How about this?

BAGHDAD, June 27 (UPI) — Iraq plans to file suit in a U.S. court against the United Nations for alleged corruption in the oil-for-food program, Iraqi legal sources said Friday.

The United Nations established the program in 1995 to allow Iraq to sell oil to global markets in exchange for food and humanitarian supplies without generating revenue to rebuild the Iraqi military in the wake of the Persian Gulf War.

The program ended shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the Coalition Provisional Authority assumed responsibility for humanitarian functions. An investigation by the congressional investigative body the Government Accountability Office found loopholes in the program that allowed Saddam Hussein to receive various sources of revenue through the deal.

A source in the Iraqi Justice Ministry, speaking to Voices of Iraq on condition of anonymity, said a legal firm in the U.S. state of Texas would file the suit in New York state court.

Let’s hope we don’t end up paying the bill.

I guess sometimes, you just can’t spin that narrative (emphasis mine):

A new United Nations report called “State of the Future” concludes: “People around the world are becoming healthier, wealthier, better educated, more peaceful, more connected, and they are living longer.”

…World-wide illiteracy rates have fallen by half since 1970 and now stand at an all-time low of 18%. More people live in free countries than ever before. The average human being today will live 50% longer in 2025 than one born in 1955.

To what do we owe this improvement? Capitalism, according to the U.N. Free trade is rightly recognized as the engine of global prosperity in recent years. In 1981, 40% of the world’s population lived on less than $1 a day. Now that percentage is only 25%, adjusted for inflation. And at current rates of growth, “world poverty will be cut in half between 2000 and 2015″–which is arguably one of the greatest triumphs in human history. Trade and technology are closing the global “digital divide,” and the report notes hopefully that soon laptop computers will cost $100 and almost every schoolchild will be a mouse click away from the Internet (and, regrettably, those interminable computer games).

Thanks to Tim Blair, I saw this little gem of idiocy:

The slaughter in Darfur was triggered by global climate change and that more such conflicts may be on the horizon, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says

I suppose it’s a refreshing change from “It’s Bush’s fault!” but it’s still nuts. Slobbering at the mouth, drooling, fly-catching nuts.

From Bullwinkle Blog, this little newsbyte:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An asteroid may come uncomfortably close to Earth in 2036 and the United Nations should assume responsibility for a space mission to deflect it, a group of astronauts, engineers and scientists said on Saturday.

Astronomers are monitoring an asteroid named Apophis, which has a 1 in 45,000 chance of striking Earth on April 13, 2036.

Guess who’s going to pay for it.

He’s a Person of Color! He’s disenfranchised! He’s marginalized! He’s disempowered! He’s oppressed! He’s on welfare!

Don Suber has his say — though he’s not nearly as sensitive as I am. He never is, though.

Over at the Corner, K-Lo has been tirelessly pushing Santorum for UN Ambassador. Now, an LA Times blog has brought up the same idea.

In a political vacuum, that is, with no other issues to affect the decision, this would be a good idea. But with all due respect to La Diva Lopez, I suspect the opposition to Santorum would make the opposition to Bolton look like a sensitivity training session.

In other words, I don’t think there’s any point even suggesting Santorum for UN Ambassador. But I have an alternative suggestion for UN Ambassador that would be advantageous, somebody nobody else has suggested (at least as far as I’ve seen).

Ed Koch.

His strengths should be obvious:

• He has no use for dictators
• He has even less use for Muslim tyrants
• He is an energetic, tireless supporter of Israel
• He is a national security and national sovereignty hawk

Most importantly, he would be a good political choice. Koch is a Democrat. By nominating Koch, Bush would be “reaching across the aisle,” so to speak, and he would push the Democrats into a corner. Most wouldn’t like the appointment, but would they eat one of their own, particularly when it would once again reinforce their justly-deserved reputation as being weak on national security?

Ed Koch.

From Yahoo:

“I think the North Korean population has been losing average height and weight over the years and maybe this will be a little diet for Kim Jong Il,” John Bolton, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Friday as the resolution was under debate.

And why, exactly, isn’t John Bolton running for President in 08?

From ¡No Pasaran!, the latest on UN Peacekeepers:

They cannot set up checkpoints. They cannot search cars or homes or businesses. They cannot detain suspects. If they see a truck transporting missiles for example, they cannot stop it. And they cannot staff check points with the Lebanese Army because they do not know each others procedures.

I’m going to set up a Panty Fund for the UN Peacekeepers. We’ll collect lingerie and send them to the Peacekeeper forces.

I think Andrew said it best in “Unreasonable Israelis Demand U.N. Forces Actually Do Their Jobs”:

I can’t possibly imagine why these obstinate Hebrews would have a problem with a peacekeeping force that openly refuses to do anything more exerting than sitting around and playing with its collective wang. I mean, the sheer gall of it.

I really don’t get it. Is the UN trying their best to demonstrate that they’re a pro-terrorist organization, is that it? It looks like they’d at least want to appear to be on the side of civilization.

From Volokh, via Cam Edwards:

Advanced Topics in Human Rights Law. Exam, Spring 2010. Question 4: One day, a woman goes to a gun store in Florida. She provides picture identification to the store owner, who then, pursuant to the National Instant Check System, uses his telephone to contact law enforcement, and ensure that the woman has no criminal record. The woman then purchases an expensive double-barreled shotgun, manufactured in the United Kingdom. She plans to use the gun for all lawful purposes, but primarily for sporting clays. In accordance with Florida law, she did not need to obtain a government license to possess the gun.

Two years later, a man breaks into her home at night. The woman reasonably (and correctly) believes that the man intends to rape and torture her. She also, correctly, believes that there is absolutely no possibility that the man will kill her. She shoots the man and kills him.

