Benedict, Saddam And The Nargis Neo-Cons

WHEN Pope Benedict explicitly rejected the morality of a "pragmatic approach" to the world's crises and endorsed the objective necessity of intervention before the General Assembly of the United Nations on 18 April, most commentators afforded the observations close to no headline-making importance whatsoever. (It was mentioned here on two occasions). The reason was obvious. The Pope's speech - like his visit to the United States in general - disappointed all those who had foolishly expected him to make the chastisement of George W. Bush for the Iraq War his trip's overriding thematic and political purpose. They searched for rarefied vexation, finespun allusions and nuanced rebukes but the embarrassing anti-Bush narrative they craved never materialised. There was no Gang nach Canossa for the President.

On the contrary, Benedict himself was the man who knelt in the snow. His penitential recognition of the child sexual abuse tragedy that has devastated the institutional Church in the United States and - more importantly - the very lives of its many victims, properly became the papal visit's abiding leitmotif. The result was not some well-managed celebrity apology but a pastoral masterpiece of genuine leadership, accountability and truthfulness. The pontiff's UN allocution, then, was overtaken by events or spiked as insufficiently tinged with the left's favoured anti Georgian Bushido. The horror of Cyclone Nargis and the international scandal of Burma's fatal isolationism, however, should remind those who value Benedict's wisdom - which seems to be quite a lot of people, across the spectrum - of his prophetic words.

The United Nations embodies the aspiration for a "greater degree of international ordering" (John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 43), inspired and governed by the principle of subsidiarity, and therefore capable of responding to the demands of the human family through binding international rules and through structures capable of harmonizing the day-to-day unfolding of the lives of peoples. This is all the more necessary at a time when we experience the obvious paradox of a multilateral consensus that continues to be in crisis because it is still subordinated to the decisions of a few, whereas the world's problems call for interventions in the form of collective action by the international community.

Recognition of the unity of the human family, and attention to the innate dignity of every man and woman, today find renewed emphasis in the principle of the responsibility to protect. This has only recently been defined, but it was already present implicitly at the origins of the United Nations, and is now increasingly characteristic of its activity. Every State has the primary duty to protect its own population from grave and sustained violations of human rights, as well as from the consequences of humanitarian crises, whether natural or man-made. If States are unable to guarantee such protection, the international community must intervene with the juridical means provided in the United Nations Charter and in other international instruments. The action of the international community and its institutions, provided that it respects the principles undergirding the international order, should never be interpreted as an unwarranted imposition or a limitation of sovereignty. On the contrary, it is indifference or failure to intervene that do the real damage.

As the unofficial death toll from Cyclone Nargis approaches 150,000, Burma's National League for Democracy has warned the world that the number of fatalities will rise because of the junta's paranoid aid restrictions. NLD spokesmen have pleaded with the United Nations to send help "by any means." However, despite such frustration - and as if to prove the timeliness and the truth of Pope Benedict's message - "imposing aid by force was rejected by UN officials and Security Council members like China and Russia, which consider it a breach of sovereignty." Aid airdrops without permission US Defence Secretary Robert Gates says he "cannot imagine." He would have been lucky to be given a job as a DoD clerk in 1948. When asked if the Berlin Airlift was possible, Curtis LeMay imagined it: "We can haul anything."

Clearly, the UN has once again proved itself to be a morally bankrupt, gangster-run disgrace. Clearly also, with even Time magazine having embraced the "neo-con" idea of invasion, a muscular response is now being undermined because of a phoney prudence brought on by the UN multilateralists' turf-protecting opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Yet Saddam Hussein killed many more than 150,000 people; the UN itself claimed the pre-invasion sanctions policy killed 500,000 Iraqi children alone. This is not to attribute to Benedict XVI a view of Iraq he did not have. It is to point out that the case for UN-centric foreign policy "realism" is now kaput. There must be another way to manage Nargis-like crises whereby police states do not enjoy - and will not always be afforded - the same sovereign rights as democracies.