> No Welcome For the World In Utah Towns
> BY THOMAS BURR [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> (c) 2001, THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
> Tuesday, June 26, 2001
>
> Most city councils have enough to do keeping the streets clean and
> safe. Not La Verkin and Virgin. The rural southern Utah towns have
> taken on the United Nations.
>
> The international organization has not exactly overrun them, but the
> two town councils are considering ordinances that would erase all
> traces of the United Nations in their communities, citing concerns the
> body is usurping the sovereignty of the United States.
>
> "We've been pushed far enough, and long enough," La Verkin Mayor Dan
> Howard said Monday. "We're tired of marching to [the U.N.] agenda.
> Maybe now we can start to march on our own agenda. Maybe La Verkin is
> the crucible to get the rest of the cities and the national government
> to listen."
[snip]
> http://www.sltrib.com/2001/jun/06262001/utah/108851.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Keaney Michael" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 5:44 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:14183] East Timor/United Nations
> 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.
>
