Erm… Surely the point is that it was the UN which, by telling the Allied force not to enter Iraq ter­ri­tory, allowed Saddam (who polit­i­cally as well as phys­i­cally models him­self on Stalin) another 12 years in which to murder maim muti­late and ter­rorise his own pop­u­la­tion? Why doesn’t it seem to matter that the Iraqi regime kills thou­sands of inno­cent civil­ians in a sys­tem­atic manner? It is because they’re brown people and sort of expect it?

Posted by cypher at 12am on 04.04.03

cypher - point taken, and sorry to be sim­plis­tic, but are those inno­cent civil­ians helped by being fur­ther maimed, muti­lated and killed by the ‘coalition’?
and do you REALLY in your heart of hearts believe that GWB lies awake at night wor­ry­ing about the Iraqi people??? is that really why we’re there? espe­cially given that the means to maim, muti­late etc. were pro­vided for Saddam by the US for many years.

Posted by trilby at 11am on 04.04.03

Not to men­tion the fact that the US abide by the UN as and when they see fit, not on prin­ci­ple - it seems clear to me in the quote above that Bush Snr. saw inva­sion as an option, but chose not to exceed the UN man­date for the rea­sons he states. No one is argu­ing that Saddam Hussein’s sys­tem­atic killing of his people is fine, but the US clearly gave him carte blanche to do so by a) arming him in the first place, and b) encour­ag­ing upris­ings by the Kurds et al, then fail­ing to pro­vide them with sup­port. I would go so far as to say that the US, and the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity share much of the blame with Saddam Hus­sein for the deaths of Iraqi civil­ians and dis­si­dents. Anyway, this war is the wrong way to deal with a sit­u­a­tion that has arisen thanks to the actions of the US, and, as you say, mis­man­age­ment of the sit­u­a­tion by the UN. The inter­na­tional com­mu­nity is shit at this stuff - how long did it take to end apartheid in South Africa? How come China can kill as many dis­si­dents as it likes? How come Bush was allowed to rig an elec­tion in the most pow­er­ful coun­try in the world? - the answer isn’t to hand over con­trol to the US, on the grounds that they have the biggest guns, the answer is to improve the mech­a­nisms used by the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity to exert pres­sure on despotic regimes, and that applies to all despotic regimes, not just the ones in con­trol of valu­able resources.

Posted by Jack at 12pm on 04.04.03

Jack, you’re bang on. The inter­na­tional com­mu­nity is shit at this stuff and the answer isn’t to hand over con­trol to the US. But in the absence of anyone else taking respon­si­bil­ity it’s all we - and they, the ordi­nary ter­rorised Iraqi - have got.

I’d adree with almost every crit­i­cism anyone made of the US and GB action. It is obvi­ously about oil; it is obvi­ously not about saving indi­vid­ual human lives; it is clearly a crying shame that the US and GB (and France and Russia and China and God knows who else) sold his regime arms in the past. But so what? So what if G W Bush doesn’t cry him­self to sleep every night about every inno­cent life. Did Churchill in 1939? Did Roo­sevelt in 1941? Does a leader need him­self to bleed in order to take action which will lead to right being done? To turn trilby’s ques­tion around, do you imag­ine that Tony Blair sleeps soundly at night know­ing that his deci­sions have led to soldiers’ deaths on both sides?

Do you sleep soundly know­ing these things? No? Then at least allow that our lead­ers, the people we (if not indeed you) voted for, are as human as you or I.

Posted by cypher at 11pm on 04.04.03

Cypher, the point is that it’s not a case of the US taking respon­si­bil­ity for the sit­u­a­tion when no-​one else will; it’s more a case of the US decid­ing that it’s the only entity qual­i­fied to make judge­ment here, and no-​one else is allowed such respon­si­bil­ity, because others’ final deci­sions would nat­u­rally not be in har­mony with the wants of the US administration.

