The 'United' Nations

“The confirmed unteachability of mankind”

Winston Churchill

THERE IS A DISPUTE CURRENTLY underway between the United Nations and Israel over the UN’s inquiry into the events surrounding the Gaza flotilla that Israel intercepted with the loss of nine ‘peace activists’ lives. The Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to attend the UN inquiry on condition that no member of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) was called to give evidence. Ban Ki-Moon, the UN General Secretary, has said that Prime Minister Netanyahu gave no such stipulation.

I believe the Netanyahu version, not only because I support Israel, but because I cannot imagine any representative of any Israeli government, agreeing to any member of the IDF appearing before any such inquiry. If Israel is prepared to go to war over the capturing of just one of their soldiers as they did in Lebanon against Hezbollah, then I feel sure they would not throw any member of the IDF to the wolves at the UN.

Just as much as I support Israel, I dislike and distrust the United Nations in equal measure. Any humanitarian organisation that would put a Libyan representative on its human rights council deserves our contempt.

The UN is a discredited institution, that for reasons of political correctness, politicians in the West allow all sorts of outrageous decisions to be taken like the above example.

The General Council is always split along political rather than moral lines. The organisation is feeble and unable to act militarily with any degree of success. Both the American and British armed services quite rightly refuse to wear the organisation’s insignia, represented by that anaemic blue beret that amply demonstrates the organisation’s impotency.

How can one forget how the Dutch contingent in Serbia allowed thousands of Muslims to be massacred by the Serbs at Srebrenica.

No modern nation with a modern army would, one hope, ever put it at the service of the UN. For to do so would bring it under UN supervision; a situation I would not wish upon my worst enemy – and in this I include Hitler at the top of my list.

Israel knows that her only true ally at the UN is America; or it was until the arrival of Barack Obama. Now I am not so sure. I know the majority of the American people remain loyal to Israel’s survival, but I doubt if the current incumbent in the Whitehouse shares his nation’s view.

THE UNITED NATIONS was born of political idealism and many of those who fought and commanded our armed forces during the last war, became enthusiasts of the project. Having witnessed what many of them must have witnessed, I to would have celebrated the UN’s creation from the old League of Nations.

But time and tide wait for no one and the world has changed at a pace. Our Western values are now under challenge, not from radicals or hippies, or radical hippies as they were celebrated as such in the 1960’s.

The UN today has, rather than united nations, divided them even further. What we have is an organisation divided by cultures. Only under such a system could a representative of a rogue state be given entrance to a human rights committee of the UN.

At the time of the Iraq crises the UN prevaricated by producing resolution after resolution, in the hope that something other than war would turn up to save its reputation . In the end, as part of the 9/11 timeline a republican president finally did what the UN would never have done. He overthrew a dictator who had mocked, scorned and defied (not to say defiled) this theatre of the absurd known as the United Nations.

For nearly a decade Saddam Hussein angered and humiliated this institution, but whenever military action was whispered at, Hussein’s allies and America’s enemies suggested just one more resolution. No wonder this monster ignored the threats made by the UN. Indeed the UN’s cowardice in dealing with this madman as he should have been dealt with much earlier, probably encouraged him to act in the way he did right up to Bush’s intervention; believing as he must have, that he was being presented with just another redundant threat: redundant indeed, even before it was made.

THE UN IS A DEBATING CHAMBER where the perplexed meet on a regular basis to be confounded by huge servings of impotence. Even when they do agree that some corner of the world needs their intervention, corruption usually follows its deployment.

The armed forces they send to carve out and administer a peace, are not exactly of the first rank, and easily prone to bribery: and who would not be if you came from what was once known as the Third World, but now likes to go under the moniker, the Developing World.

You will be pleased to know that the UN still has its uses. It casts celebrities in the role of ‘ambassadors’, doing all sorts charitable work on behalf of the world’s poor.

The UN are not daft. They appreciate the Western celebrity culture which is spreading like wild-fire worldwide, and uses its popularity to give its organisation kudos. Call me an old cynic if you like, but I also believe that many, but not all, of the celebrities who sign up are doing so to promote themselves as much as they are the UN.

If we have to have such an international body, then its membership should set down one basic qualification for admittance. Membership should only be allowed to democratic states. In this way the organisation’s moral base will be acceptable to all the democratic communities that thankfully still flourish in all four corners of the world.

The current set-up is comparable to some dystopian novel such as Gormenghast. The United Nation’s building in New York is the antithesis of what America believes in. It is a vast bureaucracy well and truly anchored to the capital of free enterprise . But hear it is and will probably remain. To meet its equal you would have to travel to Europe, and in particular Brussels, where the wielders of power are also unelected, but not, sadly as impotent as those at the United Nations.