The Prime Directive defined
OVM,
Ok I understand where you are coming from but you forget some other important things;
The Articles of Confederation a.k.a. the Federation Consitution which govern the prime directive (which prime directive is actually a star fleet thing, separate from the Federation of Planets body politic) is also important document that can’t be left out when you look at the prime directive in the context of specie rights. But also the star trek Articles of Federation (which were unwritten, sort of, until the second or third carnation of star trek) was directly taken the charter of the UN. But the prime directive is all a take off on another author (Roddenberry admitted to this) Robert Heinlein (I think that is how you spell his name) and in his book Space Cadet where the basis for the prime directive was written and better illustrated. In fact if you read any of Heinlein’s early books there is a theme running through them and a few of them are what we need to think about today with the present situation here in the states.
But I digress,
The fact that there was a clear correlation between the Federation of Planets and the UN as purposely written into the star trek genre, you mustn’t forget that there was an intent to have these two interchangeable during the times we faced in the 60’s with Roddenberry’s belief in a one universal governing body (his words again) is the better solution for universe kind.
With that said, if we take a look at the Federation politics and compare that to say the UN Security Council, we see this clear correlation in the form of a body that has its own security force, its own military force (star fleet) and it body politic. The difference lies in the attempt to remedy conflicts; the Federation of Planets has had success where the UN has had no successes in the say the last 55 years.
So this leads us to trying to apply the prime directive to the issue of Iraq. We really can’t say that it is an unwarranted invasion or the prime directive was violated for a couple reasons but I will stick with one. The UN has been trying to control the situation in Iraq for a number of years, stretching back to the Iran-Iraq conflict, it failed. With the UN’s attempts to account for different weapons and the Iraqi leadership ignoring them, we see resolution after resolution being passed (660, 661, 678, 686, 687, 688, 707, 715, 986 and 1284 – oh and 1382) and ignored and finally we have resolution 1441 which was passed unanimously (by that I mean it was passed by both the permanent members, The French Republic, The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, The United States of America, People's Republic of China, The Russian Federation and the elected members; Bulgaria, Cameroon, Colombia, Guinea, Ireland, Mauritius, Mexico, Norway, Singapore, Syria). Resolution 1441 by no means was to be taken lightly and it literally gave us the green light to go ahead with an invasion of Iraq to enforce the previous 11 resolutions. Later on we hear from Anan that this was against the UN charter (BS, it has some thing to do with Chapter VII of the UN Charter) and we find out that he has allowed the Oil for Food scandal to proliferate. The puzzling thing is France and Russia took part in the scandal but also voted for the resolution that was drafted by the US and UK with the intention of invading Iraq.
The funny thing is genocide is not mentioned in star trek because we didn’t experience Cambodia or Bosnia or Iraq when the original series was written except one episode (mirror universe which I really liked and some of the plot was to prevent genocide which was against the mirror star fleet’s orders, funny isn’t it and to the point). In fact your statement “Cultures have to take care of themselves.†is kind of right on the money, we mustn’t interfere with other cultures, even if they are eradicating their own population.
Oh Terry, to me it is a Treky (or Trekie) for a number of reasons but thanks for the input.
