Yoshie forwards the following trash from Thomas Friedman:
***** 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.
=====
It pains me greatly that you, of all people, should bring to the fore the
unspeakable garbage perpetrated by someone Louis P., with great
understatement, calls the New York Times "superpimp". Words fail me in my
efforts to record the feelings of revulsion and disgust that cause me to
swoon every time I clap eyes on his strenuously laboured efforts at wit,
reason, persuasion, propaganda. I'm having great difficulty composing myself
sufficiently to put together this reply.
Nevertheless, let's try to look beyond Friedman's dysentry -- always a good
policy, and particularly effective in this case.
The "new world order" of Bush Sr. was painstakingly constructed and, once
completed, immensely fragile. So much so, that it shattered almost
immediately, with the "coalition" of forces ranged against Saddam Hussein
steadily shrinking. Getting UN endorsement of the necessarily limited
actions undertaken by the US against Iraq was both time-consuming and an
affront to aforementioned notions of divine right/manifest destiny. Ever
since that experience, the US has been engaged in a campaign of undermining
the UN, using it only as a fig-leaf of legitimacy when it suits. The UN has
taken the rap for countless failed peace missions, which failed because they
were not properly supported by the countries, led by the US, that supposedly
sponsored them in the first place. Thus we hear now of the UN's "last
chance" in Sierra Leone, while the UN carries the great shame, apparently,
of failing to hault the Rwandan massacre in time. And see my earlier post
for the other tactics employed by the US and its allies/lapdogs in the
supplanting of the UN by NATO -- itself a necessarily slow and tortuous
process, but one that is gathering strength, as Robertson's pledge to get
involved in Central Asia (far away from the North Atlantic, assuming NATO
still stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organisation), ostensibly in the war
on drugs.
Of course this is not exactly new. Efforts to undermine the UN go back at
least as far to the marginalising of UNCTAD and Raul Prebisch, whose use of
that powerbase to promote the sort of nationalistic development championed
by Louis P. as a bulwark against neoliberal globalism was simply too much
for the William Simons and Edwin Yeos who kick-started the global structural
adjustment programme in Britain in 1976. Thatcher and Reagan very pointedly
withdrew their support of UNESCO, refusing to endorse its rather mild
sponsorship of anti-Western imperialist movements/ideas. And no amount of
international condemnation stopped Reagan from persecuting the Sandinistas
throughout the 1980s, in clear contravention of international law. The "new
world order" proclaimed by Bush, Sr. was a miscalculation that, with the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the UN would buckle quickly under US hegemony.
This did not happen, as the troublesome Arab countries, among others
demonstrated. The seeds of discontent sown in East Asia thanks to US
heavy-handedness via its vastly more dependable IMF arm have further
rendered cooperation within the UN problematic for the US. Bombing the
Chinese embassy as part of a NATO action further alienated the Chinese. And
so on.
Sure thing -- the UN is handy for the US as a means of socialising the costs
of its global security policies. The powers concerned can look forward to
mild sops in return. But the issue here is not one of either/or. More like
both/and. Let me explain. The US itself is torn between wanting to control
everything and the costs that would involve. The UN is a useful mechanism of
spreading costs (i.e. financial, bodybags), and is delegated lower priority
tasks like Africa, East Timor, cleaning up NATO's mess in Kosovo, and
Southern Lebanon (though, pointedly, not Palestine). This was apparent in
the US's efforts to screw wads of cash out of Japan during the Gulf War. But
where the US really wants to ensure an outcome commensurate with its wishes,
it's NATO that is now assuming the privileged role of preferred instrument.
Even within NATO, there are tensions about control and costs, as the
controversy over the proposed European Rapid Reaction Force reveals. But we
should not confuse the contradictions of US foreign policy with a regard for
the UN as retaining a status commensurate with that which supposedly
legitimated the Korean war. And NATO, as a separate vested interest, with
its own quasi-autonomous organisational capability, is eager in this
post-Cold War world to find a new role for itself. NATO would be a good case
study for the public choice people in this respect.
And to go back to the slime ball who was quoted extensively by Yoshie --
what's in it for him? Friedman is not a Dubya/Helms unilateralist. He
belongs to the Clinton/Gore/Summers globalist gang, who would very much like
to employ the UN as a worldwide legitimator of neoliberal globalism, and as
such can welcome China as a "strategic partner" and potential WTO-member
because it's with economic means and legal procedures that their world will
take shape. However, the more pressing requirements of global crisis
management required them to give priority to NATO, at the UN's expense, NATO
being more readily pliable. Bush et al. are stuck in a Cold War timewarp
mixed in with lashings of James Monroe, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and
John Foster Dulles for good measure. Both recipes are disgusting. Both,
despite their differences, produce the same purgative discharge: namely, the
marginalisation of the UN.
And please, don't ever, ever, throw large quantities of Thomas Friedman's
drivel at me ever again. I assure you that, whatever you may think I have
done to you in the past, it was purely unintentional, accidental,
coincidental, and not worthy of such a low blow.
Michael K.
