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May. 22nd, 2007 12:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerMy friend Nick emailed aroundthis link to UN news with the subject line "Why I may join the Idaho Anti-Black Helicopter Brigade".
My somewhat acerbic response follows.
Democracy sucks, doesn't it? Give people (or in this case states) the right to determine who will lead them, and they make all sorts of inappropriate choices. Of course, as an American who hates Bush and Cheney and everything they stand for, I feel the same way. Wouldn't it be far better if the opimates took over and ground those tiresome plebs underfoot? :-) We would rule wisely and fairly, but protect those foolish voters from making choices that made them look callous, foolish, and arrogant.
Of course, many years of the US being callous, foolish, and arrogant is probably why nothing came of the backchannel lobbying of the US representatives to the UN against this choice (lobbying that took place long before these public cries of disappointment, which are the meaningless noise of people who have lost a fight whingeing afterwards). We've been acting like we think we are kings of the world for far too long, and our abject failure to win the "two major regional contingencies" that the Army has been practicing for since the end of the Cold War, and even more so since the Frist Gulf War, have shown the rest of the world that we lack the power to do anything constructive--all we can do is destroy. No wonder they feel no impetus to try to work with us, and instead look for the alternative that they know will be the most visibile diplomatic equivalent of a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Zibabwe is a cruel, vicious, above all *stupid* dictatorship. Mugabe is a brutal tyrant who has used the langauge of freedom and liberation to seize power and grind his opponents into the dust. For his government to be selected for anythign other than condemnation by an international body is a cruel joke. But maybe foreign leaders, not as familiar with the benificent, kindly side of Bush and Cheney as we Americans are, thoguht they were seelcting people who our adminsitration would feel comfotable working with.
My somewhat acerbic response follows.
Democracy sucks, doesn't it? Give people (or in this case states) the right to determine who will lead them, and they make all sorts of inappropriate choices. Of course, as an American who hates Bush and Cheney and everything they stand for, I feel the same way. Wouldn't it be far better if the opimates took over and ground those tiresome plebs underfoot? :-) We would rule wisely and fairly, but protect those foolish voters from making choices that made them look callous, foolish, and arrogant.
Of course, many years of the US being callous, foolish, and arrogant is probably why nothing came of the backchannel lobbying of the US representatives to the UN against this choice (lobbying that took place long before these public cries of disappointment, which are the meaningless noise of people who have lost a fight whingeing afterwards). We've been acting like we think we are kings of the world for far too long, and our abject failure to win the "two major regional contingencies" that the Army has been practicing for since the end of the Cold War, and even more so since the Frist Gulf War, have shown the rest of the world that we lack the power to do anything constructive--all we can do is destroy. No wonder they feel no impetus to try to work with us, and instead look for the alternative that they know will be the most visibile diplomatic equivalent of a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Zibabwe is a cruel, vicious, above all *stupid* dictatorship. Mugabe is a brutal tyrant who has used the langauge of freedom and liberation to seize power and grind his opponents into the dust. For his government to be selected for anythign other than condemnation by an international body is a cruel joke. But maybe foreign leaders, not as familiar with the benificent, kindly side of Bush and Cheney as we Americans are, thoguht they were seelcting people who our adminsitration would feel comfotable working with.
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Date: 2007-05-23 10:12 pm (UTC)And, well, cheers.
I'm kind of a UN nerd, which is why your post caught my attention. Back before we started the Iraq War, the US had a lot of weight it could throw around the international arena. That's how we got the UN to give us the legal grounding, tenuous though it was, to go into Saddam's sandbox in the first place.
We haven't got that kind of political capital anymore. It was something I noticed over and over again when I was studying in Northern Ireland this spring. We may still have the largest military in the world, but the world is done being scared of us. This is especially true where Africa's concerned. If we had the political capital now that we had back in 2003, American troops would be on the ground in Sudan right now. Bush wants to go in there (and why not? stopping genocide's a feel-good war that would make him look good in the press), but he's stuck on the sidelines while the African Union struggles to police its own domain with insufficient funding and equipment.
That's a complete side-tangent off of Zimbabwe, granted. But Zimbabwe's another example of the same phenomenon. The whining we're doing now about this is because we wasted the aces we could have used to stop it when we railroaded the Iraq war through the Security Council.
Weather or not America should be the world's political powerhouse is a question for another day, but the fact is we aren't anymore. Not like we used to be, anyway.