Lecturing or Hectoring the UN?

Either way, though it may make John Baird and the Conservative Government of Canada feel good about themselves, it all falls on deaf ears.  Deaf to the earned criticism but not to the fact that a member country that is normally docile and abiding by the group decisions of others irrespective of content or morals, has suddenly turned critic. 

Since Canada, the 7th largest financial support of that august body has already been disciplined prior to the assault on the impregnable dignity of the UN through the Security Council snub last year, there was nothing for it but to sit there and fidget.

Plain truths plainly spoken are not general fare in the great hall of the people.  The ineffectual body of international morals, the arbiter of peace and freedom, the interlocutor of human rights and human relations that so continually and spectacularly fails at its appointed tasks much prefers to bask in the warm glow of its satisfaction with its bureaucratic performance. 

It has developed a well-used formula for expressing dismay at the actions of those among it who conspicuously flaunt the sainted values of the UN.

That the hand-wringing and gentle persuasions and finally veiled threats behind which no cudgel lurks seems to have sufficed for any meaningful strides in solving the dilemma of human rights abuses owe much to the control of the General Assembly that a broad coalition of human-rights-abusing countries have within the United Nations and as members in very good standing of various of its committees and offshoots, like, for example the UN Human Rights Council.

Citing both Syria and Iran in his speech, Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs took the General Assembly to task for its lackadaisical approach to sanctions and its unwillingness to become any more involved in strictures applied against the offending parties.  That the offending parties are locked in a self-selecting brace of support, is simply another detail; their unity of purpose and values presents as a formidable threat to the stability of the region.

None of the bodies which collectively are capable of exerting the kind of action that might impact on the volatile situation now existing with Iran's nuclear program and Syria's violent state repression of a revolution are anxious to precipitate a broader eruption of threats and action lest a wider war explode the region. 

And with that potential, the potential for another economic collapse hard on the heels of the current one, with energy prices sky-high and manufacturing, trade and economies faltering.

Should the Arab League muster its resources to intervene they might only hasten the radicalization of Syria, the eruption of a conventional war combining Iran, Syria, Lebanon and possibly Iraq, facing off against the remainder of the Muslim Middle East, drawing in the United States and possibly NATO and certainly Israel. 

Should the United Nations take the initiative, it would call upon a very reluctant NATO; its own UN forces inadequate to the task.

And a similar scenario would unfold.  This is truly the proverbial place called 'between a rock and a hard place'.  John Baird is quite correct in his statement that "A nuclear Iran would embolden an already reckless regime and perpetuate a destabilizing factor for not just an already fragile region but the entire planet".  Quite, quite so.  But the remedy....?

There is no argument that the United Nations has become a bloated bureaucracy, a useless international tool whose main purpose now appears to be to appease the oil-wealthy and ethics-recalcitrant countries of the world from Sudan to Venezuela, Iraq to Nigeria, Saudi Arabia to Qatar. 

Money, in this world has always spoken loudly and with authority.  Money in this contemporary world, is synonymous with the wealth of fossil fuel resources.

That is what controls the political clockwork of the United Nations, even while the tax-funded wealth of the democratic, socially and economically advanced countries of the world actually provide the financial wherewithal to enable the United Nations to operate administratively. 

Change all of that?  The United Nations devolved from the League of Nations, with a distinct purpose spurred on by guilt of the Holocaust.

It was in this body ostensibly representing the finest that humankind could aspire to that a former Nazi, responsible for the deaths of many European Jews during World War II, Kurt Waldheim, formerly President of Austria, became Secretary General.

It was the United Nations Security Council vote that allowed for the creation of the State of Israel.  It is within the United Nations of today that most of the denunciations for human rights violations are directed toward the nation of Jews.

Ironies abound.