Summarize the human rights violations [according to the UN]

Answer:

Apparently, the UN figured out how to solve that icky problem, you know, about UN “peacekeepers” being serial rapists.

(Wazirabad, India) A force of 125 female Indian police officers is preparing to deploy to Liberia as UN peacekeepers to assist in the nation’s recovery from years of civil war.. The women are aged 25 to 30 and attached to India’s Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF).

Don Surber does it again (emphasis mine):

The Sydney Morning Herald reported today that “Sukehiro Hasegawa, the top UN official in East Timor, has acknowledged for the first time that the UN system failed to bring anybody to justice for crimes that included sexual abuse of children and bestiality.” Ivory Coast. Congo. Bosnia. I could go on and on. We put panties on some feces-throwing twits and it is a war crime. The UN ignores bestiality by its troops and it is the savior of the world.

Excellent, sir, excellent!

If you needed another reason to love Bolton and his mustache, Regis, this is the best one imaginable:

More proof of the effectiveness of John Bolton, our ambassador to that perpetually dysfuntional organization known as the UN: Iran hates him.

Somebody tell me again why Bolton is not going to run for President …

Well, you can put it down now.

DURING THE RECENT month-long war between Hezbollah and Israel, U.N. “peacekeeping” forces made a startling contribution: They openly published daily real-time intelligence, of obvious usefulness to Hezbollah, on the location, equipment, and force structure of Israeli troops in Lebanon.

UNIFIL–the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a nearly 2,000-man blue-helmet contingent that has been present on the Lebanon-Israel border since 1978–is officially neutral. Yet, throughout the recent war, it posted on its website for all to see precise information about the movements of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers and the nature of their weaponry and materiel, even specifying the placement of IDF safety structures within hours of their construction. New information was sometimes only 30 minutes old when it was posted, and never more than 24 hours old.

Meanwhile, UNIFIL posted not a single item of specific intelligence regarding Hezbollah forces. Statements on the order of Hezbollah “fired rockets in large numbers from various locations” and Hezbollah’s rockets “were fired in significantly larger numbers from various locations” are as precise as its coverage of the other side ever got.

Think that’s disgusting? Well, it gets worse:

On October 7, 2000, three IDF soldiers were kidnapped by Hezbollah just yards from a UNIFIL shelter and dragged across the border into Lebanon, where they disappeared. The U.N. was thought to have videotaped the incident or its immediate aftermath. Rather than help Israel rescue its kidnapped soldiers by providing this evidence, however, the U.N. obstructed the Israeli investigation.

For months the Israeli government pleaded with the U.N. to turn over any videotape that might shed light on the location and condition of its missing men. And for nine months the U.N. stonewalled, insisting first that no such tape existed, then that just one tape existed, and eventually conceding that there were two more tapes. During those nine months, clips from the videotapes were shown on Syrian and Lebanese television.

Explaining their eventual about-face, U.N. officials said the decision had been made by the on-site commanders that it was not their responsibility to provide the material to Israel; indeed, that to do so would violate the peacekeeping mandate, which required “full impartiality and objectivity.” The U.N. report on the incident was adamant that its force had “to ensure that military and other sensitive information remains in their domain and is not passed to parties to a conflict.”

Hat tip to Jeff Goldstein for the link. I think he sums it up perfectly: “Astounding. Frightening. Despicable.”

How can one person be so right and so witty, so consistently?

That’s the issue: Pan-Islamism is the profound challenge to conventional ideas of citizenship and nationhood. Of course, if you say that at the average Ivy League college, you’ll get a big shrug: Modern multicultural man disdains to be bound by the nation state, too; he prides himself on being un citoyen du monde. The difference is that, for Western do-gooders, it’s mostly a pose: They may occasionally swing by some Third World basket-case and condescend to the natives, but for the most part the multiculti set have no wish to live anywhere but an advanced Western democracy. It’s a quintessential piece of leftie humbug. They may think globally, but they don’t act on it.

Read the whole thing.

No, given how many “Muslim charities” (and let’s not forget the UN) are fronts for terrorist money laundering:

Money sent to Pakistan for quake rehabilitation was used to fund the Heathrow bomb attack plot that was foiled by British authorities, says an investigation by a leading Pakistani daily.

Read the whole thing.

From a mailing list. No URL.

PRESS RELEASE

For more information:
Alex Cruz, Press Secretary
Office 305-270-1111, Cellular 202-225-8200
Pager 1-877-704-9087.
Lee Cohen, Subcommittee Staff Associate
Office: 202-225-3345
For Immediate Release: August 10, 2006

Washington, DC - U.S. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chair of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia released the following statement in response to the news that 16 nations are pressing the United Nations Human Rights Council to hold a special session, to take place tomorrow, alleging that Israel is committing human rights violations in the course of the current conflict in the Middle East.

Ros-Lehtinen said:

This call by a coalition of countries urging the U.N. Human Rights Council to hold a special session exploring human rights violations is completely outrageous because it is a biased call by an anti-Israel coalition to stage an anti-Israel forum at a more-than-willing U.N.

While Israel is acting in self-defense in this conflict, and goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, Hezbollah specifically targets Israeli civilians and further endangers Lebanese civilians by using them as human shields.

If the nations calling for the session were truly concerned about the future and the stability of the region, they would call for an investigation into the activities of the true perpetrator of violence and human rights abuses in this conflict, Hezbollah, and its supporters, Iran and Syria. Instead, the U.N. is more than happy to stage yet one more opportunity to engage its anti-Israel bias.

