The Good Cop and Bad Cop of World Government

by Anthony Gregory

Exclusive to STR

March 12, 2008

The oh-so-humanitarian, globally conscious left has often branded American opponents of the United Nations as reactionary, isolationist Neanderthals as it concerns international harmony and peace.  

An irony is that in recent years, the United Nations has at times appeared to be downright decent compared to the US empire. Most conspicuously, the UN Security Council rejected the US war on Iraq , which has so far robbed a million people of their lives and many more of their homes and liberties, bringing about one of the greatest human tragedies in modern times.  

The UN thus appears to be a force for peace, but when we look deeper, we see something sinister. The US waged that war in supposed defense of UN resolutions. The UN's credibility was exploited to back up American aggression, even as the organization was impotent to stop the war it nominally opposed.  

And the bottom line is, when the UN and US supposedly conflict, the UN never really wins. American conservatives worry about American sovereignty. They fear a future where the UN strips America of its guns, wealth and Constitution. So we need US power to, at a minimum, protect us and our national sovereignty from the UN.  

Not very likely. If Americans ever lose our rights to world government, I predict most of us will be all for it. Furthermore, if you really want to look at world government, just look at the US . It is the institution that claims the power to wage war on any people, to detain and torture any suspect, to make domestic policy for the whole world. Conservatives fret about living under an internationalist world government when they already do. The US will neither give up its liberties, nor its warmongering, simply because the UN says so. American politicians have to want it too. This is at least the case so long as the US has a plausible claim at being global policeman.  

The United Nations has, since its beginnings, been a fig leaf for US aggression. After World War II, the Allies divied up the world — Stalin and the FDR/Truman administrations agreed that the evil Japanese and Germans had to be disarmed and disenfranchised from world affairs. The Good Russians, Americans, Chinese, British, French and other standard cast members of social democratic hegemony would rule the planet.  

The first major UN project for peace was the war in Korea, which Congress never declared but which, for the good of the whole world, featured brand new US weapons technology, napalm attacks (at one point, 800 tons a day were dropped) on non-combatants, and the deliberate devastation of North Korean dams and civil infrastructure. Eighteen out of 22 major cities were at least half destroyed. Two or three million civilians were killed.  

Despite what the left believes, the UN is no pacific check on the US and never has been. It is a complicit party to US hyperdominance. With the once-mighty British empire long gone, with the Soviet Union nearly two decades defunct, the United States has emerged as the solitary global empire, the culmination of 60 years of expansion, and the UN is one of several ways the US gives the facade of international consensus to its nationalist aggression.  

And now, it is at it again: The horrid Security Council has once more declared war on the inalienable right of Iranians and others to trade with one another. Why? Supposedly, Iran still wants nuclear weapons. The fact that the US has many thousands and has still been the only body to use them – twice, in its case – is no complicating matter, apparently.  

The UN is setting Iran up for victimization by the US, just as it set Iraq up. For more than a decade, the Iraqi people were slaughtered by a diabolical sanctions regime – one that required both UN and US direction. Lacking the US, the UN could not commit much anti-trade aggression. Without the rubberstamp of the UN -- that pretense of humanitarianism pasted upon international belligerence and systematic massacre — the US could not get the passive acquiescence from the global community required to cut off trade between one nation and the rest.

For a more mundane example of the UN as US puppet, consider global drug policy. The US wants American-style prohibition the world over, and while it used to frustrate the international community when the US would bully its neighbors into maintaining their drug wars, now the UN only adds to the madness. The most recent case has the UN nosing in on Canadian harm reduction programs.  

For the last several years, we have heard the left complain about the unilateralism of the US. We have heard the right complain about the obstructionism of the UN, its attempts to block US wars of so-called national defense. A pox on both their houses. Together, the UN and US have killed and displaced more than either could alone. When the UN sometimes poses to stand up to US aggression, it matters nothing. And the US is complicit in the worst the UN offers. They are the good cop and bad cop of world government.