Friday, January 7, 2005

UN and Arabism

The UN is one of the staunchest and blindest supporters of Arab countries. It seems as though nothing could derail the agenda of courting the unwavering support of all Arab countries. An example can be found in this article by Dore Gold:



This is not just a story about Syria behaving as a rogue state; it is also a glaring example of the UN system failing. For UN Security Council membership from early 2002 through 2003 did not lead to more moderate Syrian behavior but rather to the exact opposite: a more defiant posture than was even witnessed during the years in which Hafiz al-Assad ruled Syria. And in December 2004, General George W. Casey, Jr., the U.S. commander in Iraq, has disclosed that the Iraqi insurgency was being run by former Iraqi Baath Party officials from Syria, itself. The current Iraqi leadership in Baghdad has suggested the involvement of the Syrian security services in the insurgency, as well. Indeed, US troops uncovered photographs of senior Syrian officials when they stormed insurgent strongholds in Falujah last November. A captured insurgent in Najaf told the Iraqi security authorities that he had gone through training camps in Syria. In short, Syrian fingerprints are all over the insurgency.



Earlier in the article Gold says:



For that reason, high-level UN officials were hopeful that Syria would change its behavior on terrorism, when it was elected for a two year term to the UN Security Council in October 2001 (a month after 9/11), by more than a two-thirds majority by the UN General Assembly. Since UN Security Council members were entrusted to safeguard international peace and security, it was then argued, Syria would have no choice but to curtail its support for Hezbullah and a dozen other terrorist groups to which it had given sanctuary for nearly two decades.



This logic seems fundamentally faulty to me. Columnist Andrew Sullivan used similar arguments before the election we he stated that, if the Demos won the election and were forced to confront the terrorism issue, they would take it much more seriously. This logic might lead some one to place drug addicts at the DEA. Power and responsibility do not reform people, as this argument seems to believe. Power especially causes more corruption on an already corrupt human nature.

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