The nations calling for this emergency session have seen how the U.N. has failed to demand Hezbollah’s disarmament and dismantlement; and how the international community has failed to take action on Iran, and its record in the previous U.N. Commission on Human Rights. As a consequence, these countries know how the U.N. can be manipulated and are taking advantage of that pre-disposition to advance their anti-Israel agenda.

Victor Davis Hansen, The Vocabulary of Untruth. Some of the best parts:

“Civilians” in Lebanon have munitions in their basements and deliberately wish to draw fire; in Israel they are in bunkers to avoid it. Israel uses precision weapons to avoid hitting them; Hezbollah sends random missiles into Israel to ensure they are struck.

“Collateral damage” refers mostly to casualties among Hezbollah’s human shields; it can never be used to describe civilian deaths inside Israel , because everything there is by intent a target.

[ . . . ]

“Deplore” is usually evoked against Israel by those who themselves have slaughtered noncombatants or allowed them to perish — such as the Russians in Grozny , the Syrians in Hama , or the U.N. in Rwanda and Dafur.

“Disproportionate” means that the Hezbollah aggressors whose primitive rockets can’t kill very many Israeli civilians are losing, while the Israelis’ sophisticated response is deadly against the combatants themselves. See “excessive.”

Anytime you hear the adjective “excessive,” Hezbollah is losing. Anytime you don’t, it isn’t.

[ . . . ]

“Multinational,” as in “multinational force,” usually means “third-world mercenaries who sympathize with Hezbollah.” See “peacekeepers.”

“Peacekeepers” keep no peace, but always side with the less Western of the belligerents.

[ . . . ]

What explains this distortion of language? A lot.

First there is the need for Middle Eastern oil. Take that away, and the war would receive the same scant attention as bloodletting in central Africa.

Then there is the fear of Islamic terrorism. If the Middle East were Buddhist, the world would care about Lebanon as little as it does about occupied Tibet.

And don’t forget the old anti-Semitism. If Russia or France were shelled by neighbors, Putin and Chirac would be threatening nuclear retaliation.

Israel is the symbol of the hated West. Were it a client of China, no one would dare say a word.

Hat tip Ace.

I couldn’t have said it better myself:

But it’s not Bolton’s “interpersonal skills” that make him the man for the job. It’s his commitment to putting US interests first and always. And his willingness to ditch UN bureaucratese for blunt talk…Bolton’s lifelong refusal to be a sycophant, apologist, and whitewasher makes him the necessary antidote to the global king of moral equivalence, Kofi Annan. With Iran on the nuclear brink, jihadists ascending, Israel under siege, and the U.N. oil-for-food debacle still unfolding, Bolton is exactly the right man in the right place at the right time to continue representing America’s national interests at Turtle Bay.

See it (video) here. What I want to know is why isn’t Bolton (and his mustache, Regis) running for President?

It couldn’t have been said any better:

“Not once, but twice in the past century, American citizens have risen to the challenge and quite literally saved the world,” Gottlieb recalled. “From our heartland have come heroes like Alvin York, Audie Murphy, Joe Foss and others who grew up in a land of freedom and knew what it took to defend that birthright.

“Yet, as we celebrate our 230th anniversary, global anti- gunners, under the guise of reviewing a U.N. program of action on small arms and light weapons, want to create a binding international agreement that could supersede our laws and constitution,” Gottlieb said. “We have done much for the U.N. and in return, the organization has hosted despots, tyrants and dictators whose record of human rights abuses, aggression and genocide speaks for itself. And now comes an attack on our constitution, on our national holiday.

“America has always answered the call to help our international friends and neighbors,” Gottlieb observed, “but when our very way of life is attacked, maybe it is time to find more worthy endeavors for our material and financial support.”

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin

This is why I love the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

The U.N.’s problems: Stop blaming the U.S.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

The No. 2 man at the United Nations whacks the United States for being critical where criticism is due and Big Media responds with, “Please, sir, may we have another?”

It’s argued that the U.N.’s critics, i.e., the rambunctious right, are determined to disgrace Turtle Bay when, in fact, the U.N. has managed that all on its own.

Last week, Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown went on a tear against the U.S., followed by similar claptrap by Kofi Annan in the June 12 Financial Times.

Opines the Los Angeles Times: “U.S. administrations (especially the current one) are reluctant to defend the U.N. even as they rely on it to police the world and legitimize their foreign policy moves.”

Oh, please. If the U.N. had done its job in Iraq, instead of lending its so-called authenticity to one of the biggest frauds in history — the oil-for-food mess — war might have been avoided.

Instead, the U.N. through incompetence — if not complicity — aided and abetted a lunatic who bolstered his wealth and position.

At The Washington Post, Sebastian Mallaby insists that it is U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, not Mr. Brown, who should be sent to the woodshed. Why? Because Mr. Bolton hasn’t rolled over on every half-baked U.N. appeal to transfer wealth to nations ruled by despots and steeped in corruption.

Brown’s brazen barrage, now backed up by Kofi Annan, should wake up even the most catatonic apologist.

Does this surprise anybody? Taliban surging in Afghan shift from U.S. to NATO:

KABUL, Afghanistan A large springtime offensive by Taliban fighters has turned into the strongest show of force by the insurgents since American forces chased the Taliban from power in late 2001, and Afghan and foreign officials and local villagers blamed a lack of United States-led coalition forces on the ground for the resurgence.

Seriously, can’t these weenies do anything for themselves? We start handing Afghanistan over to NATO because that’s what the weenies want, then the Taliban start swarming because NATO is a bunch of wussies, and it’s our fault?

John Bolton’s mustache, Regis, has bitchslapped the idiots at the UN (sorry, but this is too good not to reproduce in its entirety, and yes, emphases are mine):

Apologise or we’ll cut your funding, US envoy tells UN
From James Bone in New York and Richard Beeston

AMERICA’S bitter dispute with the United Nations escalated last night when John Bolton, the US envoy to the UN, threatened to withhold funding to the organisation unless it apologised for the remarks of a senior British official.

