North Korea – what the hell
What the hell have we been doing while North Korea turned itself from a comedy Stalinist dictatorship with a mad leader in charge of a ridiculously large military which occasionally exchanged small-arms fire over a disputed sea border into a comedy Stalinist dictatorship with a mad leader in charge of a ridiculously large military which torpedoes non-hostile ships across a disputed sea border, and has half-a-dozen-plus nuclear warheads and medium-range missiles to put everyone off doing anything about it? Seriously, what the hell. What. The. Actual. Hell.
We let a state run by an absolute nutter (and his dead father) aquire nuclear weapons in basically the last decade. And what did we do? Slap on a few sanctions which will not affect the ruling élite one jot. Nothing to stop it getting to the point where we essentially cannot take any action beyond token sanctions for fear of nuclear retaliation – the “they won’t actually use them” argument is unconvincing when it comes to Kim Jong-il.
Why? In a word, China. In a few more, China and its UN Security Council veto. But also a fairly serious lack of will to take any other route – a UN General Assembly resolution, over which China has no veto; or unilateral military action without a UN resolution, something neither the Bush Administration or the Blair Government were particularly averse to. OK, so there are some issues with taking unilateral military action (even just airstrikes against reactors) against a country with 1.21 million people in the armed forces, but the threat would have been an awful lot more persuasive if North Korea knew they couldn’t rely on their Chinese buddies to stop it.
The UN is fundamentally broken. It gives ridiculous influence to one outright undemocratic country and one Chinesely-undemocratic country. It is incapable of anything more than sending peacekeepers – if you’re lucky. International law prohibiting unilateral military action would make sense (not that it would stop Israel) if the UN were capable of authorising liberal intervention. But it isn’t, and so protecting people from dictators has to be done illegally, with the tacit understanding that no-one cares as long as it works; or not at all. If the UN is to be good for anything, it needs to be a club of democratic nations, dedicated to spreading democracy, via the barrel of a gun if neccessary.
If the UN had been capable of taking action against Saddam, which was needed and justified, we would have been able to do it in such a way that Iraq did not collapse into anarchy the moment his statue got dusted with the Stars and Stripes. It would have worked. If Bush and Blair are morally guilty, it is for failing to plan and implement an ordered replacement of Saddam, and for failing to protect civilians. An undemocratic state is an illegitimate state is no state, so they had every right to invade in the interests of the people of Iraq. But much of the blame also has to lie with the framework of the UN.
Liberal democracy is an ideal we should not be afraid to spread with the assault rifle and the targeted bomb, the paratrooper and the jet fighter. But we are, and that is why we have to be afraid of Stalinist personality cults spread by the hand grenade and the nuclear missile, the torpedo and the million-strong Red horde.