It’s Time to Shut down the U.N.

By Mike Whitney

"We should all be grateful that the United Nations has decided to investigate the assassination of Rafik Hariri. The decision moves the UN one step closer to its final destruction, which would be the best possible outcome.

The United Nations is a fraud. It’s little more than a rubber stamp for US-Israeli aggression. No one is fooled by the UN’s "democratic" pretensions or the Secretary-General’s lofty-sounding rhetoric. The UN serves the exclusive interests of western, white elites. Period. It is basically an annex of the US federal government---another inconsequential bureau whose main purpose is to lend international legitimacy to America's war-mongering.......

Bush’s interest in the Hariri case is a perfect example of the administration’s disdain for the UN. Bush doesn’t care about Hariri. What he’s looking for is a way to implicate Syria so he will have a reason to expand the war beyond Iraq. Everyone knows this, and yet, the UN plays along anyway. The whole investigation is just political opportunism disguised as justice. Everyone in the Security Council knows what the real goal is---otherwise they wouldn’t have passed the resolution under Chapter 7, which makes the motion enforceable through military action.

The bottom line is that the UN is willing to push the Middle East closer to a region-wide conflagration just to accommodate the US. That says it all; doesn’t it?......

Why hasn’t there been an investigation into the deaths of the 1,100 Lebanese nationals who were killed during Israel’s 34-Day rampage? Many of them were bombed in their own homes or strafed on the clogged highways as they were trying to escape the south. Don’t they count---or does one have to be a friend of Washington or Tel Aviv to have his life protected?.....

It’s an outrage. The siege of Nahr al-Bared refugee camp has persisted for two weeks without a word of protest from the United Nations. Is it really that difficult to see that bombing civilian areas is morally unacceptable?......

The United Nations has failed to preserve the peace or to see that people are treated with justice. It has only strengthened the dominance of the western powers while further subjugating the developing world. We’d all be better off if they just shut the doors and called it quits."