USA v UN: Who Best To Win the Future?

The protests were sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010, and continued until the ousting of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali 28 days later, on January 14, 2011.  This was the beginning of the Jasmine Revolution – still struggling to come to its feet – that has not only rocked north Africa, but set off a chain of uprisings that extended further into Africa and the middle East, mirroring in many ways the mounting class warfare throughout Europe and North America.

Four months later that promise of hope has met with not only the surmountable, practical, challenge of establishing responsible, democratic governance, but the harsh reality of having conflicting interests with a global economic system that supported the dictator they are trying to depose, and desperately fears the democratic will of the people they represent whom the Empire has been exploiting for so long.

There is a new, divergent, direction to the script of the drama that is unfolding. What started out as organic revolutions, and became popularly supported international humanitarian interventions under the UN, have been hi-jacked and are now the propagandized counter-revolutions (dressed up to look like revolutionary support) and non-UN, regionally controlled, USA dominated, expansions of empire through NATO.   The British, American, and French governments seem to be competing to see who can whip out the biggest guns and therefore command either more  in the inevitable division of the spoils, privatization, and war debt, or earn more political capital as the saviors of the Arab uprising and inadvertently aid in the possible, potential, emancipation of the Arab people.

The UN was right to be the body under which aid and support to the Libyan people in their struggle for emancipation and democratic self-governance was organized and executed.  This action, in response to the request of the Libyan people, and in defense of their rights under the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from the international community, was correct.  This entire operation, for the sake of the Libyan revolutionaries, and for the sake of all revolutionaries throughout North Africa and the Middle East, needed to stay under the supervision and authority of the United Nations.  The United Nations is far from perfect.  It could stand a lot of reform; for instance, getting rid of the Security Counsel and exploring a more representative, equal, just, global, federated approach to governance.  But, it does provide a little more protection from thorough exploitation at the hands of global financiers, profiteers, and Empire expansionists in this situation.

The UN has abdicated its responsibility.  It has lost an opportunity to strengthen its position and it has provided individual nations, as well as corporate and financial interests, the chance to exploit the situation.  The Arab League has effectively relinquished power in North Africa to NATO, through UN brokerage, and at the behest of America’s favorite Monarchy, the Sauds.   In exchange for Saudi Arabia’s support for the Libyan intervention, the United States had to agree to tacitly support the Saudi invasion of Bahrain.

America had no business making this trade, and Saudi Arabia had no business asking for it.  Under a democratic UN, global federation, or government of the people, both issues should have been handled separately, and justly, with respect to the lives of the individuals residing in those countries rather than those that would rule over them and exploit their resources.

To date, there have been revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt; a civil war in Libya; major protests in Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Oman, Yemen, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Western Sahara, Kuwait, and the one one you’d think Americans would be hearing the most about, Iraq.  Few of these have received any news coverage at all.  Apparently there are too many for western, and particularly the American, media to keep up with, or too much global discontent to risk sharing with an increasingly  disgruntled global population.  The 48 hour news cycle has left Tunisia and Algeria in the distant past. Egypt is last month’s story, and Libya is rapidly sliding off the front page.  Military juntas are the new dictators. Libyan rebels have lost their novelty and have been tarnished with corporate media driven doubt and fear.  As public attention is diverted, international human rights intervention has been outsourced.

Reports suggest that Libyan rebels are forced to endure stoppages in NATO air support, ushering in advancements from Quaddafi’s forces, as concessions are extracted from them and deals are struck.  These terms of support, and what favors, allowances, and contracts are coerced in return, no longer resemble the international humanitarian intervention that gained popular global support.  The human rights that the people of north Africa and the middle east are fighting for, as enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human rights, have been subverted by the interests of western expansionism that now combine NATO with AFRICOM for the first time.

Four months later, the Revolution that the western media forgot is still alive and well and suffering under the weight of entrenched dictators, fascist military regimes, greedy corporate interests, exploiting financiers, and power-hungry, bought-and-paid-for, politicians. The celebrated courage of the Tunisian people has been traded in for the next big ‘Arab Spring’ spectacle ( a unhelpful term that puts a time limit on this uprising and avoids the nature of this ‘revolution’), particularly one where the military didn’t back the revolutionaries as is the case with both Egypt and Libya.

International support for the people of Libya, as well as for the peoples of Bahrain, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, et al, must revert to the UN under full transparency without regional, hegemonic, corporate, capitalist, or industrialist influence.  Corporate and global financial interests can work easier through NATO than the UN.  NATO and the western allied countries are far more likely to ensure IMF and World Bank involvement to keep Libya in a state of over-burdened debt like the rest of the third world countries and Banana Republics they’ve created through neo-colonialism than the UN general assembly would.

For the sake of all the people of our planet, and the planet itself, expansionist powers that exploit the southern hemisphere, and much of the northern hemisphere, like the United States, cannot be trusted to dictate the direction for the planet.  An empowered and reformed United Nations is our only hope of surviving the gluttonous rise, and cannibalistic fall, of this latest empire, and protect us from repeating the cycle so that we stand a chance to win the future.