ArthurDent's Journal: Going through the motions

Everybody knows now (if we didn't know before) that the "United Nations" is a misnomer. The UN is all about political manuevering and nothing whatever about being united. Yet, for years now, our government has been trying to treat the UN as the idealistic gathering of nations that it was supposed to be, and getting limited if any result.

I groaned when I heard that the US is going back to the UN for help in dealing with Iraq. I groaned at the implication that we couldn't handle it, that things really are as bad as the media is making them out to be, and that our political will is waning.

Then I thought, what if we're starting to get what the UN is really all about? I think we'd all agree that the goal of our UN operation before the war was simply to put us in a win-win situation politically. It either proved that the UN was helpless as an organization to put force behind it's will to remove WMDs from Iraq, or it proved that it had the will. Either way we win if you look at it from the perspective that we were going to attack anyway. We either get legitimacy, or help.

I think the same thing is at work here. A multitude of things could happen here. The two biggest ones though, are we get legitimacy for being there because no consensus can be achieved as to how the UN gets involved, or we get help doing what we want to do.

I had a look at which countries would be sending help, though and I was disappointed to not find many (if any) Islamic countries on the list. I was kind of hoping for a situation where we might be able to turn the political tables on the terrorists there by saying they are only killing their Islamic brethren by attacking the forces occupying Iraq. However, any help we can get is better than the alternative!

I hope that we are finally taking a more pragmatic approach to the UN as it appears we might be!