Yeah, Rumsfeld is trustworthy

Jeanne over at Body and Soul points to this article from the LA Times. Essentially what it is is that good ol' Rummy wants is an international peacekeeping force trained by the US and entirely separate from the UN.

She then adds this:

Some of the words sound nice, but I still doubt it. There's probably a need for a permanent, well-trained, truly international peacekeeping force. It's obviously needed not only where the U.S. is fumbling -- in Afghanistan and Iraq -- but also in places where we've turned a blind eye, like the Congo and, increasingly, Liberia.

The hesitant "probably" in the last paragraph stumbles over my not knowing exactly what such a peacekeeping force would do. Are we talking about keeping civilians from being slaughtered, as the UN did, at least somewhat successfully, in East Timor and Sierra Leone (with American help, although Republican opposition to peacekeeping is nothing new)? The UN is weak, underfunded, and far from perfect, but its presence has helped in many instances. Or are we talking about an entirely different order of peacekeeping: keeping the natives pacified so we can steal their resources?

Donald Rumsfeld's sketchy plan looks suspiciously like the latter -- a colonial police force with a lot of the bodies provided by our client states.

Not to get this wrong, I think Jeanne writes a good post here. But she hazes herself. She gives Rummy too much credit here as she sort of implies that this could possibly be anything other than a naked attempt to increase American imperialism.

First of all, this is a peace keeping force, which in itself would serve as a global police force to be effective. A global police force needs the same thing as a local police force, which is a monopoly of power, otherwise it cannot be effective. Now this would be trained by the US, so we can only assume that it would be controlled by the US. That alone should clue you in that this is about US world domination.

Second of all, if this were an attempt to actually help the impoverished, why go outside the UN? The UN isn't perfect, to be sure, but it's already an international organization designed to maintain peace. Improving on an organization that already exists is certainly much easier than making an entirely new one.

So this is nothing more than an attempt to build a colonial army to police our imperial holdings. I can't say I'm too surprised.