Posted on 04/16/2003 9:43:04 AM PDT by knighthawk
Watching the northern branch of the now defunct Iraqi Ministry of Information, otherwise known as the CBC, is a reminder why eliminating the United Nations is as important as eliminating Saddam Hussein.
A show that's being repeated on CBC's Newsworld these days is The Fifth Estate special, called "Inside the War On Iraq." It proposes to explain the war in terms of a neo-conservative conspiracy aimed at establishing American hegemony in the world. In the show's view, this has been the reason for the invasion, not ridding the world of a murderous and menacing tyranny. It was all the chilling design of Goldfinger-like figures, such as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon advisor Richard Perle, and it came to pass because an ambitious socialist politician in Britain, Tony Blair, abandoned the progressive camp.
The Fifth Estate doesn't quite explain what the progressive camp's own agenda might have been -- to preserve Saddam's regime, perhaps? -- or what possible ambition a British Labour prime minister could achieve by abandoning it. But never mind. The point isn't that The Fifth Estate's Lynden MacIntyre is as divorced from reality as the Iraqi information minister who entertained us on TV until he vanished last week. No: Mr. MacIntyre's relationship to reality, marginal as it is, isn't as marginal as Muhammed al-Sahhaf's. This is precisely the problem.
If the host of The Fifth Estate -- or other CBC-types, from The National's Peter Mansbridge to The Passionate Eye's Michaelle Jean -- were clones of the exanimate Mr. al-Sahhaf, they, too, would be figures of fun until the day they vanished. They could influence no one and nothing. As it is they can and they do.
Which brings us to the UN. If the aggregate of dysfunctional dictatorships known as the United Nations was an exact replica of Mullah Omar's Afghanistan, it would be less dangerous. The UN is more dangerous than the Taliban in proportion to being less blatant and less obvious.
Kofi Annan's world organization is to Kim Jong-Il's North Korea what the CBC is to Iraq's erstwhile Ministry of Information. Their world-views may be equally askew, but the Mother Corp's soundtrack is more sophisticated. The CBC's falsehoods are less transparent than Mr. al-Sahhaf's and are expressed in better English. As a result, the CBC is given more credit than the Iraqi Ministry of Information. This isn't a plus, though; it's a minus. It's also a minus that the UN is given more credit than North Korea. It's especially a minus when it lends to the UN a moral authority that North Korea lacks, even in progressive circles.
As I wrote elsewhere recently, Iraq's delusional Minister of Information was beaten to the punch last week by Mr. Annan. Outlining why the UN should play an "important role" in post-war Iraq, the Secretary-General explained that "above all, the UN involvement does bring legitimacy" to the task of reconstruction.
An assemblage of basket-case tyrannies thinking they're needed to lend "legitimacy" to a Saddam-free Iraq, something they tried their best to prevent, is a delusion even Mr. al-Sahhaf might envy. Except the Iraqi Minister wasn't taken seriously, while the Secretary-General is taken seriously enough for even President Bush to announce that the UN will have a "vital role" in Iraq.
There are pundits who say the U.S. President is only paying lip service to the UN to placate Mr. Blair. If I could be sure of that, I'd sleep more soundly. What keeps me awake at night is that Bush Jr.'s actions, unlike his father's, tend to follow his lips.
Giving the UN a vital role in anything except perhaps distributing canned goods would be a mistake comparable to the elder President Bush's coalition leaving Saddam in power after the First Gulf War. The current Bush administration's initial choice to move against Saddam through the UN was partly motivated by the hope that the venerable institution could be restored to its founding principles and so saved from becoming irrelevant. It was a forlorn hope. I think the UN's founding principles themselves foreshadowed the organization's future. A Security Council set up to enable two dictatorships -- the Soviet Union and China, whether under Chang Kai-shek or under Mao Zedong -- to veto any measure suggested by the world's democracies could hardly be expected to stand up for the rule of law against despotism. Nor did it -- except once, in Korea, by error. Even before it was completely hijacked by opponents of free enterprise and individual liberty, the UN was a flawed concept.
By now the aging skyscraper in Manhattan signifies nothing but opposition to Western values. Far from expressing the hopes of mankind, it only expresses the hopes of people who despise individual, electoral, and entrepreneurial freedom -- and, for good measure, in the spirit of Durban, want to push Jews into the sea. Mr. Annan's fiefdom is a Petri dish for growing and sheltering the germs of European-style statism and Third World-style tyranny.
So is the CBC -- with one crucial difference. The media are protected by lofty ideals and constitutional guarantees of press freedom. The UN isn't. It's just a post-war project, brought into being to promote the values of liberal democracy. If, instead, the UN seeks to undermine those values, the same powers that created it -- i.e., the United States and its allies -- can bury it. The question is, will they do so after the UN dies from natural causes or while it's still alive.
No more UN for US-list
If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
Shoot, Ottawa prolly doesn't want them either!
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