As usual, the liberal perceptions of what conservatives believe read like a parody, and an insulting one at that. The ‘reality based community’ should try injecting a little more reality into their corn flakes.
The worst thing about the U.N., from my perspective, is that it gives thugs and tyrants a respectability and legitimacy they do not deserve, and it gives them a forum from which to exercise more power.
The U.N. has long been totally incompetent at its main role of promoting peace and stability. In the last decade there have been genocides in Rwanda and Sudan, completely ignored by the U.N. Bill Clinton had to go around the U.N. to take down Milosovic.
The U.N. was useful during the cold war, and its structure is a cold war structure with the members of the security council basically being the ‘winners’ of WWII. As a ‘safety fuse’ to allow nations to talk before conflict escalated it had some value.
In the post-cold war era, the U.N. has degenerated into a corrupt organization that is cynically used by some countries to gain advantage over others. The conference on ‘racism’ in Durban was a thinly-veiled anti-semitic attack on Israel, and only a handful of countries had the balls to call it for what it was.
Some of the ancilliary U.N. organizations like UNICEF and UNESCO do some good, and it would be nice to see the U.N. reorganized with activities like that as its focus and to get out of the power projection and legitimization game.
Most conservatives don’t want the U.N. eliminated, they want it reformed. They want power taken away from the dictatorships and human rights abusers, and more power given to the large world democracies. Proposals you see floating around right-wing web sites include adding Japan and India to the Security Council, moving dictatorships to a lower level of influence than they have now, putting only the best countries in terms of human rights in charge of the Human Rights commission (basically you have to prove your bona fides before you are allowed to chair it), etc.
Other conservatives favor scrapping the U.N., but replacing it with an organization made up of liberal democracies. In my opinion, you can’t leave Russia and China out of any world body, so this won’t work. So other conservatives support keeping the U.N., but building a parallel organization of only liberal democracies to act as a balance. Any country with free elections and a commitment to human rights would be allowed to join this organization.
So what?
Tell us more! Tell us more!