George Will: The U.N. Is A Bad Idea (article)

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A critical look at the basis and function of the U.N.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/georgewill/gw20030313.shtml

[andyfox]

"attempting to lasso the American locomotive"

I believe that's exactly what the opponents of the war in the U.N. are trying to do.

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I also believe that Will hit it on the head when he posed this question: ``Do you believe that any use of U.S. military power lacks legitimacy unless approved by France, Russia and China?''

[andyfox]

I haven't understood the appeal to the U.N. by the administration. How can we attack Iraq because they have violated U.N. resolutions if the U.N. doesn't go along with the attack? I suppose it's just PR: if the U.N. goes along, then we'll say it was a response of the "international community." If not, we'll say the U.N. didn't meet its responsibilities so we had to act.

Having any member on the Security Council forever has its benefits and drawbacks, sort of like having the members of the Supreme Court appointed for life. But I suppose the U.N. was created so that those five members as a vehicle in which those five original members could attempt to control the world, or to try to keep any of the others from doing so.

[Parmenides]

George Will is about as critical in his his thinking as William F. Buckley. That means that he isn't. He uses specious arguments to justify primarily his own public notoriety. He couldn't care less about justice.

[Chris Alger]

Will's usual technique is to avoid the basic facts of his topic and to rail against some nebulous or fabricated wrong in order to confuse people into supporting something insidious. This piece is a good illustration: he starts out by defending national sovereignty where that right is not at issue and ends up arguing that international law should be ignored whenever the US wants to invoke it as a pretext for war.

Note first how he avoids frank discussion. His topic is scarce support for US policy. An honest writer would at least allude to the reasons that is so, and then argue that they are bad ones. But Will is a rank propagandist, so his essay doesn't even touch on the terms of the dispute or the arguments of the parties.

Instead, Will assumes that the UN must be giving the US a hard time for no good reason, and then leaps to the conclusion that this proves that the UN is a "bad idea" because it abrogates the sovereignty of its members. Recall that the UN membership is voluntary and most of what the UN does amounts to enforcing agreements --such as the UN Charter -- that its members entered into. Will's national sovereignty argument is therefore as absurd as arguing that contracts unfairly impinge on the personal freedom of the contracting parties. If the US believes that it should not be bound to its agreements as interpreted by the UN, or by the procudures the UN adopts for enforcing them, it should say so and abrogate them. Will doesn't get into any of this because he can't suggest that the US is planning to violate international law. In fact, like others in his profession, Will is constitutionally incapable of suggesting that the US is doing or about to do anything that is fundamantally immoral, illegal or wrong.

Will then shifts to a different attack: the UN is illegitimate because its member states are illegitimate. This is a different problem from whether the UN, by its nature, threatens the sovereignty of its members because it suggests that many members don't deserve the sovereignty they claim. Glossing over the distinction, Will attacks the undemocratic nature of the UN this way: "It claims power not legitimized by the recurring consent of periodically consulted constituencies of the governed."

Note how bizarre this argument it in the context of the Iraq debate. Polls around the world conducted not only "periodically" but weekly and daily show that the populations of the UN member states overwhelmingly refuse to "consent" to war with Iraq. Will's real problem is not that the UN members are not democracies, but that they are behaving as if they were.

So Will spends the first half of his piece spouting vague nonsense, and then gets his real point: the U.N. should defer to the imperial might of the US. If the US wants to invade a country, the rest of the world should let the locomotive run over its victims instead of trying to shackle it with the "cobwebs of UN procedures." Nevermind that the official pretext for US actions are that Iraq has violated international law, specifically UN decrees.

And then Will says something really bizarre: France's (actually the whole world's) effort to restrain the US "has emboldened Iraq and made war inevtiable." So the US war against Iraq indefiance of the wishes of the UN will actually be the doing of the UN, undermining the efforts of White House peaceniks -- having been on record for years prior to 9/11 in favor of invading Iraq -- to seek a peaceful solution.

In the end, Will's analysis is merely a propagandist's attempt to foist off a laughable contradiction, like "'war is peace." If the US abides by its written promises, it unreasonably surrenders its freedom, if the US abides by the wishes of the world community, it will be undemocratic, if the US avoids preemptive illegal war it will be "reactionary," and if the US invades Iraq, it will be France's fault. This piece says more about the intellectual bankruptcy of what passes for "conservative" "thought" than it does about current events with Iraq and the UN.

[Chris Alger]

No, that's Will dishonest way of putting it, rather like saying "don you think Bush should be President just because Rehenquist and Scalia want him to be President?" The issue is whether the body tasked with enforcing international law believe that war is necessary. It doesn't. Will's phrasing ignores the basic issue and makes it sound like the US needs permission of irrelvant others to defend itself. It's phrasing like this that make him a rank propagandist rather than a serious commentator.

[MMMMMM]

To me, it rather highlights one good reason why the U.N. Security Council should have no legal authority.

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I think the U.N. should be dissolved or restructured, or the U.S. should strongly consider pulling out of the U.N.

[adios]

"Will's phrasing ignores the basic issue and makes it sound like the US needs permission of irrelvant others to defend itself. It's phrasing like this that make him a rank propagandist rather than a serious commentator."

Wrong, that's what he believes as do a lot of others.

[nicky g]

"I think the U.N. should be dissolved or restructured"

I agree. Nevertheless, it's a bit rich of the US to have used the council for 50 years to veto hundreds of resolutions, and to suddenly decide the structure was flawed all along when something goes against it.

[Chris Alger]

Just how do you know what George F. Will "believes?" Anyway, I'm quite sure that Will understands that the US decided to act through the UN knowing the risk of non-support, and that the veto powers (which the US has promised to ignore anyway) result not from the irrational interference by others, but by mutual agreement with the US. They get a veto, so do we. That's how we've prevented the UN from enforcing some 23 Security Council resolutions against Israel since 1968, and from enacting more than a dozen others. The only possible reason that Will doesn't disclose this to his readers is that he doesn't want them to realize it and draw the obvious conclusion that the war will violates the same international standards the US invokes when it suits its interests.