Bob Dole Quotes
We'll wait forever before the United Nations does anything.
Robert J. Dole, U.S. Senate Minority and Majority Leader (Republican, KS), Republican Presidential Nominee, Interview, NBC Today, February 6, 1994
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor. International organizations have been notoriously inept at protecting countries from aggression or minorities from persecution and ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Armenian genocide by the Turks was the exemplar at the time, but the UN peacekeepers refused to fight to prevent the Serbs from murdering 7,000 Bosnian Muslims. When they were protecting the Israeli-Palestinian borders, they did nothing to stop Arab Armies from attacking Israel right through the UN Troops. They did nothing to help prevent the Ruanda genocide. UN “troops” are rarely willing to risk their lives for the victimized people or the International Organization itself.
He was responding to the United Nations Security Counsil resolution calling on Israel to stop the building of settlemetns in the "occupied" territories. Normally such resolutions such as these were vetoed bu the United States, but this time it was not and Secretary of State John Kerry made a major speech urging the Israels not to keep building settlements which in his view inflamed the Palestinians and made the prospects for a peace less likely. The Israelis argued that the particualar areas--Jerusalem, Judea and Summaria were consecrated by God for the Jewish people who have inhabited the area for over 3000 years, and while they do not insist on sovreignty over the Judea and Summaria, from which Jews had been ethnically cleased, they do demand that the Jewish People who want to should be allowed to fulfill God's mandate and settle in their traditional territories. The traditional view of the United States on the settlement issue is that what God had done thousands of years cannot be allowed to override the obligagtion of israel and teh Palestinians to negotate the status of the territories that became an obligation when the Oslo Accords were signed in the recent past. Trump was very sympathetic to the Israeli position and was one of the many Americans who ha little or no respect for the United Nations.
Zacharia read the quotation which the audience was sure was another of the many Republican attacks on Barack Obama’s foreign policy and his decision making. The Republicans came up with the same type rhetoric that they did in earlier years with Democratic Presidents starting with Harry Truman. There have always been some politicians and pundits who regard any President (or other leader) who takes time to gather facts, hear alternative views, consider and reflect upon them, and then reach a decision as week and indecisive—an intellectual. To them, a real man—a real leader—listens looks at an issue before him and shows decisiveness by not vacillating and making his decision relatively quickly. To them if it took that much time and thought to reach a decision the President is not confident that his is the right decision and that shows weakness. Of course, every senior leader knows that if the decision reaches him, there is no clear good solution. If there were, it would have been decided at a lower level. Ideologues however don’t like to acknowledge complexity.
He used the “united nations” as a general description as the UN had not been created or named yet, However, as this quotation demonstrates, the President was already thinking about a UN idea, but as a realist, he explained that the great powers had to come to some agreement of interests. Actually China and France, at the time, would go along with whatever the United States and Britain wanted to do and had a great common interest, and there was already a strong association of interests between Britain and America. Russia was to be the problem and a complete common interest was never to be, but there was enough to get the United Nations started.
Robert Joseph Dole is an American politician and attorney who represented Kansas in the U.S. Senate from 1969 to 1996. He was the Republican Leader of the United States Senate during the final 11 years of his tenure, including three nonconsecutive years as Senate Majority Leader. Prior to his 27 years in the Senate, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1961 to 1969. Dole was also the Republican presidential nominee in the 1996 election and the vice presidential nominee in the 1976 election.
