Iraq: Wanted - mundialist police.
John Roberts - October 2003
Iraq is a country in need of security and it is not likely that the present rulers - the US and British armies can easily offer it. Nor should they: if the Iraqis need assistance to recover their security and to install a democratic regime it is unlikely that any foreign soldiers will provide it. No national forces are going to be trusted by a people who have good reason to distrust both their own rulers and neighbours or colonial governments. Something different is called for, urgently. The United Nations is the only body in the world which can provide at least the potential for an unbiased support and which has the legal right to intervene when international peace and security is at risk. But to date the UN has usually lacked the power to take effective action and has instead been compelled to request such power to be exerted by member-states, with all the consequent political and administrative difficulties that inevitably are involved. A new initiative is necessary.
First principle to be established is that security once gained has to be maintained not by soldiers, but by police. There is a fundamental objection to the use of soldiers and armies by the United Nations that cannot be ignored or overcome. Soldiers in armies are what states use to enforce their will on governments and peoples of other countries. They are not designed to produce peace, except by conquest; nor are they trained as police, unless as an optional extra and afterthought, nor can they generally be satisfactory substitutes for them. In addition, of course, being raised and paid as the agents of national policies they are always liable to be unsatisfactory in working for the one world body that needs to be impartial and independent of national politics.
Until now the UN since 1945 and particularly since the setting-up of the UN Emergency Force in the Sinai in 1957 has been compelled to rely upon troops seconded temporally from the armies of member-states. This has to change. The UN needs to enlist its own paid mundialist police units that will be able to undertake security duties in any part of the world where emergencies requiring their presence. These cannot be made available in the immediate future, but planning for them should start now.
There is a corollary. Such police cannot be employed as a fighting force. If, as for example in Afghanistan, there is still a danger of armed insurrection or guerilla warfare by opposition groups, they will have to be tackled by other means. Therefore the mundialist police cannot be simply replacement for all intervention forces at present in position. They will continue to be the playthings of the Security Council governments and the United Nations political process. As long as sovereign nation-states are not disarmed there will remain the threat of international violence and ultimately war. All a mundialist police can do will be to reduce the occasions of tensions and chances of accidental war.
The units will need to be drawn from different groups. For example, it may be that a large proportion of UN police to be employed in Iraq will need to come from Moslem communities. On the other hand, it is essential that the units from their inception will not be drawn exclusively from any one country or group of countries. Rather the aim from the outset should be to produce an integrated force, inspired by ideals of human rights and impartiality and loyal to the UN. This will become increasingly practical as time passes and the experience of the force and its members widens.
The way to achieve this integration is probably through financial incentives. For example, the fully integrated units, consisting of recruits drawn entirely from different language groups, might have considerably higher pay than the units under training which still had to pass language and other tests to qualify. Variable size of integrated units - e.g. squads of ten, fifty or one hundred and station commands of a thousand - might assist in the early days of the force. But this should be a temporary phase: there is little doubt that a totally integrated force, with high morale and a strong sense of purpose, would be practical within a matter of a few years. It would undoubtedly assist the UN in many of its activities to have the backing of such a force with units available for service anywhere.
A UN police manual may be a first step. This would lay down the rules of engagement for the new units and a system for training and the requirements for recruits. Discipline, career routes, pay and conditions and a code of conduct would be included. Language of command would be a difficult problem. A single common language would be essential. English might well be chosen as an immediate practical possibility but it would hardly be politically acceptable as a permanent feature. The ideal might be an international language - Esperanto is the only one currently available - and this would be quite practical but temporarily at least various expedients of using some lingua franca in each unit, especially the smaller ones, might be possible.
The arming of the police would probably follow the current practice of blue-helmeted UN forces. They are generally restricted to side-arms and their rules of engagement prohibit the use of lethal weapons except in situations of immediate danger to life. Since the purpose of police is to uphold law and not to destroy an enemy, this restriction is a minimum requirement. It has the benefit that it minimises the risk of the police being seen as a threat, unlike soldiers generally who, however apparently peaceful and co-operative, always retain a potential for aggression that makes them objects of fear or apprehension. That should not be something that the UN is associated with.
