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May 02, 2007

UN: Calling All Student Activists

 

 

I received this e-mail today sent out by Suzanne Domenici, Regional Membership Coordinator of the United Nations Association of the United States to UNA-USA members:

 

Dear UNA-USA Student Alliance Activist:

 

We’d like to let you know about a new online, grassroots campaign in support of UN peacekeeping called the Price of Peace (www.PriceOfPeace.org). 

 

The United States is failing to pay its fair share of UN peacekeeping.  The President’s budget request this year shortchanges UN peacekeeping by $500 million.  Considering the U.S. has already accumulated $500 million in prior unpaid bills to UN peacekeeping alone, the United States could owe more than $1 billion to the United Nations by the end of 2007! 

 

Congress must now address this shortfall. And it is up to you to remind them that the price of UN peacekeeping is far less than the tragic human and financial costs of war and insist we keep our promise to fully fund the UN peacekeeping missions for which we’re voting.

 

Tell Congress to honor its commitments to UN peacekeeping for an effective means of sharing the burdens for international security and stability. 

 

I suppose this e-mail would bother me less if the UN were actually living up to its obligations, but we all know the money often tends to wind up doing everything but that for which it was intended.

 

The second problem of course is that UN Peacekeepers only take part in countries where they are invited. This means that while those blue helmets do at times perform some good (between the taking of bribes and the raping of underage girls), it is only as much as the host state allows. During the genocide in Rwanda in which over 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered with machetes, UN peacekeepers did nothing – and this is but a single example out of many. Even worse, when Hezbollah was firing rockets at Israeli civilian neighborhoods in a clear violation of IHL, UN observers not only did not report it, they actually allowed Hezbollah to take cover and fire their rockets near those UN outposts while at the same time making public Israeli military positions and movements, thus putting the UN in a dirty political trifecta with Hezbollah (and its sponsors) and Russia (which also directly participated in operations against the Israelis during the conflict).

 

My third problem with this “activist” message is its language. Where, pray tell, do we get to hear the phrase “pay fair share”? The answer is that we hear it whenever libs are looking for a buzz word to accuse the hard-working of being greedy and evil as a means to the end of socialism on some scale. Here, a classic example of liberal guiltism. Naturally, the e-mail reads like a Democrat voter action leaflet, and assumes the students reading it (a presumed liberal constituency) will already be primed in Pavlovian fashion to react to those buzz words by their liberal professors.

 

I understand the UN needs funding in order to stay afloat, but the UN is not only not spending the money it does have in the best possible way, it's not seeking funding from those who really could pay more, like China, which has for several years been spending more than any other country on an aggressive Nazi Germany-style military buildup (and Russia, not too far behind, now stands in second place). Both states are not currently at war anywhere in the world and are making a killing (quite literally) arming the terrorists the US is trying to stamp out.  The US pays a great deal annually through its own defense budget to destroy terrorists much to the world’s benefit, with not just no help, but counterproductive efforts from Russia and China.  That being the case, one would think both Russia and China should have a greater “fair share” to pay than the US to support peacekeeping operations around the world (especially when it would be most fair to have those two states pay to undo the damage they have caused in various places).  As far as any “effective means of sharing the burdens of international security and stability” might go, this would seem more reasonable.

 

In the meantime, until the UN starts fulfilling its commitments to function as a transparent and neutral organization, the US owes it nothing, and in fact, does the world a disservice by continuing to enable the large-scale dysfunction that has become a fact of daily life for the UN superculture.

 

 

Posted by Martin at May 2, 2007 03:49 PM

Comments

Posted by: Debbie at May 3, 2007 08:09 AM

Posted by: Debbie at May 3, 2007 08:17 AM