| the un is not acting for peace. it is acting to further the interests or opinions of those members powerful enough to coerce other members to join them in siding with this or that side in conflicts. in other words it is just a pawn for the strong to step on the weak. diplomatically gilted phraseology cannot change that. this is true in the balkans, this is true in the middle east and is very likely true in places i don't know enough to mention. if a warring state is strong enough the un doesn't meddle (russia and chechenya for example), if one side might hurt the un troops while the other tries not to - the un acts only to proscribe the mild side (israel and hizballah - see the taking of israeli soldiers prisoner by hizballah using un or at least un-marked vehicles under the nose of un troops specifically tasked with preventing hizballah from operating there and the scandal of the un not admitting it had video-tapes of this attack for almost a year and then denying israel the right to see the tapes...), in the yugoslav civil wars the serbs were branded the bad guys early on and no atrocity committed by the other side counted (and i am not condoning the serbian atrocities only condemning hypocritic one-sidedness). if you happen to be on the side of the powerful you can almost do no wrong - if you are the hollywoodian bad guy (the western press don't like you, or the usa doesn't like you) you can do no right unless you are strong enough to thumb your nose at them (like russia or the arab states in general, iraq is the exception only because it broke the inter-arab rules of play once the arabs return it to the fold - goodbye un, or actually usa, containment). |