Chruchill and Roo­sevelt prob­a­bly didn’t cry them­selves to sleep over every life lost. How­ever, there’s a dis­tinc­tion here (and it’s one that is always brushed aside in the rush to equate the sit­u­a­tion now to the sit­u­a­tion in Europe between 1939 and 1945): then, action was taken in the hope that it might lead to “right being done” because Hitler was a gen­uine threat to the fabric of the world. This war isn’t about “doing right” in the same way, because the only thing Saddam Hus­sein is a real threat to is US inter­ests in the gulf. If Bush, Rums­feld and all the other blood­thirsty oil barons pou­lat­ing the Capi­tol were truly inter­ested in tack­ling a threat to world peace, they’d be attempt­ing to deal with North Korea—who already have the capac­ity to launch inter­con­ti­nen­tal mis­siles on the US—or they’d be making moves to slow down India and Pakistan’s nuclear race. They wouldn’t be going after some tinpot thug in the middle east.

As for the ordi­nary ter­rorised Iraqi, I’d imag­ine that being bombed and shot at by Amer­i­cans is really no more fun than being bombed, gassed or shot at by the Iraqi army. I sup­pose the only dif­fer­ence is that the Amer­i­cans tell you it’s for your own good, rather than for your hal­lowed leader’s.

Posted by Leon at 12am on 05.04.03

Oh come on, Leon. In 1938 not one West­ern coun­try - let alone its peo­ples - thought Hitler was a gen­uine threat to the world. What passed for opin­ion polls in the UK said that 80% of the pop­u­la­tion was against a war. The US (oh, and: Afghanistan, Alba­nia, Aus­tralia, Azer­bai­jan, Bul­garia, Colom­bia, Czech Repub­lic, Den­mark, El Sal­vador, Eritrea, Esto­nia, Ethiopia, Geor­gia, Hun­gary, Italy, Japan (post con­flict), South Korea, Latvia, Lithua­nia, Mace­do­nia, Nether­lands, Nicaragua, Philip­pines, Poland, Roma­nia, Slo­va­kia, Spain, Turkey and Uzbek­istan, as well as pluckly little GB) the US is the only pre­pared to actu­ally do some­thing about it.

Far from the UN being the only organ­i­sa­tion qual­i­fied to take action, the UN has demon­strated time and again that it is inca­pable of taking action under almost any cir­cum­stance. Soviet Rus­sion under the purges, Viet­nam (right or wrong) Cuba, Soma­lia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Nige­ria and Biafra, Uganda, Zim­babwe, Yugoslavia, not to men­tion Chech­nya, or Tibet, or what­ever you like. In each of these appalling wars, civil or oth­er­wise, the UN did noth­ing at all, and indeed actively tried to stop the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity from doing any­thing at all. The list above com­prises 25% of the “international community” - a pretty good show­ing. What many of them also have in common is that they have recently emerged from just the sort of vis­cer­ally dis­gust­ing regime the US and GB are trying to over­throw in Iraq.

Indeed, when exactly has the UN made a dif­fer­ence in the world? A dif­fer­ence for the better, that is… Its inac­tion has lead to mil­lion upon mil­lions of deaths - even Live Aid had to be organ­ised by half-​arsed pop stars!

“The only thing Iraq is a threat to is US interests…” First, I think we’ve dealt with that one above. Iraq started a war in the 1980s with Iran in which mil­lions of people died, and in the result­ing havoc took the oppor­tu­nity to begin the rou­tine tor­ture and murder of hun­dreds of thou­sands of its own pop­u­la­tion in Hussein’s delib­er­ate attempt to emu­late Stalin; it invaded Kuwait with­out provo­ca­tion, mur­dered that country’s civil­ians and blew up its oil wells; it has made a laugh­ing stock of the UN, run­ning rings around its res­o­lu­tions and arms inspec­tors and good inten­tions; it has killed per­haps a quar­ter of a mil­lion Kurds, the destruc­tion of 2000 Kur­dish vil­lages, in the South 100,000 Shia mus­lims, and 2 mil­lions refugees (these fig­ures are Human Rights Watch’s)

And still you say this war is about George Bush’s friends’ vora­cious desire for money. It might well be. I per­son­ally don’t mind if it destroys this loath­some crea­ture and his regime. I don’t mind one bit. Imag­ine if Stalin could have been destroyed one day ear­lier; if Hitler, or Pol Pot, or Mao T’se Tung, or Pres­i­dent Kim.