Speaking at the Centre for Policy Studies in London, Mr Bolton assailed Mark Malloch Brown, the British Deputy UN Secretary-General, for the disparaging remarks he made about the American public this week. “Mark Malloch Brown has a sentence in his speech where he says the role of the UN is a mystery in Middle America,” he said.

“Maybe it is fashionable in some circles to look down on Middle America, to say they don’t get the complexities of the world and they don’t have the benefit of continental education and they are deficient in so many ways,” Mr Bolton added. “It is illegitimate for an international civil servant to criticise what he thinks are the inadequacies of citizens of a member government.”

The tough-talking US envoy reiterated that the dispute could harm important reforms to the international body. He also hinted that the US Congress, which controls American government spending, might reconsider US funding to the UN, which accounts for 22 per cent of the organisation’s annual budget. “Congress has the power of the purse and they feel quite strongly on a bipartisan basis that America has a right to know how their tax dollars are being spent, even people from Middle America,” he said, with a note of sarcasm. “I don’t think we have seen the end of it.” Before Mr Bolton arrived in London, Kofi Annan, the UN chief, tried to play down the controversy. “I think the message that was intended is that the US needs the UN, and the UN needs the US, and we need to support each other,” Mr Annan said. “I think the speech by my deputy should be read in the right spirit and let’s put it behind us and move on.”

Pardon me for butting in here, but Kofi, I think you need to STFU. Did you catch that 22% of your annual budget part up there, as in 22% of your budget comes from American taxpayers, that part?

The public spat between Mr Malloch Brown and Mr Bolton represents more than just a clash of outsized personalities. It reflects the long-running battle of ideas over the role of international institutions. Mr Bolton, a Republican right-winger, has been a leading conservative critic of the UN since serving as the Assistant Secretary of State for International Organisations in the Administration of the first President Bush.

A Republican right-winger! Oh! My! God! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Can you tell this article was written by a diaper-wearing, bed-wetting, Euroweenie?

Mr Malloch Brown, a former journalist who founded The Economist Development Report and went on to work at a political consultancy before joining the UN system, is a member of a powerful network of internationalists. Their clash threatens to undermine congressional support for the world body as it confronts a looming budget crisis, caused by Washington’s insistence that management reforms be put in place.

Funny how the article glosses over the fact Brown doesn’t understand either the concept of freedom of expression, or that the United States government cannot just outlaw criticism of the UN, isn’t it. What does that say about the “concern for human rights” of this “internationalist” weenie? See the next paragraph.

The row was sparked by a speech by Mr Malloch Brown on Tuesday. Addressing prominent Democrats in New York, he criticised Washington for allowing “too much unchecked UN-bashing and stereotyping”. He singled out the conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News cable channel, owned by News Corp, the parent company of The Times.

“The prevailing practice of seeking to use the UN almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable,” Mr Malloch Brown said. “You will lose the UN one way or another,” he added.

See?

America has a long tradition of isolationism, dating back to even before the US refused to join the League of Nations. The UN has been portrayed by far-right groups as a godless, communist and corrupt “nest of spies” ready to invade America.

To judge from the pro-terrorist, anti-American garbage that comes out of the UN on a nearly daily basis, I’d say those “far-right” groups are on target.

Relations began to improve during the presidency of the elder George Bush, a former American Ambassador to the UN. The current crisis stems from the split over the war in Iraq, when the 15-nation UN Security Council refused to give explicit approval for the military action, and Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, dubbed the invasion “illegal”. The invasion yielded evidence that UN officials or their families had benefited from the Oil-for-Food programme, which was designed to feed Iraqis during UN sanctions.

Two words for the UN: National sovereignty. That means we don’t need UN permission to do a damn thing, and nothing is illegal unless it violated US law. Go play with a hot dog, Kofi.

Mr Annan, under fire from Republicans, began a UN reform drive and sought advice from his American friends, predominantly Democrats. After a secret meeting at the home of the Clinton Administration’s UN Ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, Mr Annan named Mr Malloch Brown as his chief of staff in January last year.

And exactly what reform drive would that be? Do you see any reform? No? I don’t either. But what do you expect when Kofi here is so stupid he’d seek advice from the out-of-power Demorats?

The appointment raised eyebrows when it was reported that Mr Malloch Brown was renting a house on George Soros’s estate for $2,500 a month less than the previous occupant. Even before Mr Bolton was named US Ambassador, he seemed destined to clash with Mr Malloch Brown. Mr Soros, Mr Malloch Brown’s landlord and old friend, helped to fund the Stop Bolton campaign, aimed at stopping him from getting the post.

Mr Malloch Brown has been criticised by dissident UN staff for aligning the world body too closely with Democrats in US domestic politics. They accuse him of allowing a UN staffer, Justin Leites, to play a leading role in the 2004 presidential campaign of John Kerry, violating staff rules. It is a charge that he denies. “I don’t consider myself aligned with any American political establishment,” he said. “I am British. I have worked in the UN and in international jobs all of my life.”

Ed Luck, a Columbia University professor and author of Mixed Messages: American Politics and International Organization: 1919-1999, said it was rare for a top UN official to criticise the US so explicitly, but not unprecedented.

Does anybody know why Bolton isn’t going to run for President?

Hat tip to Bullwinkle Blog for this latest supreme idiocy from the UN:

Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - Under threat of United Nations Security Council sanctions for its own nuclear program, Iran has been elected to a vice-chair position on the U.N. Disarmament Commission, whose mission includes deliberations on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.

What better example could there be that the UN is not only an ineffective, pointless body, but a corrupt one as well?

