National Post (National Edition)
WARMONGERS MASQUERADING AS PEACE-MONGERS
News reports say the International Criminal Court (ICC) is about to send an investigative team to Israel to look into suspected war crimes committed by the Israeli Defense Forces during last summer’s military campaign in Gaza. “The delegation from the prosecutor’s office of The Haguebased ICC is scheduled to arrive in Israel by June 27,” reported Haaretz, quoting a Palestinian source.
I wonder what has taken the ICC prosecutors so long. Given the nature and composition of international institutions — by now not merely infiltrated, but dominated, by jihadists and other terror-mongers and their stooges — it has been a foregone conclusion that any military response by the Jewish state against Palestinian terrorists who have been launching rockets into Israel would run the risk of being declared an international crime.
It was evident from the beginning that attempts would be made to use the ICC to delegitimize the rights of selected countries to self-defence. The prime target was Israel, with the United States a close second, and Canada, Great Britain and other Western-style democracies not far behind.
As blogger Aaron Menenberg, writing for The Hill, put it last month: “If the ICC sides with the Palestinian Authority, America’s enemies will know how to use the ICC against the United States.”
If America’s enemies knew one thing all along, it was how to use liberal democratic ideals and institutions against liberal democracies. This was something they knew from the start, with the ICC being one, but far from the only, example.
In 1998, then-U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan described peacekeeping as “an attempt to confront and defeat the worst in man with the best in man: to counter violence with tolerance, might with moderation, and war with peace.”
This sounded magnificent to Western liberals on automatic pilot, unless one took the trouble to think for a brief moment. A moment’s thought revealed Anan’s statement to be a mixture between high-minded twaddle and hypocritical cant. If the “worst” in man could be defeated by tolerance and moderation, it would hardly be the worst.
The worst in man is aggressive violence, and what counters violence is tanks, not tolerance. That’s why peace officers carry side arms, not rosaries. During the Second World War, it was the might of the Allies that opposed the might of the Axis, not moderation. Peace neither “confronts” nor “defeats” war; it simply precedes and follows victory. Or defeat, as the case may be.
International peacekeeping had as checkered a history as international justice. For a cost of about US$25 billion in the 20th century (between 1948 and 2000), the United Nations’ peacekeeping bureaucracy was only prolific in the production of acronyms. Its other accomplishments, such as the production of peace, were much more modest.
In Somalia, for instance, UN- OSOM I and II only managed to make the world secure for warlords. UNIFIL in Lebanon achieved next to nothing. UNAMIR and UNOMOUR, in Rwanda and Rwanda/Uganda, achieved rather less than nothing; arguably they facilitated, or at least masked, genocide. UNAMSIL in Sierra Leone amounted to a sheer waste of 82 peacekeepers’ lives and US$717.6 million in 2001 alone.
UNMOGIP (United Nations Military Observer Group) in India and Pakistan has been on the job since 1949, during which the two countries fought three wars. The mission will cost over US$19 million in 2014-15, without reducing the danger of a nuclear exchange between the two countries by one iota.
The motivation of peacekeepers has been equally checkered. Some have no doubt acted from a pure desire to preserve or restore peace. Others have acted from a parallel desire to advance their own political goals, or to make a region secure for the interests of a preferred party at the expense of the other, as NATO did in Kosovo.
Sometimes peacekeeping, not to mention criminalizing defensive conduct, can become a disincentive to warring parties to seek a compromise — e.g., when one side prolongs a conflict because it hopes to enlist the international peacekeepers or ICC prosecutors on its side. That’s how peacekeeping becomes a disincentive to peace. In addition, officials inside or outside the UN have routinely used peacekeeping or war crime prosecution as a tool to build their own bureaucratic empires and to extend their influence over the affairs of mankind.
If, in order to defend itself and its allies against the potential malice of the ICC, America were to shut down or starve out peacekeeping missions and international prosecutions, I’d regard it as a bonus. But helpful to world peace as it may be to shut down warmongers who masquerade as peace-mongers, it’s unlikely to happen. The Obama-administration wouldn’t have the desire to shut down UN operations in New York or withdraw its share of ICC funding from The Hague, and a Republican administration wouldn’t have the guts.
The ICC will continue operating, with results that are likely to range from the farcical to the tragic or, at best, include examples of both. Some strings have to be played out before the false notes become evident to all. Including people with tin ears.
The UN peacekeeping bureaucracy is good at producing
acronyms and spending money, but not so good at
ensuring peace