Lastly, if it doesn’t matter who’s bomb­ing or shoot­ing at you, then what does it matter. At least when the “coalition” wins it’s going to stop.

Our lead­ers are, for better or worse, the people we made our lead­ers, and there are many sides to this sit­u­a­tion. It would be nice if those who are against this war could see more than one of them…

Posted by cypher at 1am on 05.04.03

Sorry, but I’m on a roll here. Some­one else on this site pointed us to some idiot journalist’s blog which starts (at least today) with

As the con­flict enters its second week it’s begin­ning to take its toll on the per­sonal lives of some of the jour­nal­ists based here in Sulay­maniyah.
Over dinner, two mem­bers of the press pack tell me they’ve split up with their girl­friends by phone or e-mail in recent days. With no end to the assign­ment in sight and no return date, some loved ones have had enough.
erm… Anyone else think that with all the death going on in that benighted coun­try the last thing the world needs to hear about is some fat­headed jour­nal­ist split­ting up with his girlfriend?

On a per­sonal level though, tough luck, guys… the bitches…

Posted by cypher at 1am on 05.04.03

Granted, in 1938, that might have been the case, but the case changed pretty quickly, and yes, not every­thing that hap­pened during WW2 was the result of beau­ti­ful altru­ism: each of the coun­tries majorly involved were obvi­ously in it for their own var­i­ous ends, as is prac­ti­cally every coun­try which gets involved in a war, be that war jus­ti­fied or otherwise.

And yes, the UN is inef­fi­cient, ter­ri­ble at deal­ing with both inter­na­tional and internecine dis­putes, and ought to be reformed in order to rec­tify this. How­ever, as regard’s who’s qual­i­fied to take action, it’s simply not jus­ti­fi­able for any coun­try—the US or anyone else—to step out­with the bound­aries of inter­na­tional con­sen­sus that exist, and that each coun­try is party to. To do so sets a dan­ger­ous prece­dent; what if, say, either India or Pak­istan was to make some sort of “pre-emptive” strike on their neigh­bour on the grounds that they were per­ceived as a threat? It’s too implau­si­ble a sit­u­a­tion, but could you imag­ine the UN acced­ing to that? Just sit­ting back and saying “well, they’ve made their choice, and there’s not much we can do about it”?

Like I said, I agree that the UN isn’t best placed to deal with this, and their list of dis­as­trous lack of inter­ven­tions stretches back to the time of the UN’s for­ma­tion, but—and this is a big but—that doesn’t give the US, or any other coun­try, the right to uni­lat­er­ally (or maybe bilat­er­ally, with British sup­port; after all, how many “coalition” coun­tries are actu­ally pro­vid­ing more than verbal agree­ment) inter­vene, par­tic­u­larly if the world­wide body to whicch they are sup­posed to adhere has not backed the enterprise.

Maybe I was a little flip­pant with that remark about threats to US inter­ests, but I think it does have some cre­dence, par­tic­u­larly when you look at the way the US (and, for that matter, the UN) con­sis­tenly ignored/sold arms to the Iraqi regime which enabled it to gas its own people and invade neigh­bour­ing countries.

I’d love to see Iraq rid of Saddam Hus­sein as well, but I’m not con­vinced that when the “coalition” “win” it’ll just stop. Should the “coalition” win, then I sus­pect that the US (and the UK, though they’re a minor­ity char­ac­ter in this par­tic­u­lar game) will feel it’s been given carte blanche to then invade Syria and Iran, as well as any other coun­try in the region they feel like invading.

