confronted in its womb and, if it can't be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force." Mr. Annan, by contrast, is a trimmer and temporizer who has stood up for tyrants far more than he has stood up to them.

If the comparison is damning to Kofi, it's even more damning to the U.N. Mr. Havel once wrote Czech dictator Gustav Husak, "So far, you . . . have chosen . . . the path of inner decay for the sake of outward appearances . . . of deepening the spiritual and moral crisis of our society, and ceaselessly degrading human dignity, for the puny sake of protecting your own power." One might say the same of the U.N. bureaucracy.

And that, perhaps, is the only argument against bringing Mr. Havel to the U.N. (besides the obvious: He probably wouldn't take the job). The U.N. is losing what shreds of moral legitimacy remain, even among those who were once sympathetic, as the extent of its corruption becomes too obvious to ignore. There's talk of replacing--or, more diplomatically, supplementing--the U.N. with a Community of Democracies that would draw its support from legitimate governments, not thugs and kleptocrats. At the very least, it seems likely that the U.N. will soon come under enormous pressure to reform.

But here's a paradox: It's hard to imagine that Mr. Annan could parry the pressure. But a U.N. headed by Mr. Havel might derive enough reflected legitimacy to resist such changes. According to Mr. Annan's Web site, the secretary general is supposed to serve as a "symbol" of U.N. "ideals." It may well be that he's doing that more accurately than Vaclav Havel ever could.

Mr. Reynolds, professor of law at the University of Tennessee, writes at InstaPundit.com.