Amazing.

Yo! All you liberals out there! You’re fond of content-free little soundbytes that you can put on your protest signs, but stop trying to use them as arguments. They’re not. And it makes you look like idiots (well, you are, but at least try to look like you’re halfway intelligent for once). So to help you out, I’ve listed a few of the most idiotic Leftist Screaming Points below, and commented on them.

It’s not a child!

Then what is it? A cheetoh? A grape? A penguin? Of course it’s a child, and calling it a fetus doesn’t change that. Drop this, because this is the number one, most idiotic Leftist Screaming Point. If you want to make a case for abortion, fine, but this is not even a point worth consideration.

We used to support Saddam!

Barely, but really, now, we used to do a lot of things. You used to play with your shitty diapers, too. That doesn’t mean that you didn’t learn better later, now does it? Drop this idiotic line.

Work with the UN!

You should have dropped this long before Oil for Food. The UN is wholly ineffectual (please point to just one way in which the UN has been effective that did not involve US military forces), the UN is wholly corrupt, and is nothing more than an apologist for terrorism. Drop it. Drop it now. You can’t claim to be concerned about human rights and support the UN.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer!

And your point is … ? If you don’t like being poor, get a better job. It’s as simple as that.

That’s [whatever]-ist!

You moonbats have screeched this one so many times, and so frequently without cause, that it’s lost what strength it once had. Drop it. Nobody cares.

Hat tip: GOP Bloggers. Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.

The following is abridged from a speech delivered on December 5, 2005, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., at Hillsdale College’s sixth annual Churchill Dinner.

At one level, the United Nations is merely the latest variant on the Congress of Vienna held almost two centuries ago—a venue where the great powers sit down to resolve the problems of the world to their mutual satisfaction. Unfortunately, unlike Lord Castlereagh, Prince Metternich and Talleyrand, none of whom would be asked to audition for a “We Are The World” charity fundraising single, the UN has become the repository of all the West’s sappiest illusions of one-worldism.

Let me give an example. Nearly three years ago, the space shuttle Columbia crashed, and Katie Couric on NBC’s Today show saluted the fallen heroes as follows: “They were an airborne United Nations—men, women, an African-American, an Indian woman, an Israeli….” By contrast, there’s a famous terror-supporting Islamist imam in Britain, Abu Hamza, who, when the shuttle crashed, claimed it was God’s punishment “because it carried Americans, an Israeli and a Hindu, a trinity of evil against Islam.” Say what you like about the old Islamofascist nutcake, but he was at least paying attention to the particulars of the situation, not just peddling, as Katie Couric did, vapid “multi-culti” bromides.

Why couldn’t Katie have said the Columbia was an airborne America? After all, the “Indian woman,” Kalpana Chawla, was the American Dream writ large upon the stars: she emigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s and became an astronaut within a decade. What an incredible country. But somehow it wasn’t enough to see in the crew’s multiple ethnicities a stirring testament to the possibilities of her own land; instead, Katie upgraded them into an emblem of what seemed to her a far nobler ideal—the UN.

In the days before Miss Couric’s observation—this was in 2003, just before the Iraq war— there had been two notable news items about the United Nations: (1) The newly elected chair of the UN Human Rights Commission was Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya; and (2) it was announced that in May, the presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament would pass to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. But as Katie demonstrated, no matter what the UN actually is, the very initials evoke in her and many others some vague blurry memory of a long-ago UNESCO benefit with Danny Kaye or Audrey Hepburn surrounded by smiling children of many lands. There were many woozy Western leftists who felt—and still feel—that the theoretical idealism of Communism excused all its terrible failures in practice. The UN gets a similar pass, but from a far larger number of people. How else to explain all the polls in Europe, Australia, Canada and even America that show large numbers of people will only support war if it’s approved by the UN?

The Real UN

In fact, however, the UN is a shamefully squalid organization whose corruption is almost impossible to exaggerate. If you think—as the media and the left do in this country—that Iraq is a God-awful mess (which it’s not), then try being the Balkans or Sudan or even Cyprus or anywhere where the problem’s been left to the United Nations. If you don’t want to bulk up your pension by skimming the Oil-for-Food program, no need to worry. Whatever your bag, the UN can find somewhere that suits—in West Africa, it’s Sex-for-Food, with aid workers demanding sexual services from locals as young as four; in Cambodia, it’s drug dealing; in Kenya, it’s the refugee extortion racket; in the Balkans, sex slaves. On a UN peace mission, everyone gets his piece.

Didier Bourguet, a UN staffer in Congo and the Central African Republic, enjoyed the pleasures of 12-year-old girls, and as a result is now on trial in France. His lawyer has said he was part of a UN pedophile network operating from Africa to southeast Asia. But has anyone read anything about that? The merest glimpse of a U.S. servicewoman leading an Abu Ghraib inmate around with girlie knickers on his head was enough to prompt calls for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, and for Ted Kennedy to charge that Saddam’s torture chambers were now open “under new management.” But systemic UN child sex in at least 50 percent of their missions? The transnational morality set can barely stifle their yawns. If you’re going to sexually assault prepubescent girls, make sure you’re wearing a blue helmet.

And at least the Pentagon put a stop to Abu Ghraib. As a British UN official in the Congo told my newspaper in London: “The crux of the problem is that if the UN gets bolshie”—that’s Britspeak for complaining aggressively—“with these governments then they stop providing the UN with troops and staff.” That’s the system in a nutshell: when a British bigwig is with British forces, he’ll enforce British standards; when a British official is holed up with an impeccably “multilateral” force of Uruguayans, Tunisians, etc., he’s more circumspect. When in Rome, do as the Visigoths do. In Congo, the UN had to forbid all contact between its predatory forces and the natives. The rest of the world should be so lucky.

