[quidnunc]

FYI

[sinkspur]

Hanson's usually good, but he sucks here.

[HisKingdomWillAbolishSinDeath]

President Bush, the UN is an obsolete and worthless organization. A "paper tiger" is an understatement. How about creating a new international organization that is made up of only countries, a coalition of willing warriors, whose only stated goal is the destruction of terrorism. Now that's leadership!

[TwoWolves]

I never heard the whole speech, but what I did hear sounded like President Bush was trying to shame them into doing what their charter says they should be doing.

[McGavin999]

Indifferent, yes, and that loud clicking sound you hear is our checkbook snapping shut.

[P H Lewis]

Save for later (too bleary-eyed to tackle anything else tonight)

[goldstategop]

The UN is the Star Wars bar. Its hard to take its denizens seriously. Most of them do not like President Bush's message since freedom is exactly what threatens their hold on power back home. That's subversive stuff.

[VeritatisSplendor]

One reason we might want to have the UN in NYC is to make it much easier for us to spy on them.

[claudiustg]

Arab oil money has subverted the UN. The oil rich Arab despots bribe the poor countries of the world to support their agenda. The Europeans follow their greedy self interest in the same direction. No better example can be given than the continual anti-Israel resolutions flowing from the General Assembly.

Moving the UN somewhere else or dropping our membership while emotionally satisfying, would ultimately be self-defeating. It would be quite a coup if we could dissolve the UN over the oil for food scandal. That will probably not happen, but it is possible to neutralize it through de-funding and reorganization. The UN is a danger to our Republic.

[My2Cents]

The UN...The International House of Tyrants.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

I think the EU should be allowed only ONE VOTE, just as the U.S. has only ONE VOTE.

[Tolik]

Victor Davis Hanson:

Our own problems with the U.N. should now be viewed in a context of ongoing radical change here in the United States, as all the previous liberal assumptions of the past decades undergo scrutiny in our post 9/11 world. There are no longer any sacred cows in the eyes of the American public. Ask Germany and South Korea as American troops depart, Saudi Arabia where bases are closed, and the once beaming Yasser Arafat, erstwhile denizen of the Lincoln Bedroom, as he now broods in his solitary rubble bunker.

Deeds, not rhetoric, are all that matter, as the once unthinkable is now the possible. There is no intrinsic reason why the U.N. should be based in New York rather than in its more logical utopian home in Brussels or Geneva. There is no law chiseled in stone that says any fascist or dictatorial state deserves authorized membership by virtue of its hijacking of a government. There is no logic to why a France is on the Security Council, but a Japan or India is not. And there is no reason why a group of democratic nations, unapologetic about their values and resolute to protect freedom, cannot act collectively for the common good, entirely indifferent to Syria's censure or a Chinese veto.

So Americans' once gushy support for the U.N. during its adolescence is gone. By the 1970s we accepted at best that it had devolved into a neutral organization in its approach to the West, and by the 1980s sighed that it was now unabashedly hostile to freedom. But in our odyssey from encouragement, to skepticism, and then to hostility, we have now reached the final stage--of indifference. Americans do not get riled easily, so the U.N. will go out with a whimper rather than a bang. Indeed, millions have already shrugged, tuned out, and turned the channel on it.

    Victor Davis Hanson Ping ! 

[OESY]

MORE:




What was the response to Mr. Bush's new multifaceted vision? He was met with stony silence, followed by about seven seconds of embarrassed applause, capped off by smug sneers in the global media. Why so?

First, the U.N. is not the idealistic postwar organization of our collective Unicef and Unesco nostalgia, the old perpetual force for good that we once associated with hunger relief and peacekeeping. Its membership is instead rife with tyrannies, theocracies and Stalinist regimes. Many of them, like Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Vietnam and Zimbabwe, have served on the U.N.'s 53-member Commission on Human Rights. The Libyan lunocracy -- infamous for its dirty war with Chad and cash bounties to mass murderers -- chaired the 2003 session. For Mr. Bush to talk to such folk about the need to spread liberty means removing from power, or indeed jailing, many of the oppressors sitting in his audience.

Second, urging democratic reforms in Palestine, as Mr. Bush also outlined, is antithetical to the very stuff of the U.N., an embarrassing reminder that nearly half of its resolutions in the past half-century have been aimed at punishing tiny democratic Israel at the behest of its larger, more populous -- and dictatorial -- Arab neighbors. The contemporary U.N., then, has become not only hypocritical, but also a bully that hectors Israel about the West Bank while it gives a pass to a nuclear, billion-person China after swallowing Tibet; wants nothing to do with the two present dangers to world peace, a nuclear North Korea and soon to follow theocratic Iran; and idles while thousands die in the Sudan.

Third, the present secretary-general, Kofi Annan, is himself a symbol of all that is wrong with the U.N. A multibillion dollar oil-for-food fraud, replete with kickbacks (perhaps involving a company that his own son worked for), grew unchecked on his watch, as a sordid array of Baathist killers, international hustlers and even terrorists milked the national petroleum treasure of Iraq while its own people went hungry. In response, Mr. Annan stonewalls, counting on exemption from the New York press on grounds of his unimpeachable liberal credentials. Meanwhile, he prefers to denigrate the toppling of Saddam Hussein as "illegal," but neither advocates reinstitution of a "legal" Saddam nor offers any concrete help to Iraqis crafting consensual society. Like the U.N. membership itself, he enjoys the freedom, affluence and security of a New York, but never stops to ask why that is so or how it might be extended to others less fortunate.

[prognostigaator]

always bttt.....