As regards run­ning rings round the UN, ignor­ing secu­rity coun­cil res­o­lu­tions, refus­ing weapons inspec­tors access, lying about chem­i­cal weapons pro­grams and so on, Iraq, as devi­ous as they’ve been, still have noth­ing on Israel (and then there’s Amer­ica, who have recently decided to ignore both nuclear anti-​proliferation treaties, as well as those signed to pre­vent fur­ther invest­ment in chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal weapons, and refuse to let inde­pen­dent UN inspec­tors inside mil­i­tary installations).

Yes, there’s obvi­ously been a good case for get­ting rid of Saddam Hus­sein for years, but it’s not the case that’s been made in an attempt to jus­tify this war. And quite simply, I don’t trust the US admin­is­tra­tion to be the ones to do the best job. I can’t think of a single coun­try that they’ve inter­vened in since 1945 which resulted in a democ­racy being installed, but I can think of plenty where a democ­racy, how­ever flawed it might have been, was replaced by a bru­tally auto­cratic head of state will­ing to do busi­ness with the US (Chile being a prime example).

Yes, there are many sides to this sit­u­a­tion, and I’m sure you could find quotes from as many Iraqis who want to get rid of their leader as I could find quotes from Iraqis who want the “coalition” forces to with­draw. Thing is, there are better means of resolv­ing this than the cur­rent war; diplo­macy, to use a hack­neyed phrase, had not been exhausted; indeed Hans Blix has said recently that given more time, the inspec­tion and dis­manlt­ing of Iraq’s weapons would prob­a­bly been pos­si­ble, because he believed that the inspec­tions process was work­ing. That’s not to say it would have been a cake­walk, as it were, but surely a peace­ful means of dis­arm­ing the Iraqi regime, would be preferable.

A final point: our lead­ers might be the people who, for better or worse, the people we made our lead­ers, but that doesn’t mean we have to (i) accept that they’re always right or (ii) not make our­selves heard when we fell they’re not doing the right thing, or that they’re doing some­thing for the wrong reasons.

Posted by Leon at 1am on 05.04.03

Oops. That’s rather long-​winded and full of spelling mistakes.

Posted by Leon at 2am on 05.04.03

What’s inter­est­ing is that I agree with almost every­thing you say and still come up with the oppo­site interpretation.

Let me see if I got this right: the UN is inef­fi­cient as presently con­sti­tuted in deal­ing with inter­na­tional crises; yet the UN is the only author­ity which should be allowed to deal with inter­na­tional crises. Hmmm. It’s not just inef­fi­cient, it is inca­pable. Its inac­tion has directly led to the death of mil­lions of human beings, all in the name of some bogus “international concensus”. I orig­i­nally inter­fered in this dis­cus­sion to point out that it was through the UN that the Iraqi regime has been allowed to con­tinue its mud­er­ous ways. After the Alliance vic­tory in 1991 the UN told the Alliance, “Thus far and no further… Let us, the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity, take it from here.” And so the Alliance went no fur­ther. And the UN did… noth­ing. Sanc­tions were imposed which hurt only the Iraqi people; they imposed an oil for food pro­gramme which actu­ally helps Hus­sein, since Iraq’s oil is now sold through inter­me­di­aries who kick back 20% of the pro­ceeds directly to the gov­ern­ment. And Hans “Give me just a little more time” Blix. Well, in Chris­tine Keeler’s famous words, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

Does anyone now doubt the jus­tice of the 1991 war? They did at the time, but I hon­estly can’t remem­ber on what grounds. I hon­estly can’t imag­ine on what grounds. War really does con­form to Clausewitz’s dictum of “diplomacy by other means”. And this one more than most. Remem­ber back in Novem­ber last year - we all knew what Res­o­lu­tion 1441 meant. The inspec­tions process was restarted only through the threat of immi­nent war 1441 pro­posed; the war became inevitable exactly at the moment that the per­fid­i­ous cheese-​eating sur­ren­der mon­keys (couldn’t help it - thank God for Bart Simp­son) made it clear that the US and GB would never get their second resolution.

