Posted on 12/09/2004 1:22:20 PM PST by neverdem
Start with too-friendly media, apathy and members' entrenched interests.
Imagine if U.S. troops were accused of sexually exploiting children in impoverished nations. Imagine if a U.S. Cabinet secretary were accused of groping a female subordinate, whose complaint was then swatted aside by the president. Imagine if the head of a U.S. government agency and the president's own offspring stood accused of complicity in the biggest embezzlement racket in history.
Those would be pretty big stories, no? Above-the-fold, top-of-the-newscast stories. Yet the United Nations has been mired in all these scandals and until just recently hardly anybody outside the right-wing blogosphere has noticed.
Even now, if you're not an inveterate U.N.-watcher, you probably don't know that Ruud Lubbers, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, was accused of sexually harassing a subordinate, only to have the charges dismissed by Secretary-General Kofi Annan despite an internal investigation that supported the woman's complaint. Or that U.N. peacekeepers have been accused of a variety of sexual offenses involving children for more than a decade, most recently in Congo. Or even that Annan's son, Kojo, and Benon Savan, the head of the U.N. "oil for food" program in Iraq, are said to have benefited financially while Saddam Hussein stole $21 billion.
Where's the outrage? It's easy to find among conservatives, but then they never liked the U.N. to begin with. Why didn't the mainstream media and the Democrats (pardon the redundancy), not to mention various European governments, devote more attention to these scandals? Far from demanding high-level resignations, they are circling the wagons.
The U.N.'s friends are doing their favorite international institution no favors with this knee-jerk defense. Until it cleans up its act, the U.N. can never be as influential as its boosters would like. Even Annan recognizes this. In fact, he seems to specialize....
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Why is the LA Times stating an obvious but politically incorrect truth?
Max Boot is politically incorrect.
This is just the beginning of the Lefts way of redefining itself over the next 4 years. We will see alot of this from the MSM.
Well its certainly out of character for that paper, but the column is probably not something over which they have a lot of editorial control.
Still, when these articles start appearing in that type of paper its a good sign that the MSM is being dragged kicking and screaming to the issue of the utter failure of the U.N.
Why is the LA Times allowing a known conservative like Max Boot (formerly of the WSJ editorial page) have ink?
Yeah they aint worried about Kofi they are still trying to tie Cheney to Haliburton.
Its not about the criminal acts, its about their sticking by the UN while they try to stick it to the USA, and Yes I do mean so called American political figures.
Thanks for the link.
The reason the UN stays mired in its defects is that the US hasn't withdrawn financial support.
Yet.
Get the UN out of the US, and get the US out of the UN.
I've got a nice Photoshop image about the UN, but I don't remember the URL. Dang.
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