The child sex racket is only the most extreme example of what’s wrong with the UN approach to the world. Developed peoples value resilience: when disaster strikes, you bounce back. A hurricane flattens Florida, you patch things up and reopen. As the New Colonial Class, the UN doesn’t look at it like that: when disaster strikes, it just proves that you and your countrymen are children who need to be taken under the transnational wing. The folks who have been under the UN wing the longest—indeed, the only ones with their own permanent UN agency and semi-centenarian “refugee camps”—are the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the earth: the Palestinians. UN territories like Kosovo are the global equivalent of inner-city housing projects with the blue helmets as local enforcers for the absentee slum landlord. By contrast, a couple of years after imperialist warmonger Bush showed up, Afghanistan and Iraq have elections, presidents and prime ministers.

Let’s just take one of the scandals that go widely unreported in the American media—the UN Oil-for-Food program. Among the targets of the corruption investigation was Kofi Annan’s son Kojo—who had a $30,000-a-year job but managed to find a spare quarter-million dollars sitting around to invest in a Swiss football club. The investigators then broadened their sights to include Kofi’s brother Kobina Annan, the Ghanaian Ambassador to Morocco, who has ties to a businessman behind several of the entities involved in the scandal—one Michael Wilson, the son of the former Ghanaian Ambassador to Switzerland and a childhood friend of young Kojo. Mr. Wilson is currently being investigated for bribery involving a $50 million contract to renovate the Geneva offices of the UN World Intellectual Property Organization.

The actual head of the Oil-for-Food racket, Kofi sidekick Benon Sevan, has resigned, having hitherto insisted that a mysterious six-figure sum in his bank account was a gift from his elderly aunt, a lady of modest means who lived in a two-room flat in Cyprus. Paul Volcker’s investigators had planned to confirm with auntie her nephew’s version of events, but unfortunately she fell down an elevator shaft and died. It now seems likely that the windfall had less to do with Mr. Sevan’s late aunt than with his soliciting of oil allocations for a company run by a cousin of Kofi Annan’s predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

Despite current investigations into his brother, his son, his son’s best friend, his predecessor’s cousin, his former chief of staff, his procurement officer and the executive director of the UN’s biggest ever program, the Secretary-General insists he remains committed to staying on and tackling the important work of “reforming” the UN. Unfortunately, his Executive Coordinator for United Nations Reform has also had to resign.

You’d think that by now, respect for the UN would be plummeting faster than Benon Sevan’s auntie down that lift shaft. After all, these aren’t peripheral figures or minor departments. They reach right into the heart of UN policy on two of the critical issues of the day—Iraq and North Korea. Most of the Ghanaian diplomatic corps and their progeny seem to have directorships at companies with UN contracts and/or Saddamite oil options.

What’s important to understand is that Mr. Annan’s ramshackle UN of humanitarian money-launderers, peacekeeper-rapists and a Human Rights Commission that looks like a lifetime-achievement awards ceremony for the world’s torturers is not a momentary aberration. Nor can it be corrected by bureaucratic reforms designed to ensure that the failed Budget Oversight Committee will henceforth be policed by a Budget Oversight Committee Oversight Committee. The Oil-for-Food fiasco is the UN—the predictable spawn of its utopian fantasies and fetid realities. If Saddam grasped this more clearly than, say, Katie Couric or John Kerry, well, that’s why he is—was—an A-list dictator and they’re not.

Why was there an Oil-for-Food program in the first place? Because back in the 90s, having thrown a big old multilateral Gulf War and gotten to the gates of Baghdad, the grand UN coalition then decided against toppling Saddam. So, having shirked the responsibilities that come with having a real policy, America and its allies were in the market for a pseudo-policy. And where does an advanced Western democracy go when it wants a pseudo-policy? Why, the UN! Saddam correctly calculated that the great powers were over-invested in Oil-for-Food as a figleaf for their lack of will, and reasoned that in such an environment their figleaf would also serve as a discreet veil for all kinds of other activities. He didn’t game the system; he simply understood far better than Clinton and Bush Sr., John Major and Tony Blair how it worked.

Failures of Transnationalism

Transnationalism is the mechanism by which the world’s most enlightened progressives provide cover for its darkest forces. It’s a largely unconscious alliance, but not an illogical one. Western proponents of Kyoto and some of the other loopy NGO-beloved eco-doom-mongering concepts up for debate in Montreal at the moment have at least this much in common with psychotic Third World thugocracies: they find it hard to win free elections, they regard transnational bodies as useful for conferring a respect unearned at the ballot box, and they are unduly troubled by the lack of accountability in global institutions.

Those of us who believe that big government is by definition remote government—and that therefore the UN’s pretensions to world government make it potentially the worst of all—should, in theory, argue for withdrawal from the organization. Outside of a few college towns and coastal enclaves, I don’t believe there would be any political downside for candidates campaigning on a platform of pulling out of the UN entirely, and I’d encourage Republicans to do so if only as a way of unnerving those lazy pols like John Kerry who are prone to mindless transnationalist boosterism. But as a matter of practical politics, I can’t see the U.S. leaving the UN anytime soon.

Can the U.S. force the UN to reform itself? Look at it this way: With hindsight, the UN was most effective when it was least effective—that’s to say, the four decades between Korea and the Gulf War, when the Cold War’s mutually-assured vetoes at least accurately represented the global stand-off. Now, however, we’re in a unipolar world. As a result, the UN is no longer a permanent talking-shop for the world’s powers but an alternative power in and of itself—a sort of ersatz superpower intended to counter the real one. Consider the 85 yes-or-no votes America made in the General Assembly in 2003: Arab League members voted against the U.S. position 88.7% of the time; ASEAN members voted against the U.S. position 84.5% of the time; Islamic Conference members voted against the U.S. position 84.1% of the time; African members voted against the U.S. position 83.8% of the time; Non-Aligned Movement members voted against the U.S. position 82.7% of the time; and European Union members voted against the U.S. position 54.5% of the time.

