| Wake Up Call |
25 August 2003
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UN's Iraq HQ Blown Up -- So Much for Neutrality
Any idea that the United Nations was viewed by "the resistance" as an honest broker or interested neutral in the ongoing troubles in Iraq was blown to bits by the truck bomb that killed around 20 people at the UN's offices in Baghdad last week. While the UN lowered it flags to half-staff in mourning, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been moved into the same camp as George Bush and Tony Blair. Reluctantly or not, the US, the UK and UN are all on the same side now.
The UN was originally meant as a forum for the victorious allies of WWII to resolve global troubles in tandem. When the US and USSR began their Cold War, the UN became a forum for that struggle. With the death of the USSR, it became an amorphous talking-shop of nations. But it never stopped being a creation of the developed, largely western, world.
The nation-state system was born in Europe with the Treaty of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648. The idea of a global peace-keeping authority was born in the mind of President Woodrow Wilson, and the UN itself was a product of pre-Yalta and Yalta conference chats. The UN is, by pedigree and birth, a western entity.
Last week, the UN's top man in Baghdad was blown up with 19 others by those who don't approve of the west. The UN now is no longer in a position of having to decide what to do about Iraq. The terrorists' bomb decided for it. The UN is now part of the occupation of Iraq. The way out now is America's way out. One wonders how long it will take Mr. Annan to discover that.
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