Charles Colson commentary on UN
 

BreakPoint with Charles Colson
Commentary #030320 - 03/20/2003

Utopia in the Rearview Mirror
The UN Outlives Its Usefulness

This past weekend, I flipped on the television to check the news on Iraq. There on the screen was chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix being interviewed on MTV—yes, MTV. In the interview, the man responsible for disarming the deadly Iraqi regime said, "I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict." Really? The danger to the environment is greater than the issues of war and peace? I almost fell off the chair. That's comic opera.

And, in a nutshell, it sums up why the United Nations (UN) has outgrown its usefulness.

The UN was born in one of those great utopian moments, when all the nations of the world pledged to work together for peace and order.

There's no denying the good things that the UN has done in humanitarian areas like childhood immunization and working with refugees.

But social work isn't the biblical standard by which government and government-like institutions are measured. The biblical criterion is the restraint of evil and the preservation of peace and order. Almost from the outset, the UN's efforts in this area have been undermined by what New Republic publisher Martin Peretz calls the UN's "Rube Goldberg" structure.

When North Korea invaded the South in 1950, the UN was able to respond only because a Soviet boycott on an unrelated matter kept Moscow from using its veto—a mistake that others learned from later. In the past few months, we witnessed how a few committed obstructionists can prevent the UN from addressing a genuine threat to international order and security.

Even its attempts to enforce a peace treaty already agreed to by the parties have met with mixed results. While UN peacekeepers have played a constructive role in parts of the Middle East, peacekeepers obeying orders from Kofi Annan, the current secretary-general, stood by doing nothing while genocide was going on in Rwanda and Bosnia.

Even worse than its structure is the UN's essentially utopian worldview. Men like Blix have what theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called an excessive trust in human nature and the power of good intentions. You see this worldview at work when Blix told Associated Press that he doubted that Hussein would use chemical or biological weapons against American troops out of deference to world opinion.

A man who can say something like this does not understand human nature. For people like Blix, every tyrant, thug, and maniac is somebody who can be persuaded to do the right thing. The history of Saddam's regime tells a different story.

As a result, Blix is incapable of understanding the tragic need for force and coercion to restrain evil. Even worse, he doesn't recognize evil when he sees it, worrying about the environment instead.

And this is the man we are supposed to believe about Iraq's disarmament? No, thanks. I will put my trust in a president who has a realistic worldview, who sees human evil and knows what needs to be done to restrain it.

The UN may come to its senses, beginning with shaking off its utopianism. I'd welcome that. But if not, if Hans Blix represents the UN of the future, then it will go the way of the League of Nations, another group that did not understand the tragic necessity to use force against tyrants. And I, for one, will not mourn its passing.

:) Thanks Chuck! :)

I didn't see the MTV interview (And what's so wrong with MTV interviewing Hans Blix? They don't play music videos any more, so they have to do something - and they might as well cover current events.), but I seriously suspect that the author of this piece is taking Blix's statement out of context. The reason I suspect this is that it's the only statement from Blix that he uses to attack him. There is no other supporting information - just one thing the guy said in one interview. That hardly presents us a full picture of the guy's personality, priorities or competence. It certainly does not represent the priorities or competence of his employer, the UN.

I found Hans Blix's reports on the inspection process to be objective and thorough. Blix told the world that progress was being made, but that Iraq still did not accept that the world demanded its disarment, and that many questions remained to be answered. He told us what we needed to hear - that Iraq was not cooperating fully.

It was the security council which failed, not Hans Blix. Why it failed is complicated. This was a contentious issue, and we got mired in a cycle of appeasement and 'last chance' diplomacy solutions. The Iraq issue took so long to resolve that nobody seemed to ever remember that they had been in the same place a few times before.

Well said, Nick.

Mike

The quote in context:
 

Norris: Speaking of multilateralism, do you notice, as many have suggested, that there's an increasing unilateralist bent in the United States government?

Blix: Yeah. On big issues like war in Iraq, but in many other issues they simply must be multilateral. There's no other way around. You have the instances like the global warming convention, the Kyoto protocol, when the U.S. went its own way. I regret it. To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war. We will have regional conflicts and use of force, but world conflicts I do not believe will happen any longer. But the environment, that is a creeping danger. I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict.

