United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973
The amazing, fantastic, ground-breaking United Nations Security Council Resolution 1970 was followed almost immediately by the hideous, ambiguous, paloeolithic United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973. UNSCR 1970 was passed 15-0, a momentous event, made even momentouser by the referral of the Libyan leadership to the International Criminal Court, which the United States has been loathe to recognize for obvious reasons, the most obvious being the "Crime Against the Peace" of the Iraq invasion of 2003, a war crime by any estimation. Now we were getting traction. Then, in some distorted, hallucinating initiative from the Crusader past, the Security Council passed Resolution 1973 10-0, with 5 major abstentions: China, Russia, India, Brazil, and Germany. Germany! We're talking NATO here.
Instantly, all the painful progress achieved in 1970 was wiped out by a Curtis LeMay "bomb them back to the Stone Age" resolution that apparently gave carte blanche to all members of the UN to do whatever the hell they wanted in Libya and chalk it up to good works, probably with a tax exemption.
This is hard to believe, given the recent hideous past in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. In his book "Taliban. Islam, oil and the new great game in central Asia" Ahmed Rashid offered up this definition of a failed state:
"A failed state is not necessarily a dying state although it can be that too. A failed state is one in which the repeated failure of policies carried out by a bankrupt political elite is never considered sufficient reason to reconsider them."
Rashid was talking about Pakistan 10 years ago. He might as well be talking about NATO now.
