Invite Bill Clinton to head the United Nations

A unipolar world is dangerous. Since there isn't another country strong enough to provide a balance, maybe this might help.
Invite Bill Clinton to head the United Nations

A survey published today has found nearly two-thirds of the world doesn't like US president George W Bush.

The BBC just released the results of a survey they commissioned in eleven countries to find out what they thought of America, its leaders and its policies.

International pollsters quizzed 11,000 people in Australia, Canada, Brazil, France, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Russia, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States for their opinions.

They found that 60% of non-Americans had an unfavourable attitude towards Bush. Even if you add the findings in the US, he is still disliked by 57%.

Worse, the US is now seen as being more dangerous to world peace and stability than countries considered as 'rogue states' by Washington, which includes North Korea, Syria and Iran. Only Al-Qaeda is considered more dangerous than the United States.

Seventy per cent - a majority in every country asked except the US - said America didn’t do enough to avoid civilian casualties during conflict. That included 73 per cent of Britons, 74 per cent of French and 57 per cent of Israelis.

Seventy per cent of Americans said other nations did not appreciate how much the US does to avoid civilian casualties.

But attitudes toward America as a whole, however, were a lot more favorable, with 50 percent expressing fairly or very favorable views. What they don’t like is George W. Bush and his policies.

Will this worry the American establishment? No one’s going to admit it, of course; when you are the most powerful nation in the world it is possible to tell yourself that world opinion is fickle and issue based and can be managed.

But behind the scenes, very influential people in the American establishment are going to be getting worried. The problem that is going to engage them as much as the rest of the world is what anyone can do about it. American opinion, after all, still favours George W. Bush, and that matters more than what the hungry and the poor of the world think.

The UN was created to prevent situations like Iraq from happening. No one imagined that the US would one day ride roughshod all over it, reducing it in one fell swoop to a platform for rhetoric.

A solution would be to give the greatly diminished UN back its legitimacy and clout.

Many would question whether this is possible. But it may become possible if the US’s stakes in the UN were to rise.

How could this happen?

One wild and radical idea might be to invite ex-President Bill Clinton to become Secretary General of the UN. I say wild and radical because I just thought of it. And most of my ideas are considered wild and radical by others, so this is probably deserving of the same description.

Clinton, despite the millions of jokes made about his peccadilloes, was a very successful president and one of the most popular in American history. There is no question that he would have been re-elected if American laws didn’t limit the term of office to presidential office to two terms. He would have left George W. Bush far behind.

Internationally also, Clinton was well liked and a proposal to appoint him head of the UN would be widely viewed with favour. Many governments cannot voice their discomfort with George W as their relations with the US are so important to their survival.

While Clinton is a fighter he is politically very savvy. He wouldn’t allow the UN to come into direct conflict with the US, but he wouldn’t let the UN get cowed down as easily as it did.

In a uni-polar world, where you can’t find a force to act as a check to American dominance, maybe this can bring in some balance.

Mayor of New York? This is far more important.

Any takers? Please post your opinion and share this with your friends.
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