And they’re being lec­tured to by Jacques Chirac? The man who actu­ally resumed his country’s nuclear weapons test­ing progamme, test­ing 12 atomic devices in the South Seas in clear breach of agreed inter­na­tional con­ven­tions, and thus giving tacit per­mis­sion to, inter alia, coun­tries like India, Pak­i­stand and Isreal to do the same? The friend of Robert Mugabe? The man whose prin­ci­pal drive to power at the last elec­tion was to avoid impeach­ment for polit­i­cal and finan­cial offences (allegedly) com­mited while in the second-​highest office in the land. Bring back Dick Nixon, I say…

You grant that at the start of the Second War noone much minded about Hitler except a hand­ful of vision­ary politi­cians (oh, some Czechs, Slo­vaks, Poles, Hun­gar­i­ans, Aus­tri­ans, a few Jews, gypsys, homo­sex­u­als etc etc), then refuse to grant that - just per­haps - some­one might know a little more than you or I. You draw par­al­lels with Israel - for­give me, but I just don’t see where you can go with that. Sure, Israel is this that and the next thing - but to say that it is worse than Iraq, or even com­pa­ra­ble, is hardly a seri­ous argu­ment. I bow to no man in my dis­taste for Ariel Sharon, in my dis­gust for his role in, among other things, the mas­sacres and Sabra and Shatila or his delib­er­ate rekin­dling of the Intifada. But what of it? The major factor keep­ing a mon­ster like Sharon in (demo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected) power is pre­cisely the ordi­nary Israeli citizen’s fear of a greater mon­ster like Saddam Hussein.

By all means don’t trust the US admin­is­tra­tion. By all means hold it to account. But you can hold it to account - which you cannot the UN, nor Saddam Hussein.

Posted by cypher at 12pm on 05.04.03

Amaz­ing how ppl change.

Posted by Tora at 1pm on 05.04.03

Regard­ing the UN: as it cur­rently exists, yes, it’s in some sit­u­a­tions worse than use­less, and like many a huge beau­reau­cracy, is about as fast-​acting and sharp on its toes as was the aver­age bron­tosaurus. The thing with the UN is that it doesn’t just exist as an organ­i­sa­tion which ought to be pro-​active (and god knows, it ought to have been a lot more pro-​active in any number of sit­u­a­tions in the past); it is also sup­posed to exist as a bul­wark against dan­ger­ous behav­iour, and though it’s pretty ter­ri­ble at doing that as well, that doesn’t mean it nec­es­sar­ily has to be ter­ri­ble.
It’s not some­thing that’s going to happen overnight, and any reform embarked upon now will doubt­less come too late to affect the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, but there needs to be some inter­na­tional body to which coun­tries agree to abide by. Oth­er­wise, what’s to stop a descent into var­i­ous regional (and global) power strug­gles between nations who don’t care about even appear­ing to adhere to some form of inter­na­tional con­ven­tion?
Chirac, as you said, restarted nuclear test­ing in the South Seas, thus giving tacit per­mis­sion to other coun­tries to do the same; like­wise, the US inva­sion of Iraq cre­ates a sit­u­a­tion where other coun­tries can attempt to jus­tify them­selves in fol­low­ing suit. Chirac may be a pretty odious politi­cian, but I can’t think of a west­ern leader who isn’t, at this point in time; none of them have a cast-​iron alibi when it comes to dis­grace­ful inter­na­tional behav­iour, inter­nal cor­rup­tion, vote-​rigging, and sup­port for brutal African regimes in some respect or other. (The idea of any of them upbraid­ing their fellow lead­ers for moral trans­gres­sions is a cruel joke, really.)

As I’m sure you know, Israel have ignored a far greater number of UN res­o­lu­tions than Iraq. I don’t want to get into a points-​scoring “Israel is bad because x, y, z” kind of a debate, and I’m not about to start chant­ing “Intifada! Intifada!” What I will say, though, is it’s hypocrisy of the most obvi­ous and base kind to invade one coun­try on the pre­text of lib­er­at­ing its people whilst not only allow­ing but fund­ing the oppres­sion of part of another country’s pop­u­la­tion, simply because that coun­try is your polit­i­cal ally.