You can take the view of the European elites that this is proof of America’s isolation and that the U.S. now needs to issue a “Declaration of Interdependence” with the world. Or you can be like the proud mom in Irving Berlin’s WWI marching song: “They Were All Out Of Step But Jim.” But what these figures really demonstrate is that the logic of the post-Cold War UN is to be institutionally anti-American. The U.S. could seize on Kofi Annan’s present embarrassment and lean hard on him to reform this and reorganize that and reinvent the other and, if it employs its full diplomatic muscle, it might get those anti-U.S. votes down to…a tad over 80%. And along the way it would find that it had “reformed” a corrupt, dysfunctional, sclerotic anti-American club into a lean, mean, functioning, effective anti-American club. Which is, if they’re honest, what most reformers mean by “reform.”

In the old days, ramshackle dictatorships were proxies for heavyweight patrons, but not any more. These days, psychotic dictators represent only themselves. Yet somehow, in the post-Cold War talking shops, the loony tunes’ prestige has been enhanced: the UN, as Canadian writer George Jonas puts it, enables “dysfunctional dictatorships to punch above their weight.” Away from Kofi and Co., the world is moving more or less in the right direction: entire regions that were once wall-to-wall tyrannies are now filled with flawed but broadly functioning democracies—e.g., Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America. The UN has been irrelevant to this transformation. Its structures resist reform and the principal beneficiaries are the thug states.

What Actually Works?

What should replace the UN? Some people talk about a “caucus of the democracies.” But I’d like to propose a more radical suggestion: nothing. In the war on terror, America’s most important relationships have been not transnational but bilateral: Australia’s John Howard didn’t dispatch troops to Iraq because the Aussies and the Yanks belong to the same international talking shop; Tony Blair’s reliability on war and terror isn’t because of the European Union but in spite of it. These relationships are meaningful precisely because they’re not the product of formal transnational bureaucracies.

When the tsunami hit last year, hundreds of thousands of people died within minutes. The Australians and Americans arrived within hours. The UN was unable to get to Banda Aceh for weeks. Instead, the humanitarian fat cats were back in New York and Geneva holding press conferences warning about post-tsunami health consequences—dysentery, cholera, BSE from water-logged cattle, etc.—that, its spokesmen assured us, would kill as many people as the original disaster. But this never happened, any more than did their predictions of disaster for Iraq: “The head of the World Food Program has warned that Iraq could spiral into a massive humanitarian disaster.” Or for Afghanistan: “The UN Children’s Fund has estimated that as many as 100,000 Afghan children could die of cold, disease and hunger.”

It’s one thing to invent humanitarian disasters to disparage Bush’s unilateralist warmongering; but in the wake of the tsunami, the UN was reduced to inventing a humanitarian disaster in order to distract attention from the existing humanitarian disaster it wasn’t doing anything about.

In fact, the whole idea of multilateral organizations feels a bit last millennium. With hindsight, institutions like the UN seem like a hangover from the Congress of Vienna age when contact between nations was limited to the potentates’ emissaries. That’s why transnationalism so appeals both to Euro-statists and to dictators—the great men of the world meeting together to decide things for everyone else. But, in the era of the Internet, five-cents-per-minute international phone rates, bank cards issued in Finland that you can use in an ATM in Brazil or Fiji, and blue collar families taking cheap vacations in the Maldives and Bali, the bloated UN bureaucracy seems at best irrelevant and at worst an obstruction to the progress of international relations. I’m all in favor of the Universal Postal Union and the Berne Copyright Convention, but they work precisely because dysfunctional dictators weren’t involved. The non-nutcake jurisdictions came together, and others were required to be in compliance before they could join. That’s why they work and endure. Transnational institutions should reflect points of agreement: Americans don’t mind the Toronto Blue Jays playing in the same baseball league—and even winning it occasionally—because they’re all agreed on the rules of baseball. A joint North American Public Health Commission, on the other hand, would be a bureaucratic boondoggle seeking to reconcile two incompatible health systems. Imagine then what happens when you put America, Denmark, Libya and Syria on a human rights committee, and then try and explain why the verdict of such a committee should be given any weight when the U.S. is weighing its vital national interest.

It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice cream and a quart of dog mess and mix ’em together, the result will taste more like dog mess than ice cream. That’s the problem with the UN. If you make the free nations and the thug states members of the same club, the danger isn’t that they’ll meet each other half-way but that the free world winds up going three-quarters or seven-eighths of the way. Indeed, the UN has met the thug states so much more than half way that they now largely share the dictators’ view of their peoples—as either helpless children who need every decision made for them, or a bunch of dupes whose national wealth can be rerouted to a Swiss bank account.

Perhaps that malign combination of empty European gesture-politics and Third World larceny would be relatively harmless, at least in the geopolitical sense, if these were quieter times. But they’re not. This is an age in which America and its real allies—a bigger number than you’d think—need to be free to act without being a latter-day Gulliver ensnared by Lilliputian UN resolutions from head to toe. After all, consider the alternative to American action. As you may have noticed, the good people of Darfur in Sudan have been fortunate enough not to attract the attention of the arrogant cowboy unilateralist Bush and have instead fallen under the care of the UN multilateral compassion set. So, after months of expressing deep, grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan managed to persuade the UN to set up a committee to look into what’s going on in Darfur. Eventually, they reported back that it’s not genocide.