Norris: Most of our audience was quite young when the Cold War came to an end, and I think that a lot of us envisioned a world that would be significantly safer as a result of that. So now that we're 10, 12 years down the line, are we a safer world, in your opinion?

Blix: I think so, yes. I lived through the whole Cold War and the risk then, the mutually assured destruction, the "M.A.D.," as it was called, that was very much a reality for us, that the world could be blown to pieces all together with the nuclear weapons that they had in Russia and the United States. I don't think that anyone seriously fears that the world can be blown to pieces all together. But what one can fear and rightly so are regional things, like in the Middle East, India, Pakistan, the Korean Peninsula, borders in Africa, etc. We need to have patience in order to try to solve these conflicts as well. Like I said, I'm more worried long term about the environmental issues then the use of arms.


http://www.mtv.com/bands/i/iraq/news_feature_031203/

It's no great secret that Chuck is no fan of MTV. That being said, you're point that it's wrong to think there's something peculiar about Hans being interviewed there is well taken.

I must say however, that the comment about not believing world conflicts will happen anymore is nothing more than wishful thinking. Nobody really thought it could happen before - but it did. The world is much smaller and men's arms are much longer. Nothing even remotely like Utopia is on the horizon.

It's a secret to me. I've never heard of Chuck Colson.

Thank you for supplying the text of the comment. That's helpful to closer place Blix's statement in context.

Still, I argue that Hans Blix is not the UN. I don't really care about his geopolitical predictions, because the guy was given a job to do and he did it well. Then the rest of the UN, which he does not represent, failed to reach an agreement based on his reports.

And what's so dangerous about a guy saying that he doesn't think we'll see another world war? It's his opinion, and he's got a right to it.

As for Blix's concern for the environment, that's well-founded. He's just saying, 'look, wars have always happened and affected regions - but environmental problems affect everybodyand have the potential for more serious consequences.' Those are his priorites and he's entitled to them.

Despite Hans Blix's obvious pacifist tendencies, the guy's reports to the UN still represented the facts well. He said 'we're getting cooperation here, we're not getting it there, they have these banned items here - short version, they're still not cooperating.'

I think Colson's finger-pointing at Hans Blix is baseless and absurd, it ignores other possibilities and causes and it does nothing to suggest a way to fix it. His is sensationalist 'the sky is falling' journalism.

A little more . . .
 

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030...ditorial031703


By the way, Nick. Your Ayn Rand quote says it all. :)

What is "The New Republic?"

Mike

Re: A little more . . .
 

Your smug comment would have more of an impact if you explained it a little better. I have no idea what you're talking about. But then I've never claimed to be very smart.

It's apparently some kind of conservative mag. :confused:

Smug? SMUG!? I think I resemble that statement. :)

First: From the New Republic: "Hans Blix has been reduced to praising Iraq for partial compliance."
The quote seems to agree with me that Hans has misguided confidence in Saddam's ability to do the right thing (not a quote).

Second: That claim would be completely unnecessary. Your intelligence is apparant and obvious.

Sure, it agrees with you - but it provides no new actual evidence or information. You, Chuck and the New Republic are all claiming that Hans Blix did a bad job because of something unrelated he said in an interview. I am claiming that he did a good job, and I will actually provide evidence instead of conjecture and assumptions. As evidence I will use, go figure, his work. I don't think a person's job performance can be assessed while ignoring such information.

First, two matters of opinion:

1. Hans Blix expressed a desire to see the Iraqi government cooperate. But so did everybody else, so I fail to see why this is a problem. Who didn't want to see Iraq cooperate so we could avoid military conflict?

2. I don't remember him praising them for partial cooperation, but of course his reports credited them for it. What was he to do, omit that information from his reports? Omitting this information would suggest bias far more than including it does.

I see no reason to presume that Blix's objectivity was compromised by these two facts.

Below is a link to Blix's report to the UN on January 27th of this year. It presents the facts - exactly how Iraq had responded to different situations and how forthcoming they had been. It's clear from this report that they had not cooperated fully with inspectors, and Blix makes a point to say that several times. He even goes so far as to suggest how certain Iraqi responses may be an attempt to hide information or materials.

