Within the broader antiwar movement in the United States, more moderate
voices have raised the idea of substituting United Nations troops for the
Anglo-American occupation forces in Iraq. This gesture supposedly would
constitute a blow against the unilateralism that inspired the war and
would express a more multilateral foreign policy that supposedly is a
hallmark of the Democratic Party.
Even somebody as principled in his opposition to U.S. foreign policy as
Ralph Nader endorsed this idea in calling for an international
peace-keeping force drawn from neutral and Islamic nations under the
auspices of the United Nations that would replace all US troops and
civilian military contractors doing many jobs the Army used to do more
efficiently.1
There was support for United Nations intervention from even more radical
quarters in Australia. While it is undoubtedly one of the more principled
and far-sighted groups on the far left, the Democratic Socialist Party had
no problems calling for U.N. intervention in East Timor. On September 6,
1999, they declared that:
"The Democratic Socialist Party calls on all supporters of democracy to
mobilise to demand that the Australian government insist that the United
Nations authorise the immediate dispatch of Australian troops to East
Timor. The task of these troops must be to assist the East Timorese
resistance forces to stop the current bloodbath being organised by the
Indonesian armed forces (TNI) and police (Polri). This can only be achieved
through the disarming of the pro-Jakarta terror gangs. In addition, these
troops must supervise the rapid withdrawal of all Indonesian military and
police personnel from East Timor so as to enable the East Timorese to take
full control of their nation's affairs."2
Looking back at the history of our movement, there is scant evidence for
confidence in earlier international peace-keeping bodies. In an October
15, 1920 speech, Lenin spoke derisively of the League of Nations, which had
demanded that the Red Army cease its offensive against
counter-revolutionary Polish troops and enter into peace negotiations: To
this proposal we replied that we recognised no League of Nations, since we
had seen its insignificance and the disregard that even its members had for
its decisions.3 He added that it had become plain that the League of
Nations was non-existent, that the alliance of the capitalist powers is
sheer fraud, and that in actual fact it is an alliance of robbers, each
trying to snatch something from the others. This allusion to an alliance
of robbers has been alternatively translated as a den of thieves, the
more famous citation.
One major difference between the League of Nations and the United Nations
was the presence of the Soviet Union. Additionally, the inclusion of
postcolonial states in the General Assembly and their frequently courageous
and principled stands give the U.N. a certain cachet that the League of
Nations lacked. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, and the
continuing inability of the General Assembly to actually make an impact on
policies drawn up in the far more powerful Security Council, there should
be no lingering illusions in the U.N.s ability to act on behalf of peace
and social justiceno should there have been when the organization was
born, for that matter.
When the United Nations was created, the overwhelming preoccupation of the
founders was to minimize challenges to the World War Two victors, who
feared imperialist rivalries of the sort that had led to two costly world
wars. The Soviet Union had its own interests at heart, which revolved
around the need to create a barrier between European capitalist powers and
its own project of building socialism. Initially, Stalin did not really
see the need for a U.N. but hoped that a coalition of the U.S., Great
Britain and the U.S.S.R. could negotiate conflicts and divide up spheres of
influence between themselves as they had already at Yalta and Potsdam.
In conventional historical accounts, Franklin Roosevelt is seen as the
thoroughgoing Wilsonian multilateralist who believed that the U.N. could
succeed where the League of Nations had failed. Such idealist preening was
of course bolstered by his allies in the Communist Party who had high hopes
in 1945 that the wartime alliance would continue into the next century, if
not forever. For Communist Party leader Earl Browder, the war was a fight
between a slave world and a free world. He stated, Just as the United
States could not remain half slave and half free in 1862, so in 1942 the
world must make its decision for a complete victory one way or the other.
Somehow, it must have escaped his attention that Black Americans served in
segregated companies in the army and lacked the right to vote in the deep
south.
full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/unitednations.htm
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