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Posted on 02/17/2005 4:53:59 AM PST by SJackson
It's a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice cream and a quart of dog poop and mix 'em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. 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 halfway but that the free world winds up going three-quarters, seven-eighths of the way. Thus the Oil-for-Fraud scandal: In the end, Saddam Hussein had a much shrewder understanding of the way the UN works than Bush and Blair did.
But another week, another scandal; corrupt organizations rarely stop at just one kind of corruption. If you don't want to bulk up your pension by skimming the Oil-for-Food program, don't worry, whatever's 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.
But you get the general picture: 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 currently on trial in France. His lawyer has said he was part of a UN pedophile network that transcends individual missions and national boundaries.
Now how about this? The Third Infantry Division is raping nine-year-olds in Ramadi. Ready, set, go! That thundering sound outside your window is the great herd of BBC/CNN/New York Times/Le Monde/Moose Jaw Times Herald reporters stampeding to the Sunni Triangle. Whoa, hold up, lads, it's only hypothetical.
But think about it: The merest glimpse of a freaky West Virginia tramp leading an Abu Ghraib inmate around with frilly panties on his head was enough to prompt calls for Rumsfeld's resignation, and for Ted Kennedy to charge that Saddam's torture chambers were now open "under new management," and for veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk to be driven into an almost orgasmic frenzy: "Just look at the way US army reservist Lynndie England holds the leash of the naked, bearded Iraqi," wrote Fisk. "No sadistic movie could outdo the damage of this image. In September 2001, the planes smashed into the buildings; today, Lynndie smashes to pieces our entire morality with just one tug on the leash."
Who's straining at the leash here? But, if Lynndie's smashed to pieces our entire morality with just one tug, what would be left for Bush's Zionist neocons running a pedophile network of Congolese kindergartners?
Fisk would be calling for US expulsion from the UN – no, wait, from planet Earth: slice it off from Maine to Hawaii and use one of those new Euro-Airbuses to drag it out round the back of Uranus.
But systemic UN child sex in at least 50% of their missions? The transnational morality set can barely stifle their yawns. If you're going to rape prepubescent girls, make sure you're wearing a blue helmet.
And at least the Pentagon put a stop to Abu Ghraib. As a UN official in Congo put it: "The crux of the problem is that if the UN gets bolshie with these governments then they stop providing the UN with troops and staff."
And the problem with that is...?
IN CONGO, the UN has now forbidden all contact between its forces and the natives. The rest of the world should be so lucky.
I take it from his use of "bolshie" that the quoted UN wallah is British. If so, 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.
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, the IRA blows up a Belfast pub, a suicide bomber detonates in an Israeli mall, you patch things up and re-open.
But, as the New Colonial Class, the UN doesn't look at it like that: when disaster strikes, it just proves you and your countrymen are children who need to be taken under the transnational wing. The folks that 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. When the tsunami hit, hundreds of thousands of people died within minutes. The Australians and Americans arrived within hours. The UN was unable to get to Banda Aceh within 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, they assured us, would kill as many people as the original disaster.
But it never happened, anymore 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 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 this latest flop performance 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.
All this derives from a UN culture in which the free nations of the world have 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 you can reroute to your Swiss bank account, or a never-ending source of fresh meat. That British official trying to rationalize child sex rings gives the game away: it's not just the underage Congolese girls who get corrupted by contact with the UN.
The writer is senior North American columnist for Britain's Telegraph Group.
A Mark Steyn ping.
So9
The United Nations should be put out of its misery like a mad dog would be.
Steyn is great. Thanks for posting this.
The analogy in the first sentence is such a perfect description of the UN. Steyn is a genius.
Funny how nobody but Fox News is talking about the UN sex scandals. Hell, it took months before the MSM would even mention Oil for Food.
"If you're going to rape prepubescent girls, make sure you're wearing a blue helmet."
Ain't that the truth?!
"as the New Colonial Class, the UN doesn't look at it like that: when disaster strikes, it just proves you and your countrymen are children who need to be taken under the transnational wing."
"New Colonial Class, the UN" >>>>liberal democrats
"When the tsunami hit, hundreds of thousands of people died within minutes. The Australians and Americans arrived within hours. The UN was unable to get to Banda Aceh within 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, they assured us, would kill as many people as the original disaster.
But it never happened, anymore 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 Afghanistan ("The UN Children's Fund has estimated that as many as 100,000 Afghan children could die of cold, disease and hunger")."
Great Piece!
Excellent article. Thank you. Mark Steyn said it all.
right on!
It's all so very sad.
I remember UN missions from 20 years ago, and they were not so bad. Sure there was the featherbedding and the emphasis on getting the proper wines in a tropical climate and all that, but they were not yet completely corrupt. One of my good friends from High School (a Dane), was going to attend a military academy so that he could learn to soldier and then work as a UN peace-keeper. It did not seem like a completely stupid idea at the time.
I can only imagine what has happened to him over the years. He was a good man, and I imagine he still is. These stories must turn his stomach. He understood, even then, the importance of order and discipline in the military and diplomatic community. But how do you maintain order and discipline in a trans-national body where nobody has authority over anybody else? It is just a recipe for disaster.
I maintain that it has nothing to do with the nationalities involved. You could take a bunch of farm boys from Iowa and drop them in the middle of the Congo with no supervision, and you would get pretty much the same result. The thing that keeps that from happening in the US military is the Chain of Command, the UCMJ and the prospect of many years of hard labor at Leavenworth, Kansas.
But these things do not exist for UN peace-keepers. Boys will be boys, and on UN missions there is nobody keeping them from doing what they will.
The UN is about as useful as a sunporch on a submarine. Enron was less corrupt and sleazy than the UN. I know I'm preaching to the choir at FR, but it is long overdue for the US (and Israel, Australia) to get out of the UN and for the US to kick the UN out of the USA! Let the sorry lot of them go meet in Paris, Pyongyang, Tehran, Damascus, Khartoum, or Gaza, places more compatible with the UN's actions and agenda.
Denny Crane: "There are two places to find the truth. First God and then Fox News."
Another gem from the best writer in the business, bar none. Maybe we can give him his own talk radio show and replace Hannity, and instead of trying to Hannitize people we'll Steynize them.
Get the US out of the UN and the UN out fo the US.
Send the UN to Botswana or some other remote location. kick them out of the US!
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