I think we addressed that to some extent. The idea was to favour the developed economies in the Senate as the Assembly is heavily weighted to underdeveloped ones. I still think a kWh/person might work but there would have to be caps relative to top and bottom members (i.e. the US and Canadian kWh/person numbers are 1.5-2 times that of France or Germany).
Make it a step function for all I care, though Kuwait would have no votes as it isn’t a democracy.
You could change it from an outright majority vote to a combination of population+minimal number of states. I.e. Senate voting requires that a 50%+1 majority pass the motion and that the voting block contains 2/3 of the total GDP held by Senate members.
I’m beginning to think the U.N. has outlived its usefulness. Back in the cold war, it was a critical tool to help defuse world events before they turned into nuclear exchanges.
The U.N. was also more useful when there was more parity between nations. Therefore, the various member countries had more clout.
The fundamental problem with the U.N. is that it has no army of its own (and a damned good thing that is). But that means that in the end, the U.N. relies on its member nations to enforce its resolutions. When the U.S. towers over everyone else militarily, this essentially gives the U.S. a big damned veto on everything the U.N. does.
For some, belief in the U.N.'s power seems almost religious in nature. Take, for example, the suggestion that if the U.S. had only gotten the U.N.'s blessing, that somehow the Iraq war would have been less of a burden on the U.S. military. Really? Just how was that supposed to happen? The only countries with any additional military resources of reasonable size are France and Germany, and both of them are in fiscal crisis. So instead of having a force composed of 150,000 Americans and 25,000 Brits and Australians and Poles, full U.N. sanction might have meant 130,000 Americans and 40,000 troops from everyone else. Not much of a difference. And, in my opinion doing this through the U.N. would have added a layer of rules of engagement, bureaucracy, and political infighting that would have made the war much harder to win, and the peace harder to keep.
From the U.S.'s perspective, trading total control of the war and its aftermath for another 10% in troop strength would probably have been a pretty lousy deal.
Well Sam… but no one said the issue was more troops… only more money and more legitimacy.
As for the UN being at its end… what is the option… the US leading the world ? With voters who barely care ? With presidents who barely care about diplomacy ? The US lost its leadership value when Bush took over.
Rashak, I think you need to relax a little bit. That’s not an attack, it’s a suggestion. The US is still the exact same country it always was, it just has someone in power whose philosophy of governing you happen to disagree with. Don’t worry, I can guarantee he’ll be gone by January of 2009, and the world will still be spinning. I mean, there’s articles all the time in our press about the mess poor Lula’s making of your country, but I don’t think you’d like it very much if we started thread after thread about how Brazil is going off the tracks, would you?
The alternative is for the UN to shake itself up IMO and realign itself among lines that more properly reflect the values it wants to espouse. Some of those will be American, some will not, but they can’t be those of places like Libya. The UN has only been around for sixty years or so–the US for nearly four times that. They’ll both make it fine.
Sam Stone: Getting UN approval for the use of force on the two occasions where it was granted, Korea and Iraq 1991 did ease the burden on the US by a decent amount. In Iraq 1991 the US fought alongside a Syrian armored division of all things, along with two divisions from Egypt, two from Saudi Arabia, one from the Gulf Cooperation Council, one from France, one from the UK, and ~2/3s of a division worth of Kuwaiti forces. In both cases though the US provided the majority of forces and did most of the heavy lifting, of course. I agree that a UN authorized force in 2003 would not entirely have been in the US’s interests, and even if it were given, considering the vastly different circumstances I don’t see anything like the level of Arab participation in 1991, if any at all.
The UN has never really worked as an enforcer of peace through military action. Iraq 1991 was almost an entirely unique experience; if the USSR hadn’t been boycotting the UN in 1950 it would have vetoed UN action in Korea. In my mind, though, the UN is still a very useful organization in negotiating peace and helping to establish and maintain peace between combatants.
The Korean war was a very different time. The U.S. was not anywhere near the military collossus then as it it today. In fact, the U.S. had a heavy drawdown of forces after WWII that left it barely able to fight the Korean war. And countries like Canada were still very large military powers. Today, most of the western world lives under the U.S. military umbrella, and as a result most other countries have let their militaries atrophy almost to the point of irrelevance.
The Gulf war in 1991 was U.N. sanctioned, but that’s not why the U.S. got all that money. The U.S. got a lot of money simply because a whole lot of countries had a vested interest in getting Saddam out of Kuwait. Saudi Arabia alone contributed $29 billion, and Kuwait 22 billion. The total cost of the war was about 90 billion, so half of the cost came from those two countries alone.
The countries that opposed this war, France, Germany, and Russia, weren’t much help financially the first time around, either. So I really don’t think much would have changed. Even with U.N. approval, Saudi Arabia wasn’t about to kick in that kind of money again. U.N. sanction might have gotten a little more money from Japan, a couple of thousand troops from Canada, maybe a few thousand from Germany and France, and that’s about it.
