The UN is back in the news with preparations for the opening of the 69th General Assembly session. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon highlights the importance of the UN’s mission in this “time of turmoil.” But maybe we should take a closer look at what that “mission” is. The avowed purpose of the UN is to maintain peace and stability — or, as former American UN Ambassador Susan Rice says, to “deter and punish aggression.”
That’s a bit odd, when you stop to think about it. The UN’s stated mission is to prevent aggression; yet it does absolutely nothing to restrain the one country whose aggression far outweighs all others in the postwar period — perhaps in all of history. In the past seventy years the United States has invaded more countries, overthrown more governments and backed more dictators and terrorist death squads than any other country on Earth. There isn’t even a close second.
Even assorted “threats” like Al Qaeda, Hamas, ISIS and Saddam’s Iraq were either blowback from aggressive American policies or were covertly sponsored by the US and its allies to further their aggressive aims.
Both the United States and the UN proclaim spreading democracy as a central goal. Yet the US overthrew Mossadegh in Iran and Lumumba in the Congo and actively encouraged the wave of military dictatorships that swept South America in the 1960s and 1970s.
And despite packaging its criminal acts as “punishing aggression” or “spreading democracy,” the United States has been motivated almost entirely by a desire to protect the ability of extractive corporations to loot mineral resources in Africa, oil in Indonesia and Nigeria, etc., or the ability of First World manufacturers to export sweatshop production to slave labor countries.
Far from stopping the United States from any of these crimes against humanity, the UN serves as a fig leaf for US aggression against those who defy its will.