Anyway, I digress.
The rea­sons that I’m opposed to this par­tic­u­lar bit of neo-​conservative colo­nial­ism you already know, and I’m not going to act like a British tourist abroad by shout­ing louder when you already know what I’m saying. What I was trying to say when I started this reply was that there needs to be seri­ous and urgent reform of the entire struc­ture of the UN, because the world isn’t able to func­tion in any just way at all with­out some form of inter­na­tional body. That the one we are stuck with now is awful at its job isn’t a reason for ditch­ing the good inten­tions with which it was orig­i­nally set up, and that the UN as it cur­rently stands is almost impos­si­ble to hold to account is no reason for there not being a body which can be held to account.
Even if I was an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen, I’d be hard pushed to hold the US to account; sure, I could vote and hope that the elec­tronic voting sys­tems being brought into the use in the US (devel­oped and man­u­fac­tured by Repub­li­can party donors) are fair, even though the com­pany which built them refuses to let anyone inspect their inner work­ings (busi­ness con­fi­den­tial­ity over­rides clear and trans­par­ent democ­racy, y’see?). I could protest in the street (as I have done here), hope that enough people feel the same way, and hope that I don’t get demonised by the media for being some sort of cheese-​eating sur­ren­der monkey. How­ever, that’s pretty lim­ited, and the Bush admin­is­tra­tion has proved time and again that the only people it is account­able to are its major donors.

The US has made it clear that it sees itself as some sort of moral force for good, the good being their best inter­ests, and an increas­ingly unac­count­able US admin­is­tra­tion, which aims to estab­lish mil­i­tary dom­i­nance across the world (and in space) is, to me, a far more fright­en­ing thing than a UN which at least, some­where along the line, has the poten­tial to be a good thing.

Posted by Leon at 2pm on 05.04.03

Like I say, I agree with pretty much all of that - and still come to the oppo­site con­clu­sion. The only point of dis­agree­ment between either side of this debate (glablly, not just here) seems to be that one side thinks that the USA (and, pre­sum­ably GB and Aus­tralia at the least, since they are also send­ing troops) is a force for evil. I think it is / they are, on bal­ance, a force for good, Repub­li­cans notwith­stand­ing. And if I have to wink at a little hypocrisy, a little finan­cial cor­rup­tion, and per­haps even quite a lot of arro­gance on the way to seeing the Iraqi regime neu­tralised I’m happy to wink like a Bel­isha beacon…

We have to trust our lead­ers, in this case. unless we can demon­strate that they cannot be trusted. It can be demon­strated of the UN - it cannot (at least in the broader sense) be demon­strated of Tony Blair or GW Bush or Joh Howard. If you don’t trust them who can you trust?

Look at the quote again.
Exceed­ing the U.N.’s man­date would have destroyed the prece­dent of inter­na­tional response to aggres­sion we hoped to estab­lish. That prin­ci­ple was first estab­lished by the US-​led alliance in 1991; the UN took the prin­ci­ple in hand and… let it slip away - it took no action in Soma­lia, or Rwanda, or Zim­babwe, or even Bosnia except to send in peace­keep­ing troops who made it easier for geno­cide to happen. It does not even have a policy about what to do about Iraq.

You say that, if you were an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen, you’d be hard pressed to hold your gov­ern­ment to account. Well, that’s democ­racy, and it’s more than the Iraqis get. In a democ­racy your voice is uniquely impor­tant, but it only has mean­ing if every­one else agrees with you. If they don’t it means, unfor­tu­nately, that you’re wrong. ‘Til next time round. Or until you actively join the estab­lised polit­i­cal process.

