It is already too late.

respectfully
BJ

Are you somehow suggesting that someone should take down George Bush before its too late ?

NZ was right to stay out of it. NZ IS right to stay out of it. NZ has a right to stay out of it. The folks on the right should take the hint.

respectfully
BJ

The implementation we currently have is the UN. My observations are:

1. The current form of the UN is necessarily limited due to the major Security Council nations continuing to protect and wield their own National sovereignty within the UN’s structure.

2. The American right wing has in particular been especially effective at undermining the UN; the current GWB regime appears determined to reduce the UN to irrelevancy.

3. In the medium-term the UN will recover when it realises the essential need for reform and to devise wholly new means for the peoples of the world to participate in it’s deliberations.

Just because China, Russia and France opposed the war, for deeply cynical reasons of their own, doesn’t mean that we have surrendered our sovereignty to them. The UN, for all it’s many, many flaws, is the best we have. Certainly a damn sight better than some superpower waving it’s big stick around. If the UN had OKed the invasion, who’s to say that under the circumstances that Labour would have sent our troops in? The situation would have been a lot different, and I imagine that a pretty thorough cost-benefit analysis would have been done on this, especially when the NZ Army at the time was still getting over operations in East Timor. So, I fail to see why waiting for a UN approval equates to surrendering our sovereignty to Chirac and Putin.

As for Rwanda, yes, that was a massive cock-up, and continues to be one now that the war has spilled over into Zaire. The right thing to do would have been for the powerful nations of the world to force this issue through the UN, get a resolution and send in the troops. But there’s no oil there, and they’re only black people so I guess the great and powerful didn’t give a rat’s arse.

Bosnia was always done under a UN flag; my mates went there with UNPROFOR, the UN Protection Force. The Russians probably spat the dummy, but they didn’t veto it.

Iraq should have been a UN operation from the start. But it wasn’t, and this is part of the reason it’s such a godforsaken mess. The UN is by no means perfect, but it is better than what the Yanks have done. And I am very glad that we are not a part of it, not yet anyway.

I’m not sure how this is a justifiable position. What this amount to is putting our foreign policy in the hands of France, Russia and China - they are the ones that stopped the UN supporting the invasion. Had they voted the other way then NZ troops would have taken part.

National’s position is far more justifiable - they are saying they agreed with the US and would have committed troops. Labour, on the other hand, is saying we didn’t agree with the war but if Chirac was for it we would lined in behind.

And along with that would be an acceptance that not intervening in Rwanda was the right thing to do - because the UN did not intervene. And it was wrong to intervene in Bosnia - because the UN (i.e. Russia) did not support it.

Thanks for that pointer. I have (apparently) been watching too much of the popular press, which always talks about the “surplus” but never about exactly what it is.

Since I don’t believe in governments being in debt (I am NOT a good Keynesian), I don’t want to “cut” taxes if there’s no money. Heck, if you have a surplus but I haven’t paid the mortgage (the existing debt), you really don’t have a surplus anyway.

The effective marginal tax that is imposed is still a problem, but I had been taking in good faith that the numbers reporters are reporting reflect reality.

If there’s no surplus, and I see there’s not, the issue becomes making the reporting more accurate and making the effective tax burden a bit smoother.

respectfully
BJ

David. National would have had Kiwis with the Aussies and fighting. Whether they came back dead or alive is irrelevant to the fact that the damned war is illegal, but reconstruction is not. There are enough dead civilians in Iraq… that none of them are dead at our hands is a good thing.

Peter - You can do better, and usually you do.

respectfully
BJ