You can discuss Lula as well… I never implied it would be unfair. Don’t minimize the damage Bush did though… its scared alot of people… and that takes time to go away.
It is very true that the US let itself be caught with its pants down in Korea due to the massive draw down in conventional forces in favor of a purely nuclear option at the time of the Korean War. With no offense intended to Canada and its armed forces, though, the US was able to rapidly modify the situation due to its great industrial base. It is a great exaggeration that the western worlds armed forces have atrophied to the point of irrelevance, though. They simply were not interested in involving themselves in Iraq 2003. If Germany and France felt themselves sufficiently threatened by Iraq, they could have provided a great deal more than a few thousand troops a piece. Germany, for example, maintains 8 divisions today as opposed to 12 during the Cold War, though its manpower reserves and ability to mobilize to deal with a Soviet invasion were greater during the Cold War. Due to its commitments in Iraq, the US is currently strained in its own military manpower situation.
The UN is as relevant today as it was in 1945. It is not a panacea of world peace and enforcement of such a peace though military means, but it is a source of putting warring factions on notice that they have commitments larger than themselves once they agree to allow international UN peacekeepers to put themselves into harms way by placing themselves between warring factions.
esquimalt, Ghadafi is being discussed in this thread. It is nonsense to say Ghadafi was scared by Bush. Ghadafi had taken this path starting quite a few years ago, long before Bush.
“Beginning”? I seem to recall you have unambiguously espoused the view that the UN is not useful for much of your stay on these boards?
I am not familiar with this argument, where is it coming from? In the case of Iraq UN approval could have conferred legitimacy to the otherwise piratical actions of the US, there is no reason it would have removed the military burden from the shoulders of the Pentagon. It would probably have resulted in greater monetary contributions from the international community, which I suppose alleviates the burden, but quite apart from a small club of a very few countries (predominantly Christian and white) not much of the world thought very highly of this initiative, and here I am not considering the coalition of the Unwilling for obvious reasons.
Those sorts of measures are there for good reason. For example, more stringent rules of engagement would have controlled propaganda-fed trigger-happy young soldiers and would have made it easier to avoid foolish mistakes like the regular deaths of Iraqi civilians, US tanks shooting unprovoked at buildings where Western journalists were known to be staying, etc. UN involvement may even have had a favourable impact on CentCom, which I’d nominate for the greatest journalistic farces of all time.
As for political infighting, well I would heartily welcome more of that if it had even half a chance of keeping the administration hawks honest and responsible in such matters for fears of being examined by the system.
Sure, but didn’t that have little to do with it? As mentioned the UN issue was about international consensus and concern, and about legitimacy – something that in spite of Bush’s cretinous and responsibility-dodging assertions is not going to materialize no matter how fervently Misleader keeps gasping the words “evil” and “dangerous” in moronic repetition.
The UN isn’t in the business of invading sovereign countries on piss-poor grounds and manipulation of tragedies such as 9/11, so there would have been no UN approved military support without a much stronger case for war anyway…
Those sorts of measures are there for good reason. For example, more stringent rules of engagement would have controlled propaganda-fed trigger-happy young soldiers and would have made it easier to avoid foolish mistakes like the regular deaths of Iraqi civilians, US tanks shooting unprovoked at buildings where Western journalists were known to be staying, etc. UN involvement may even have had a favourable impact on CentCom, which I’d nominate for the greatest journalistic farces of all time.
There is no evidence that UN restrictions on ROE prevent civilian deaths.
Would you say the civilian deaths in 1991 were big ? Especially considering 12 years less technology than 2003 ?
I guess what people were implying is that more UN troops would have been a deterrent to trigger happy GI’s since there would be slightly more non-US troops and more care.
I think you are confusing missions here. On a peacekeeping mission, the ROE are very restricted. However, the Gulf War was not a peacekeeping mission, it was a UN war. The gloves were off. Non US military fought with just as much ferocity as US troops.
adaher, on the broad assertion that UN soldiers are “much more poorly trained than US soldiers”, that’s simply not true. For example, in the department of human relations --which is what I was discussing-- UN forces are generally rather better trained than US soldiers (they simply have to be). British troops are too, indeed, the same point was made often in the news coverage of the war and the ensuing occupation. I don’t think anyone disputes that, in terms of overwhelming force, US armed forced rank pretty high up.
Perhaps you could explain who’s talking about war crimes here, because that just seems your average hasty dismissal of the argument. What hideous pattern of war crimes is it that you allude by wave of the hand to the UN?
More restrictive rules of engagement don’t result in attenuated civilian casualties, is that what your other point was? Not about the difference between a peace keeping mission and a war, I said specifically that “more stringent rules of engagement … would have made it easier to avoid foolish mistakes …”. Do you find that an unreasonable assertion?
Don’t minimize the damage Bush did though… its scared alot of people… and that takes time to go away.