That’s great news, isn’t it? Because if it had been genocide, that would have been very, very serious. As yet another Kofi Annan-appointed UN committee boldly declared a year ago: “Genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of all and should never be tolerated.” So thank goodness what’s going on in Sudan isn’t genocide. Instead, it’s just 100,000 corpses who all happen to be from the same ethnic group—which means the UN can go on tolerating it until everyone’s dead, and none of the multilateral compassion types have to worry their pretty heads about it.

That’s the transnational establishment’s alternative to Bush and his “coalition of the willing”: appoint a committee that agrees on the urgent need to do nothing at all. Thus, last year the UN Human Rights Commission announced the working group that will decide which complaints will be heard at its annual meeting in Geneva this spring: the five-nation panel that will select which human-rights violations will be up for discussion comprises the Netherlands, Hungary, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe. I wouldn’t bet on them finding room on their crowded agenda for the question of human rights in Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe.

One of the mystifying aspects of UN worship is the assumption that this embryo world government is a “progressive” concept. It’s not. Most of us in our business and family and consumer relationships are plugged into global networks far better for the long-term health of the planet than using American money to set up Eurowimp talking shops manned by African thugs—which is what the UN Human Rights Commission boils down to.

Judging by Results

Go back to that tsunami. While the UN and its agencies were on television badgering and hectoring the West for its stinginess, the actual relief efforts were being made by a couple of diverted U.S. naval groups and the Royal Australian Navy. The Scandinavians can’t fly in relief supplies, because they don’t have any C-130s. All they can do is wait for the UN to swing by and pick up their check. And it says something for the post-modern decadence of the age that that gives you supposed moral superiority.

There’s a moment in the latest Batman movie in which Bruce Wayne has just bumped into his childhood sweetheart, Rachel Dawes, in the lobby of some Gotham City hotel. Unfortunately he’s sopping wet, having been cavorting in the ornamental fountain with a couple of hot pieces of arm candy. Rachel is a crusading district attorney and Bruce can see she’s a bit disappointed to discover her old pal is now Paris Hilton in drag. So he attempts to assure her that deep down he still cares about all the worthy stuff. Rachel swats this aside. It’s not what you feel inside that counts, she says. “It’s what you do that defines you.”

Bruce wanes, visibly, under her withering riposte. I wouldn’t claim this film has anything as coherent as a philosophy, but its director thought enough of that line to reprise it late in the action. “It’s what you do that defines you,” Batman whispers to Rachel before diving off a rooftop to go whump the bad guys. “Bruce…?” she says, faintly.

A couple of days after seeing this film I read that the Oxfam international aid organization had paid the better part of a million bucks to Sri Lankan customs officials for the privilege of having 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles allowed into the country to get aid out to remote villages on washed-out roads hit by the tsunami. The Indian-made Mahindras stood idle on the dock in Colombo for a month as Oxfam’s representatives were buried under a tsunami of paperwork. Fourteen Unicef ambulances sent to Indonesia spent two months sitting on the dock of the bay wasting time, as the late Otis Redding so shrewdly anticipated.

The tsunami may have been unprecedented, but what followed was business as usual—the sloth and corruption of government, the feebleness of the brand-name NGOs, the compassion-exhibitionism of the transnational jet set. If we lived in a world where “it’s what you do that defines you,” we’d be heaping praise on the U.S. and Australian militaries, who in the immediate hours after the tsunami dispatched their forces to save lives, distribute food and restore water, power and communications.

According to my favorite foreign minister these days, Australia’s Alexander Downer, “Iraq was a clear example about how outcomes are more important than blind faith in the principles of non-intervention, sovereignty and multilateralism…. Increasingly multilateralism is a synonym for an ineffective and unfocused policy involving internationalism of the lowest common denominator. Multilateral institutions need to become more results-oriented.”

Which is pretty much the Batman thesis: It’s what we do that defines us. And we’ll do more without the UN.

from NIS News:

The prophet Mohammed justifies Islamic violence in the battle between the faithful and unfaithful. Paradise awaits the faithful who die as a result, Mohammed Bouyeri claimed yesterday in the district court of The Hague.

No doubt the UN will invite him to chair the Human Rights council.

Mark Steyn on the Canadian election results:

Remember the conventional wisdom of 2004? Back then, you’ll recall, it was the many members of George Bush’s “unilateral” coalition who were supposed to be in trouble, not least the three doughty warriors of the Anglosphere–the president, Tony Blair and John Howard–who would all be paying a terrible electoral price for lying their way into war in Iraq. The Democrats’ position was that Mr. Bush’s rinky-dink nickel-and-dime allies didn’t count: The president has “alienated almost everyone,” said Jimmy Carter, “and now we have just a handful of little tiny countries supposedly helping us in Iraq.” (That would be Britain, Australia, Poland, Japan . . .) Instead of those nobodies, John Kerry pledged that, under his leadership, “America will rejoin the community of nations”–by which he meant Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder, the Belgian guy . . .

Two years on, Messrs. Bush, Blair, Howard and Koizumi are all re-elected, while Mr. Chirac is the lamest of lame ducks, and his ingrate citizenry has tossed out his big legacy, the European Constitution; Mr. Schroeder’s government was defeated and he’s now shilling for Russia’s state-owned Gazprom (”It’s all about Gaz!”); and the latest member of the coalition of the unwilling to hit the skids is Canada’s Liberal Party, which fell from office on Monday. John Kerry may have wanted to “rejoin the community of nations.” Instead, “the community of nations” has joined John Kerry, windsurfing off Nantucket in electric-yellow buttock-hugging Lycra, or whatever he’s doing these days.

Read the whole thing. Excellent.

information at Alpha Patriot.