[quyote] If everything truly was applied in a fair and even-handed manner things would be a lot different on many levels.[/quote]
Totally agree, but when the UN is the instrument of international law, or a world judicial system shall we call it, then what is the function of the UNSC veto... if not a mechanism for protecting the big 5 and their closest allies from the rule of law applied to all the other countries?
The UN can only be a discussion forum and nothing more because it is not equipped to be more.
As shown in the recent past it has been used as a weapon to impose the will of a few for reasons other than those which the founders of the UN had intended.
The UN is useless but only because its misuse and abuse by the major powers has made it so.
As an international forum for debate and discussion... it works as it was supposed to... it was never meant to ensure world peace through force or sanctions.
The reaction to Georgia was a patent joke given that NATO and the US just finished extolling the virtues of an independent Kosovo. What, it was alright for Kosovo to decide to be independent, but not Abkhazia or South Ossetia? Or, the horror, for one or both of them to decide to be part of Russia instead of Georgia?
Neither Russia nor South Ossetia nor Abkhazia have ever stated at any time that joining the Russian Federation was even to be considered. More importantly South Ossetia and Abkhazia were part of Georgia only by decree of Stalin, and for no other reason... it would be like the US splitting up into states and California demanding that Texas becomes a part of California, while Texas wants to remain a separate autonomous state on its own.
The funniest thing is when Clinton claims that Kosovo is a unique case, I guess all the other cases are the same are they? That is politician speak for we are going to ignore all the rules and common sense and just go with something that is useful to us right now... and in that sense it really isn't all that unique.
The UN is and will remain a complete and total laughingstock so long as the Security Council retains the one-veto requirement. Until you require a majority of the five to agree to a veto, it's both undemocratic (heh) and useless.
Well as long as Britain and France and the US are three of the 5 then such a change will never happen. Removing Britain from the voting 5 and perhaps adding a country that is independent from the US would make it rather more democratic in my opinion. France generally votes with the US anyway, but this is not automatic like it is with Britains vote.
Members don't even abide by crap the UN or its affiliates come up with anyway.
Global or regional powers can safely ignore UNSC resolutions if they can be sure that the western powers wont reinterpret the resolution to justify the use force when it suits them, but they will be frustrated in their attempt to misuse the UN if one of the big countries oppose them... an example is Libya... for all the western BS about Russian support for Gaddafi, he wasn't really a best buddy for Russia and left his orders for powerful Russian weapons too late to save himself. In Syria on the other hand to the average westerner it looks like a repeat of Libya, but it is not because while the western media portray both countries as being ruled by ruthless dictators and the opposition as being freedom fighters wanting democracy, while anyone who paid even the slightest attention would see that those brutal dictators actually ruled countries where minorities were safe and extremists were kept in line, the real difference is that Russia has an interest in Syria, in the form of a naval base to support their naval operations in the Med and beyond, and for that reason letting the west play its game of corner Iran and let muslim extremists rule the Arab world... perhaps the plan is that in the long term they might eventually see western democracy as an improvement over living in the 5th century.. is not going to be anywhere near as easy as it was in Libya.
That was all about slapping Saddam for messing with the oil. Plus, it's not like Kuwait or Saudi Arabia were opposed to the effort.
Of course it was all about the Oil. Kuwaite exists as a country because in the 1920s when France and the UK were drawing lines on maps to create countries they realised that one country can't have all the oil to themselves. One country called Kuwaite gets this boundry and we will pick a family to be the royal family to rule without question, and next door we will create a country and that country will be so arrogant as to name itself after the family we pick to be the royal family there... and so the family Saud rules Saudi Arabia... and still does to this day.
Was it worth spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives to protect those brutal dictatorships that export muslim extremism around the world? I really don't think so. The sooner the US gets over its addiction to oil the better for the US.
Hindsight is always 20/20.
Apparently not.
...and the USSR entered the war on 8 August, blowing Japan's hopes out for a negotiated peace via Stalin out of the water. I'm not implying that the two bombs were the singular events that ended the war. But to claim that they had no effect whatsoever is laughable.
The allies were asking Stalin to open a second front of Japan from about 1943. Considering the loss of life and material the Soviets had had to live through because the western allies didn't start D-Day till 1944, I would say the west is rather ungrateful for what they did in 1945 at your request.
No, they'll still have their lobbyists leading Congress around by its nose and exerting policy influence, but the current framework of the treaty would basically allow Israel to be put on the list of human rights violators with or without American consent, thereby requiring America to cease arms shipments. This is all over the news over here, it's one of the reasons Congress is up in arms over the treaty right now. It's funny because this is one of the few non-partisan issues everyone seems to agree on!
Dare I say that the reason such objections are all over your media reflects the infiltration of your media by those sympathetic to Zionist Jews. Non zionist jews would likely celebrate such a law...
Furthermore, while we're at it, if two states go to war, then as far as I'm concerned you open the toolbox and find your biggest hammer. Which constitutes warfighting, not some convoluted crime against humanity crap.
The amusing thing is that on both fronts the west was happy to fight from 30,000 ft and drop bombs on enemy cities.
The irony is that if you speak with most western laymen and even some interested in the military activities of WWII they will often claim such air raids won WWII.
The irony is that from the dispassionate hindsight of half a century later fire bombing a city to pretty much wipe out an enemy population seems like the real war crime. You are not targeting the enemy military that is a threat to you, you are targeting the families of those on the front line... women, children, old men.
Sure they started it and they started total war bombing of cities, yet Britains own experience of London being bombed must have told them that no level of German bombing would make them want to give up so the gamble was that the Germans were weaker than Brits. They continued a course that led to the unnecessary deaths of millions of civilians and they claim that won the war. Of course if they had hit the ball bearing factories and the oil wells and oil refineries then they might have had a case, but mostly they killed people and destroyed their homes.
The dropping of the two bombs was a callous act and most definitely a crime against humanity – but the victor chooses the Court.
I agree, mainly because Nagasaki and Hiroshima were of no military value and were specifically targeted with nuclear weapons because they had been largely untouched by conventional bombing and were therefore largely intact.
The only military purpose of choosing those two cities and the other cities that were on the list for nuclear attack was to maximise the body count...
The International Red Cross Completed a lengthy study into deaths at the 13 German concentration camps and published their findings in 1979 [http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_s5yaZ0Ye2Mo/RrU7Ouu69KI/AAAAAAAACkI/4Ody4MwX-WY/s1600-h/paage_1.jpg] in this official report, they found that a TOTAL of 373,468 deaths occurred in the 13 German camps. For 60 years we have had the Jew lie and the vilification of Germany to live with – time now to face the truth.
Sorry, but I don't agree with that. We know for a fact that at least 4.5 million captured Soviet soldiers were worked to death over the period of mid 1941 to 1945, so those numbers are clearly wrong. There were about 1.5 million Soviet survivors from German camps from an estimated 6 million captured over the whole war period.