The West is the Best

'The UN Has Come to Be Seen As a Tool of the West
by Adrian Hamilton

Answering questions on Radio 4’s World Tonight about the bomb attack on its offices in Algiers, a spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was cut off in mid-sentence. When asked why the UN was targeted, she started to say: “Unfortunately, the UN is not any more the innocent, humanitarian organisation that can work anywhere,” before she was hustled on to the next question as to why the UN didn’t take better precautions against attack.
But, however uncomfortable the question, especially when the aid organisation has just lost nearly a dozen employees in the bombing, what its spokesman was saying has a terrible ring of truth about it. In the West, the UN is regarded as largely a good thing, with its many arms dedicated to helping refugees, resolving conflicts and, if necessary, to stepping in with the blue helmets to keep the peace.
In other parts of the world, however, the UN is no longer regarded in this benign light. Indeed, in a substantial part of the developing world it has come to seem an instrument of western oppression and US hegemony - a club of the big boys intent on bullying smaller countries in the interests of Washington and its European allies.
When al-Qa’ida blew up the UN offices in Iraq in 2003, killing its envoy, it was trying to drive the outside world away and make sure that nations hesitated to support the US and Britain in the occupation (in this it was, in fact, brutally successful). When al-Qa’ida North Africa, as the militant group now calls itself, blew up the UNHCR offices in Algiers, it was to show that it too had the power and determination to bring down a symbol of western presence.
Iraq has much to do with this change in perceptions. Of course, the UN had been attacked elsewhere before the invasion took place. But Washington’s decision to press ahead with occupation regardless showed to much of the Muslim world both the UN’s powerlessness and the extent to which it was regarded as a tool of the US, not an independent source of global governance. The rest of the world has been brought up to believe that the security role of the UN was to keep a peace already agreed. Now it saw that the UN was being pushed to impose a peace on terms dictated from outside.'

Lees verder: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/13/5806/ Of:
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/adrian_hamilton/article3247515.ece