Collounsbury, one comment by the “anonymouns official” quoted by your cite doesn’t add up. “He suggested that the sanctions and UN inspections probably prompted Mr Hussein to dispose of much of his stockpile.” If sanctions motivated Saddam to get rid of his WMDs, why didn’t Saddam show the UN that he done so and get the sanctions lifted?
Your Arafat source has a different spin than mine, but the facts are pretty similar.[ul][li]Arafat is corrupt[]His wife lives in Paris[]Much of the donated money didn’t reach the Palestinian people.[/ul]Your cited doesn’t actually contradict my cite’s version of Arafat’s wealth as $1.3 bllion or $10 billion or $11 billion. It merely says, he “has shown little sign of interest in personal wealth… He is personally frugal.”[/li]
Your cite does add the claim that “Israel and the US tacitly endorsed” Arafat’s control of the PA checkbook. I don’t know whether Israel tacitly endorsed it in the past, but they’re overtly complaining about it now.
OTOH that accusation probably does apply to the US (one reason to fault the State Dept.) Within the last couple of years, the US has quietly supported efforts to get better auditing.
december, you don’t understand. Most people are on board with the assertion that Arafat is a bad guy who really shouldn’t be allowed to run a country. We even believe he’s not always doing the best thing for “his” people with the monies he gets. But! Here is the kicker. You are making specific accusations and you aren’t backing them up with anything but conjecture by either Israeli sources(biased in the extreme) or anonymous reports of some line item “alleged” to be in some nebulous other report. This is pretty much the same kind of flimsy evidence that the US presented for NBC weapons in Iraq. Many people agreed that Saddam was a bastard and that if he had the opportunity he’d gladly stockpile NBC weapons. What is in dispute is that did such events ACTUALLY HAPPEN.
Arafat = bastard with tons of opportunity to embezzle funds.
Saddam = bastard with proclivities towards NBC weapons
As of yet I have seen no hard evidence for the assertions made about either of these respective bastards. Arafat doesn’t seem to have the monies you claim he does and Saddam’s massive stockpiles have yet to appear. I have my own questions about their activities, given the nature of the characters in question, but I am hesitant to accept your conclusions without solid proof. Basically I don’t disagree with the possibility, I disagree with treating it as a foregone conclusion. It is simply dishonest. It is even more dishonest to somehow take the fact that his wife lives in Paris as an indication that he is misusing aid funds. What the hell does that have to do with anything?
Slightly off-topic, but I have a question for Collounsbury. Any insight or links to info on the culture of the Palestinian people? It is my understanding that it was a bit of a misnomer to refer to “the Iraqi people” because they are hardly monolithic. Many tribes, religions, ideologies, and other cultural backgrounds are fused in modern-day Iraq. Part of the “corruption” in Iraq was actually special treatment along the lines of many of these old alligencies. If an official was told to help his people, the idea of who “his people” were varied depending on which group he identified with and felt loyalty to. This lead to an imbalance between the populations who were favored by those in power versus the situations of those with no influential advocates. Money, and political power, flowed along tribal, ideological, or other types of lines instead of to “the people” as a whole. The national identity was too fractured to really expect fair distribution of wealth and opportunity, let alone representation of the different groups.
Is this a somewhat accurate picture of pre-war Iraq? Are there parallels with the Palestinian people? Is it possible Arafat believes he actually IS helping “his” people with the way he is distributing the aid? We may disagree over who he should consider “his”, but the articles indicate he does take care of his friends. Any idea if, based upon the cultural climate of the area, he would feel responsibility for the greater population? There seems to be a disconnect between the western nations, with a strong sense of common nationality, and the MENA nations with regards to eactly who “your people” are. If monies are given to a MENA leader by a western culture with instructions to “take care of your people” is it not possible that the old tribal/cultural/ideological/religious affiliations kick in and instead of spreading it out among the population at large they simply take care of the subset of the population that the leader personally identifies with?
Wrapping my head around a culture so drastically different with regards to national identities and customs is hard work. I would appreciate any insight you can offer.
The government of the USA knows very well there are no WMD and it is just trying to save face, gain time, and hope the issue fades.
Well, duh! You didn’t find them did you?
Which is one obvious reason the US government know full well there are NO WMD. If they really believed they existed they’d be scared they’d be in the hands of terrorists now. They are not scared because they know they don’t exist.
Depending on what defines successful nation-building, the Soviet Union. They built or rebuilt nine countries after WWII (twelve if you count the Baltic States) and pretty much achieved the results they were looking for. Only in Yugoslavia and Albania did they fail, and there only partially.
Well, december, that is a question, as is why Sadaam the Dangerous never used any NBC weapons.
Given the Iraqi story, even now from captured officials is that they did in fact destroy much of their stockpiles in the 1990s, it may be the documentation was provided in part, and other parts was simply lacking. It may also be they wanted to conceal latent capacities for a rebound, who knows? It may also be they had correctly concluded that Bush was gunning for war come hell or highwater or fabricated documents.
Regardless, I have confidence that The Financial Times is reporting correctly, whether the official in question is right or not is another matter. Of course this was likely a trial balloon to see what the blow back might be from admitting the NBC weapons do not and may never have existed in the quantities hyped.
Well, no, but the only citations I have seen to actually support your claims of billions in wealth come from the NY Post, not a paper of integrity I will tell you in my estimation, and the Jerusalem Post, again with a certain… point of view.
In short, the extreme claims appear to emmenate from certain Israeli intel circles, who have clear interrests in bringing down Arafat by any means necessary.
However, my point here is not that Arafat is a shining exemplar of good governance – the Palestinians themselves before the intefada exploded were complaining bitterly on this point. Rather the issue was your wild claims regarding the extent of looting, and its connexion with his wealth. The British report more nealry matches my understanding, of an Arafat personally rich mostly off of Gulf ‘gifts’ and using PA as payoff money for power. Not substantively different on some points, but less lurid and rather more accurate in my opinion.
By the way, the fact of Arafat’s wife living in Paris is not relevant and simply a stupid personal smear.
Yes, they are overtly complaining. It suits them, now. As it suits you to attack certain kinds of targets.
You are a pretzel. Really you are. No twist or turn is too much to support your preconceived conclusions.
It appears that the OP has been set up in such a way that “UN action” is compared to action, or lack thereof, of nation states outwith its bounds or resolutions.
If I may belabour the obvious, The UN is its component nations. Any failure on its part is the failure of Britain, France, the US, China and so on all the way down to Kiribati, Trinidad and Leichtenstein. If its most powerful member sees the UN as “them” rather than “us” it is no wonder that difficulties arise.
The constitution of the UN is such that it is very easy for disagreement to result in no action, as illustrated recently and by eg. numerous UK & US vetoes of action against apartheid and Israel.
Perhaps this thread could develop into how the UN might become more democratic and active. I forward a motion to remove the dreaded veto and pass resolutions on a 2/3rds majority basis.
No prizes for guessing the first nation state to burst into tears of petulance and throw an isolationist tantrum.
I would add that not all failures of the UN automatically are the fault of the members. Structural problems in certain areas may arise from poor program design, or operational design. E.g. in Yugoslavia in addition to the major powers not committing for political reasons enough forces, the design of the force structure seems to have been such that command responsib was diffuse and tended to paralysis. Again, in part that is a result of many actors, esp. the US, jealously guarding control.
If you reflect on the reasons for this, you will see that winning large actor cooperation is not served or even addressed in substance by removing the veto.
The analogy sounds nice, but the UN is not analagous to a democratic body such as a parlaiment. It’s a club of sovereigns jealous of their power and suspicious of each other.
