Most of them have agreed (even in their constitutions) not to send troops abroad, except for UN peacekeeping missions. So if the UN mandate ends, it's against their LAW to send down their soldiers.
My deep and sincere apologies, Hal. In the light of this information, I gladly retract my previous statement about U.N. Peacekeeping and wish all perceived hostility away to the cornfield. If it’s actually illegal for European countries to deploy troops, (a step in the right direction, actually, considering the bloody history of the continent) then my remarks were quite clearly wrong. I’m more than willing to listen to reason, and as per the Scientific Method I will modify my hypotheses when new evidence is introduced. We can always discuss this stuff like sensible adults, Hal. I’m more than willing to listen, unlike certain NamEless sUbaTomic paRticles One kNows,eh?
I further apologize if my style of discourse, which relies heavily upon absurdist exaggeration to emphasize points, has been misperceived as hostility and belligerence. I shall lay off the Dennis Miller and P.J. O’Rourke for a little while until their influence fades.
However, I must provide a rebuttal to the instances of U.S. refusal to sign the three treaties you mention.
A: The Kyoto Global Warming treaty was seriously flawed. It contained a clause by which industrialized nations would agree to reduce the amount of "Carbon Units" (I do not recall the precise term, but it's a measure of how much CO2 and other "Greenhouse Gasses" are put out during a set time period) they produced per year, which is all well and good, but these Carbon Units could then be sold to other countries in lesser developed areas, allowing them to
increase the amount of pollution they produced. Total Greenhouse Gas levels would actually
not have been reduced under this scheme. At best, nothing would change, and considering that the nations buying allotments of Carbon production generally do not begin to approach the level of pollution-prevention technology of the selling nations, the environmental situation could even have been made
worse. Further, the reduction in industrial activity would have a detrimental effect upon the economies of the U.S. and other G8 nations, and the resulting recession/depression could drag the rest of the world down with it. On top of all this was the fact that many of the worst-polluting nations, notably China, demanded clauses that they remain
exempt from the treaty even if it did pass. Conclusion: not much to gain and an awful lot to lose, so it went unsigned. The U.S. was not alone in refusing to sign, as the last I heard (Pre-9/11/01, it kinda dropped from the headlines after that) the
only country willing to sign on was Romania, and I suspect that they were mainly interested in the opportunity to buy up carbon units. The U.S. was too frequently presented as if it were the lone holdout, and nothing could be further from the truth. From a certain view, in fact, we could be seen as actually
joining consensus world opinion on this one, not being dangerously isolationist.
B: Land Mines are nasty pieces of work, I freely admit, but a universal ban will cause as many problems as it solves. Land mines do have legitimate military uses, a perfect example being their deployment along the North Korea/South Korea border. If the border was not protected by minefields, does anyone honestly believe that North Korea would waste any time swooping down on South Korea like the Plague of Locusts upon Egypt? If the mines were gone, South Korea would require a vastly increased number of troops to keep the peace (I shall not open the U.N. Peacekeeping debate again just now), at a certain great cost in money and a potentially greater cost in human life. Land mines don’t panic and open fire across the border when spooked by enemy activity.
No, the problem isn't land mines, it is their indiscriminate use by warring tribal factions in places like the Balkan states and Afghanistan, where they were scattered across farm fields and schoolyards with
the specific goal of maiming and killing as many noncombatant members of the ethnic group to be cleansed as possible. These are the places where all those photos of hollow-eyed children with missing limbs originate, and not where mines are used to protect legitimate military objectives. In this respect, a ban on Land Mines is very much the geopolitical equivalent of restrictive Gun Control Laws as drafted in the U.S. A criminal commits a armed robbery, and rather than take steps to keep the criminal in prison where he can no longer hurt the general public, the goal is to blame and punish the manufacturer of the gun and deny guns to those who are already using them safely and responsibly. As with the American Gun Control movement, none of this treaty's adherents will acknowledge that the people committing the atrocities it is ostensibly meant to stop are invariably going to ignore this new law as well. The Ethnic Cleansers in the Balkans are already violating innumerable laws of god and man against murder, rape, and theft, yet some new treaty is supposed to make them abandon dreams of genocide and take up needlepoint instead? Once again, signing the treaty would not produce any gain in lives saved from rogue states and would very probably endanger the lives of many more American soldiers. IIRC, I read an article on the woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize some years ago for proposing this treaty (her name sadly escapes me), and when confronted with the above assessment, she made some sneeringly dismissive comment to the effect that she considered the lives of American soldiers to be beneath her concern, and I got the distinct impression that she acted as if endangering U.S. troops was a laudable goal in itself.
C: I confess to having heard little and read even less about the Rights of Children resolution, so I am not in possession of all the details. Is it designed to punish states like Thailand, which actively provide support to (and profit from) the booming underground business of selling children from poor rural families into sexual slavery? Is it designed to punish the Palestinian Authority, which considers Jewish children to be targets of choice in its war against Israel, and offers financial incentives to Palestinian families who wish to send their own children into the fight as living torpedoes? Or is it, as Shark suggests, intended to set up a welfare bureaucracy which siphons money from American taxpayers the entire time it berates them for spanking their kids or smoking in their presence? I won't go so far as to say that I agree with the tinfoil-hat contingent, who believe that Black Helicopters of the U.N. are poised to snatch up American children to be raised in re-education camps where they would be indoctrinated to turn in their parents as enemies of the New World Order. I do, however, think that this and the other treaties mentioned are more intended so that politicians can congratulate themselves on their own terrific Goodness because they took the maverick position of opposing Bad Things like Global Warming and Accidental Land Mine Deaths and Child Abuse, and taking the radical step of signing a piece of paper which agrees that such things are Bad without really doing anything concrete to keep the worst offenders from carrying on as usual.
Q
