Liberal Democracies throughout the world operate on this basis. Their societies are based on freedom and cooperation within society and between nations. The philosophy of Liberalism is based on the hypothesis that state policies are driven by the pursuit of common interests through cooperation. This is the underpinning of democracy, hence the frequent use of both terms together to describe Western society.
The interests of Liberal democracies are necessarily damaged by conflict. The only way to fully pursue the Liberalist agenda, and the only way to fully implement democracy, is to subordinate conflict to the point where the use of force is either not considered at all, or is used only to protect the interests of the broader society from armed threat. This explains why Liberal democracies never fight each other in war, but settle their conflicts through negotiation.
Liberalism is opposed by the Realist school of thought, in the form of tyranny. This philosophy is based on the hypothesis that state policies are driven by the pursuit of power, and that all means are justified in this pursuit. For totalitarian states, their broader interest is conflict itself, since only through the perpetuation of conflict can tyrants justify their continued pursuit of power. Thus, war or the threat of war is endemic among totalitarian states, since not only can conflict not be subordinated to other interests, it is the broad interest upon which such regimes are based.
Perhaps the greatest believer in and supporter of Liberal Democracy in the world today is Natan Sharansky. The former Soviet dissident and Prisoner of Zion spent nine years in a prison camp in the Gulag contemplating the meaning of Liberalism, freedom, democracy, and the forces arrayed against them. Over the past year, Sharansky has impressed upon such current luminaries as George W. Bush the necessity of democratization if peace is to be achieved in any conflict. George Bush understands this truth as self-evident. It has informed his pursuit of the war on terror and his formulation of American policy in regard to Israel and the Arab conflict with it.
There have been several noted successes to this approach. The US posture since World War One, to protect freedom at home, extend freedom abroad, and oppose foreign threats to freedom, have resulted in less major conflict and a lower threat of conflict since World War Two. Where this US has been implemented, conflict has ceased with the Liberalization of society. The prime examples of this are in Western Europe, Japan, Eastern Europe, and more recently in South and Central America, the Balkans, and in the US relationship with the former Soviet Union. Conflicts in these areas, or the tendency of these countries to engage in armed conflict, have largely disappeared in conjunction with democratization of society in these states.
Such philosophical truth, however, has not taken hold in much of the rest of the democratic world, where narrow self-interests continue to be allowed to affect foreign policy, while the true basis of the current struggle eludes world leaders. That basis is that Liberal Democracy must resist and defeat tyranny if peace is to take hold. Unless such action is taken, pre-emptively, terrorism will continue to ravage Israel, the United States, and other Western societies as the chief tool available to totalitarian regimes in their drive for power.
Yet by failing to realize this truth, many Liberal democracies face the threat of war by totalitarian states and fail abysmally to answer that threat in a way that protects freedom and Liberal values. We have recently seen examples of this in the attitudes of France, Germany and Russia toward Iraq.
The United Nations too has failed to oppose tyranny. This organization and others that operated under its umbrella have never succeeded in preventing conflict or curbing tyranny. No state has ever been pulled out of poverty due to UN economic programs, no illness or epidemic has ever been prevented due to UN health programs, and no temporary UN body has ever actually stopped operating. Peacekeeping forces, that wonderful invention that has won its inventor and the United Nations as a whole no less than 4 Nobel Peace prizes, always leave at the first sign of trouble – exactly when their presence is most necessary. This happened with the very first peacekeeping force, in the Sinai Peninsula, in 1967, and with others in Rwanda, the Baltic states, and so on.
In addition to passive incompetence, however, the UN in particular has also provided active aid to tyrannical regimes in their pursuit of conflict. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), charged with providing for the so-called Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, has been running schools in the “camps” which, for decades, have educated generations of students to hate. The targets are generally Israelis, Jews, and Americans, those who gave the world Liberal traditions. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) provided cover for armed attacks against Israel by Amal and Hizbullah irregulars for close to twenty years. They also provided cover, uniforms, and refuge, to the terrorists who abducted three Israeli soldiers in October 2000 on the Israeli side of the Lebanese border – a line they themselves were instrumental in demarcating scant months earlier.
And most recently, the second installment of the United Nations arms inspection teams in Iraq provided cover for Saddam Hussein to hide his weapons of mass destruction in such a way that the US and British Forces have still not been able to uncover most of the stash. This is a continuation of the cover-up UN inspectors implemented between 1991 and 1998. The second round was basically only necessary to hide the weapons programs that had been proceeding apace for the previous four years when there were no inspections.
Since the early 1970s, the United Nations has been co-opted by tyrannical regimes to do their bidding. Most UN actions are done either at their behest, such as the Zionism Equals Racism scam in 1975, forcing the US to quit Iraq in 1991, the Durban Conference on Racism in 2001, and the attempts to block the US from attacking Iraq earlier this year, or serve to divert world attention from even greater horrors, such as the massacre of 800,000 Rwandan tribesmen or the massacre of 8000 Muslims in Srebrenica – the worst post-Holocaust massacre in European history.
Most European countries, however, as the battleground of the Cold War, remain tied to the United Nations as a guarantor of peace. For forty years, the guarantee that the Cold War would not explode into military conflict was held by the UN, where the Soviets and Americans held equal influence as the two superpowers. And while each side amassed hundreds of thousands of missiles across the continent, the conflict remained manageable.
But now, with the UN fully co-opted by tyrannical regimes and doing their bidding, such umbilical fealty is dangerous for European democracy. Since such regimes represent the last great threat to peace in the world, the UN can be seen as perhaps the single biggest guarantor of further war on the international scene. And as European Liberal democracies, led by France and Germany, continue to hoist the UN as the final international line of conflict resolution, they tacitly support tyranny and prove traitorous to their own ideals.
Just as the League of Nations was used as a cover for German re-armament before it crumbled in the worst war in human history, the UN is being used by every tyrant in the world as a cover for all sorts of devious schemes and plots against democracy. And as the war against terrorism, which is in essence a war against tyranny, unfolds, a new set of international relations, where democracy and a chance for peace take precedence over tyranny and continued horror, should unfold with it.
Instead, as all this is unfolding, and as commentators spout on about the possibilities of a new Middle East in the wake of Saddam’s fall, the United Nations and Europe try to force Israel to swallow the creation of a Palestinian state, one that will be led by a tyrannical dictatorship more interested in the pursuit of power than in actual peace, and one whose birth will be through the blood of terrorism rather than the light of freedom.
If President Bush is really prepared to implement the Bush Doctrine – “Either you’re with us, or you’re against us” – fully, then the UN must finally be counted among those who operate against the interests of Liberal democratic traditions, and in support of tyranny, and those European states who still believe the UN to be the final frontier of international peacekeeping must be relegated to the role of impotent spectators. The UN, France, Germany and Russia were sidelined into irrelevance while the US dethroned Saddam. The same should be done as Yasser Arafat and other terrorist leaders are eliminated as well.
Copyright 2003. All rights reserved. Yehuda Poch is a journalist living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission of the author only.