I get the feel­ing that those making the loud­est noise about Iraq are among the, what, 41% of people (myself among them, mea culpa) who didn’t bother to vote in 2001. We only get to tell our lead­ers what to do once every five years - after that they tell us what to do. So we gotta make sure we pick a good one… Just thank your Gods it wasn’t little Char­lie Kennedy.

Posted by cypher at 5pm on 05.04.03

Do we have to trust our lead­ers? At any time? I’m not so sure. Open­ing this ques­tion up, and look­ing beyond the sit­u­a­tion we’re in at the moment, I’d argue that on bal­ance it’s our respon­si­bil­ity to keep check on those whom we elect, and to vote them out of office if we think they’re not acting respon­si­bly. Rather than approach this from the view­point that we should trust our lead­ers until they have proved them­selves untrust­wor­thy (which they sadly do too often), shouldn’t we be asking them that they have to earn our trust in the first place? (Okay, voting them into office is an acknowl­edge­ment that we do trust them, but it’s not enough for lead­ers to rest on those par­tic­u­lar lau­rels, such as they may be; they have to earn the right to stay in that posi­tion.) I’m not advo­cat­ing a para­noid “trust nobody, smash the state, let’s all live in small­hold­ing com­munes and knit our own yoghurt” approach here; I simply think that those in power, by virtue of their posi­tion, ought to be sub­ject to strin­gent scrutiny because if they’re not, they’ll do what­ever they want.

That’s a side-​issue to what we were orig­i­nally debat­ing, although I think that it is a related one. When it comes to the US/UK/Australia being a “force for good” I don’t think you can side­line the Repub­li­can ele­ment, given that in the past three years US for­eign policy has been crafted by the Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ists at the heart of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion. Any sub­se­quent US admin­is­tra­tion is going to find it very hard indeed to repeal the stag­ger­ing tax cuts imple­mented since Jan­u­ary 2001, and will face huge oppo­si­tion if they attempt to scale back the pro­posed 3.8% increase in the defence budget pro­posed for 2004, not only from Con­gress (who knows which party will hold the bal­ance of power in the Senate and the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives in 2 or 3 years time?), but from the media. Again (as with the UN) that doesn’t mean that the US, in the future, can never be a force for good, but given the cur­rent cli­mate and admin­is­tra­tion, and the long-​term impact both of those fac­tors, it’ll be a long time coming, if it ever comes at all.

I’d have to strongly dis­agree with your asser­tion that in a democ­racy your voice only counts if every­one else agrees with you; surely when every­one dis­agrees with you, most of them with­out ques­tion, is when your voice counts more than ever? Because to be silent in such a sit­u­a­tion is to be as com­plicit as an inac­tive UN.

Posted by Leon at 6pm on 05.04.03

So what would you do?

Posted by cypher at 8pm on 05.04.03

What would I do? I’m just gonna sit here and debate minute points about the nature of the UN.

Seri­ously, though, I don’t know. I could sug­gest var­i­ous half-​baked ideas for some pro­posed UN replace­ment, but I don’t know enough to actu­ally come up with a viable alter­na­tive; I’m not learned enough in the world of inter­na­tional affairs to devise some alter­na­tive. All I know is that I’m going to keep protest­ing about the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, and argue about it with people like your good self. (Which, I have to say, has been far more inter­est­ing than debat­ing the war with the stan­dard lunk-​headed nutters…)

Posted by Leon at 9pm on 05.04.03

Yeah, I feel the same way about the chat :-). But at the same time I believe that while we do our little noth­ing there are people dying, and there are hon­ourable people trying to stop it, and your (and in some cases my) hon­ourable objec­tions as to the moral rec­ti­tude of some of the lead­ers trying to stop it is just so beside the point. Some­thing had to be done, noone came up with a better idea, so here we are.

And today people are still dying. But as the result of this war it just might stop. Not just in Iraq but in a host of places, Tel Aviv and Pales­tine among them. The shame is that this war is the only idea anyone has come up with. Shame on you. Shame on me. Shame, most of all, on Saddam Hussein.

Posted by cypher at 10pm on 05.04.03