Thank Heavens for the United Nations

What would the world do without the sage wisdom of the Security Council sitting in judgement of rogue nations?

Without the threat of sanctions and the fear and disgrace that they engender - surely nations of the world for whom the very concept of universal human rights represents utter claptrap, a stupid Western notion of which they will have no part - would simply commence abusing and oppressing their populations with no constraints, no embarrassment, no will to halt the travesty of a government slaughtering its own.

So, thank heavens for the United Nations and its priceless institutions, all of them geared to upholding the immutable, universal values of peace, liberty, human rights.  What would we do without them?

The founders of the United Nations had an agenda.  They made a conscious, well-thought-out decision to further the most basic human rights of humankind.  At the same time the United Nations was set up for the purpose of ensuring that international security must prevail.  To avoid, at all costs, the very notion that the world could sustain itself in the horrors of yet another world war. 

"The founders of the United Nations were guided by the assumption that any future conflict among the world's greatest powers would inevitably lead to a third world war, and that such a war would eventually result in the destruction of all humanity."  Prof. Adam Chapnick, Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies

Thus was born the Security Council.  Its permanent members, China, Russia, France, Britain, the United States, would have to reach an accord of opinion and decision-making for any full-fledged steps to be taken in judgement of any nation seen to be engaging in harmful activities.  Activities that might have the potential of triggering a regional or a global conflict.

Ironically, two of its members, through the Soviet Union and the United States, both deemed superpowers, were for decades capable of huge destruction but for MAD, should true hostilities resulting in war ever have succeeded.  As they indeed almost did on several occasions.

"The UN was not designed to solve crises like the one in Syria.  It was intended to prevent a Syrian-type situation from escalating into a Western Powers/Eastern Powers world war.  At that level, it has thus far succeeded", explained Prof. Chapnick.

While a regional war still has the potential of breaking out as the conflict itself, a civil revolutionary war takes its death toll to the angst of the United Nations, the Security Council has divided itself between supporters of the regime and supporters of the rebels. That, in and of itself, has the potential of triggering a confrontation between East and West, culminating in a much wider conflict, drawing in global powers.

The United Nations itself, as a theoretically nobly-aspiring and -inspiring institution has become a dismal failure.  Syria is understood to be opting for a place on the UN's human rights body, possibly joined by Sudan, both of which states are exemplars of human rights tragedies.  While the International Court of Justice has issued an arrest warrant for Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir on counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, pledging to do the same with Syria's President al-Bashar, the Human Rights Council lavishes praise on them.

Robert Mugabe, the elderly tyrant of Zimbabwe whose atrocious anti-human rights policies have ruined his country, turning it from a regional breadbasket into a handbasket to hell, has been appointed a United Nations tourism ambassador, resulting in Canada withdrawing from the UN world tourism office.  UNESCO's decision to establish a chair at the Islamic University of Gaza, a breeding academy for terrorism, is an absolute travesty, shocking in its insouciance.

When Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur for food ignored endemic starvation in areas of the world ruled by dictators, tyrants and despots, and looked instead to Canada to single it out for disparaging remarks about its poor "food security" it served to highlight the obscene absurdity that the United Nations has become.

The United Nations' 2005 Responsibility to Protect goal, where every state is expected to secure its citizens from "genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity", was a feel-good initiative with no hope of ever achieving its purpose.  It lacks the will and the ability to enforce, entreat, compel any country to respect the basic human rights of its citizenry.

The United Nations is a sadly failed world institution that reflects the frailty of the human spirit in its search to make of itself a finer end product than it is capable of becoming.