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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 517
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WCL 517 July 2006
Sheepdogs or wolves
The current pressure on Iran by the Security Council has been directed by the United States in order to prevent the Iranian regime from developing its nuclear industry. That is declared necessary by a vehemently anti-American president in order to provide an alternative to the use of the vast Iranian oil reserves, which he intends to sell. That should provide money for imports of other sorts, which is already raising living standards and helping to satisfy the wants of a very rapidly growing population. Such questions as climate change are ignored by both protagonists.
The Security Council is not focusing on the needs of our time. The Council is supposedly the guardian of the flock of sovereign states that need international peace and security to be maintained and even extended. In fact the states whose emissaries sit as permanent members of the Council are not the shepherds or sheepdogs of the flock: they are the wolves who menace it. They are the vendors of weapons that have made and make the world a continually dangerous and even a suicidal place. Wolves, not sheepdogs, who, on withdrawing from colonialism or supporting anti-colonialism, have turned Africa into a place of desolation.
The United Nations, still insisting on the need for aid to the poorer countries of the world, is unable to prevent the steady worsening of conditions in many of them. The public, gulled by the protestations of concern, is implored to better the lot of the famine-stricken, or refugees, while their governments are still subsiding the sale of weapons and paying for Arms Fairs. Crocodile tears for victims, export guarantees to exporters of lethal weapons. The United Nations has never had the power, or, unhappily, the vision, to tackle this crucial defect in our political system.
This double standard is not new. The states that battled for 40 years to win a Cold War that had no winners, are now producing and selling weapons on similar scale, without the old excuse of threats from menacing neighbours. Instead they are fighting a war "on terror", which could hardly exist if they had not previously stocked all parts of the world with the guns, bombs and other like products that make it perilous. The habit of walking a tight-rope between peace and war has gone on so long that governments are reluctant to consider any other process. The United Nations is merely a theatre for playing out some of their games.
The Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, signed when people throughout the world saw the imminent danger of nuclear war through inadvertence, is increasingly forgotten and ignored by the governments with military power. Their signed commitments to take steps towards complete and general disarmament are disregarded. Treaties that are supposedly sacrosanct are quietly tucked away and not discussed. War is a habit that is too hard to break. United Nations action is too little and too late.
All this leaves world citizens in limbo. Their traditions and the public propaganda aimed at them by governments proclaim the obligation to continue obedience and loyalty to governments that are not only failing to offer a better path to the future, but are also ignoring the threats that will probably destroy the world as it is today. World citizenship has become all the time a more urgent need, but when the next generation does finally adopt that creed, it will probably come too late.
John Roberts
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