Re: East Timor/United Nations

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Michael Keaney says

> Of course, now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, the United Nations
> is more than ever a tool of territorial and economic ambitions by the USA
> and its allies. Put in old-school Marxist terms, the UN is not an
> expression of Empire but imperialism. Power grabs by big fish in the ocean
> at the expense of smaller fish--rather than Kantian pieties--is the only
> way to understand the United Nations.
> (see http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2001II/msg03491.html)
>
> ... we should bear in mind that many of a distinctly different political
> persuasion, and at the very heart of US power, would disagree, precisely
> because they regard the UN as out of control.
>
> Now of course, thanks to Senator Jeffords, Senator Helms no longer sits from
> on high throwing his cardboard thunderbolts at maps highlighting Cuba,
> China, North Korea and Venezuela. But it's a safe bet that the largely
> insulated (from Congressional scrutiny) process of foreign policy will
> enable the noticeably unilateralist Bush administration carry on in Uncle
> Jesse's fine tradition. And that tradition involves both circumventing and
> undermining the credibility of the UN, precisely because it is not under the
> sort of control that large sections of the United States power elite regards
> as its divine right/manifest destiny.

*****   The New York Times
May 29, 2001, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section A; Page 15; Column 5; Editorial Desk
HEADLINE: Foreign Affairs;
95 to 5
BYLINE:  By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN;  Gail Collins is on vacation.

Ever since the U.S. got voted off the island at the U.N. Human Rights
Commission three weeks ago, Congress has been hopping mad and the
U.N.-haters have been on a tear. So I have an idea: Let's quit the
U.N. That's right, let's just walk. Most of its members don't speak
English anyway. What an insult! Let's just shut it down and turn it
into another Trump Tower. That Security Council table would make a
perfect sushi bar.

No? You don't want to leave the U.N. to the Europeans and Russians?
Then let's stop bellyaching about the U.N., and manipulating our
dues, and start taking it seriously for what it is -- a global forum
that spends 95 percent of its energy endorsing the wars and
peacekeeping missions that the U.S. wants endorsed, or taking on the
thankless humanitarian missions that the U.S. would like done but
doesn't want to do itself. The U.N. actually spends only 5 percent of
its time annoying the U.S. Not a bad deal....

...[T]here are now 16 U.N. peacekeeping missions.

For the past decade, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Fiji and Nepal have been
doing U.N. peacekeeping that the U.S. wants done but doesn't want to
do itself. These poor countries do U.N. peacekeeping to earn extra
cash, and have been paying the salaries of the U.N. peacekeepers
themselves, while waiting for years for the U.S. to pay its dues. So
the world's richest country has been taking interest-free loans from
the world's poorest, dollar-a-day economies. That's embarrassing.

All these problems would exist whether the U.N. were there or not. So
what the U.N. provides 95 percent of the time is a body for
coordinating our response to problems we care about. And it does it
in a way that ensures that the burden of costs is shared, so that the
U.S. doesn't have to pay alone, and that the burden of responsibility
is shared, so that wars the U.S. wants fought, or the peace accords
the U.S. wants kept, have a global stamp of approval, not
made-in-U.S.A....   *****

All in all, the U.N. is a pretty good deal for the U.S.

Yoshie