A little while ago I wrote that a great deal of political discourse is nothing more that a shouting match, as people on both sides of a debate merely present arguments that reinforce their own argument, oblivious to the fact that someone of the opposing view is likely to give the benefit of the doubt to those they arlready support. The best arguments and evidence are those that are so compelling they ring true even with people who are naturally pre-disposed to think the opposite.
I tend to be naturally pro-UN, mainly because we need such an organisation and its the only one we have. I have always thought that the disregard for the UN by the United States does as much to undermine the organisation, as any inaction on the part of the United Nations itself. However, the report of doctored UN reports seems to me a classic piece of almost opinion-changing evidence. It has transpired that, in a report into the death of former Lebanese leader Rafik Hariri, someone in the UN deliberately removed allegations that brother of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria was involved in the assasination.
The UN must derive its strength from being obviously impartial. This does not simply mean that it remains impervious to pressure from the USA, but also that it does not aid and abet wrong-doing of the apparent ‘other side’, the Arabic and/or Islamic states in the Middle-East. If we and the UN wish to condemn US unilateralism, we also have to condemn such acts by other states as well. Nothing could be more unilateral than the upper echelons of the Syrian regime committing political assasinations. Never mind the fact that the assasination back-fired, and resulted in a diminished Syrian power-base in Beirut; the UN has sunk into the trough of the moral-low ground, and seriously undermined itself by these actions.
On a side note, I find it fascinating that such a large, global organisation has been undone by the ‘track changes’ tool in what I can only assume is the Microsoft Word programme (although I suppose it could have been the open source alternative, OpenOffice.org). Hasn’t anyone in the UN heard of a PDF? Obviously not. It is another delightful example of technology and the internet exposing the duplicity of the organisations that seek to control the information we receive.