These are not the words of somebody with 'misguided confidence' in the regime he was sent to inspect.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,76710,00.html

"In this updating I am bound, however, to register some problems."

"I am obliged to note some recent disturbing incidents and harassment."

"Where our Iraqi counterparts have some complaint they can take it up in a calmer and less unpleasant manner."

"The discovery of a number of 122 mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions."

"In the letter of 24 January to the President of the Council, Iraq's Foreign Minister stated that "all imported quantities of growth media were declared". This is not evidence. I note that the quantity of media involved would suffice to produce, for example, about 5,000 liters of concentrated anthrax."

"The recent inspection find in the private home of a scientist of a box of some 3,000 pages of documents, much of it relating to the laser enrichment of uranium support a concern that has long existed that documents might be distributed to the homes of private individuals.

This interpretation is refuted by the Iraqi side, which claims that research staff sometimes may bring home papers from their work places. On our side, we cannot help but think that the case might not be isolated and that such placements of documents is deliberate to make discovery difficult and to seek to shield documents by placing them in private homes."

News from MTV
 

So what's wrong with getting your news from MTV? Its gotta be a whole lot less biased than from the "New Republic". At least they don't limit the news to one-sided politics.

Re: News from MTV
 

do you think MTV might have a bit of a liberal view......no, of course not! they wouldn't try to get the opinion of the war from rappers, pop stars, and college kids. i'm sure the conservative view is well represented on MTV. :rolleyes:

Re: News from MTV
 

I think MTV may be somewhat weighted to the liberal side of things. And I could tell by reading some of the "articles" on "The New Republic" that it is very conservative. I think it is important to remember the source from which you are getting your information. As I see my self as a pretty liberal guy, I would prefer to get my news from a more liberal source. The same holds true for the people that read "The New Republic." I doubt there are very many serious liberal subscribers to that.

:Turns on MTV.:

Mike

Re: Re: News from MTV
 

Sure its a little on the liberal side but keep in mind EVERY NEWS PROGRAM has some liberal sources to it othewise there wouldn't be a hook to lure someone to watch. Personally I can't stand MTV. Never understood why it was soooo important to look at music but that's probably from the liberal upbringing in the field of music (I actually paid for some of my college through a piano scholarship). I'm just thankful MTV has been providing news though, given the fact that no other network targets youth in providing coverage so a majority of younger persons rely on the net for most of their news.

I remember that during the last few presidential races MTV offered interviews/ sit downs to both parties and Bush Sr. declined, Dole made an appearance in one and canceled the next b/c he felt it didn't fit his image (he was wearing his suit during the interview) and finally W. declined an interview. I guess they felt that young people didn't matter. I would certainly doubt that the "New Republic" offered such interviews with either of the Democratics during the elections.

Those who forget history....
 

<"In this updating I am bound, however, to register some problems."

"I am obliged to note some recent disturbing incidents and harassment."

"Where our Iraqi counterparts have some complaint they can take it up in a calmer and less unpleasant manner."

"The discovery of a number of 122 mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions."

"In the letter of 24 January to the President of the Council, Iraq's Foreign Minister stated that "all imported quantities of growth media were declared". This is not evidence. I note that the quantity of media involved would suffice to produce, for example, about 5,000 liters of concentrated anthrax."

"The recent inspection find in the private home of a scientist of a box of some 3,000 pages of documents, much of it relating to the laser enrichment of uranium support a concern that has long existed that documents might be distributed to the homes of private individuals.

This interpretation is refuted by the Iraqi side, which claims that research staff sometimes may bring home papers from their work places. On our side, we cannot help but think that the case might not be isolated and that such placements of documents is deliberate to make discovery difficult and to seek to shield documents by placing them in private homes.">
-------------------------------

So.....with statements like this, and others, from Blix....

...what is the problem with the rest of the Security Council?

Since when in noncompliance.....compliance?

Europe, of ALL places, should have learned the hard lessons of appeasing a tyrant. Our brave young men are buried all over their landscapes....a bitter reminder of the folly of that tactic, and the high price that had to be paid to remedy the mistake.

Don