UN intervention

I welcome Kofi Annan's debate on UN intervention. It's high time that the international community stop looking to the U.S. for policing the world. Since the U.S. government will weigh its own interests before entering a conflict that has high political, economic and human costs, the best you can usually hope for is the U.S. "doing the right thing for the wrong reasons".

Even though it is 100 years since Americans hailed Rudyard Kipling's poem White man's burden as a moral justification for imperialism, public awareness of colonialism's hypocrisy eventually caused our government to resort to covert aid. Our government committed unspeakable crimes in the interests of big business and cold war strategy, that were hidden from the public for many years. Is it any wonder that developing countries continue to regard our good intentions with suspicion?

Nevertheless, up to now only the U.S. and some other western powers have the cohesiveness to impose international justice when persuasion fails. NATO stopped the genocide in Bosnia due to failure of the UN "peacekeepers". If NATO's goals are imperialistic, why has it yet to accept all of the countries which have applied to join? Hegemonic organizations do not have "waiting lists", NATO got involved in Yugoslavia simply because the previous forces had not prevented the murder of 300,000 Bosnian civilians.

Only with an effective procedure for UN intervention can we shed the stigma at international justice as being "the white man's burden", and perhaps, more often than not, the right thing will be done for the right reasons.

ANTONIO CHAVES

Hyattsville, Maryland

USA