The U.N. ? Who Cares . . .

These are surreal times. Americans in Iraq are beheaded on videotape. Russian children are machine-gunned in their schools. The elderly in Israel continue to be blown apart on buses. No one -- whether in Madrid, Istanbul, Riyadh, Bali, Tel Aviv or New York -- is safe from the Islamic fascist, whose real enemy is modernism and Western-inspired freedom of the individual.

Despite the seemingly disparate geography of these continued attacks, we are always familiar with the similar spooky signature: civilians dismembered by the suicide belt, car bomb, improvised explosive device and executioner's blade. Then follows the characteristically pathetic communiqué or loopy fatwa aired on al-Jazeera, evoking everything from the injustice of the Reconquista to some mythical grievance about Crusaders in the holy shrines. Gender equity in the radical Islamic world is now defined by the expendable female suicide bomber's slaughter of Westerners.

In response to such international lawlessness, our global watchdog, the United Nations, had been largely silent. It abdicates its responsibility of ostracizing those states that harbor such mass murderers, much less organizes a multilateral posse to bring them to justice. And yet under this apparent state of siege, President Bush in his recent address to the U.N. offered not blood and iron -- other than an obligatory "the proper response is not to retreat but to prevail" -- but Wilsonian idealism, concrete help for the dispossessed, and candor about past sins. The president wished to convey a new multilateralist creed that would have made a John Kerry or Madeleine Albright proud, without the Churchillian "victory at any cost" rhetoric. Good luck.

Why should the UN go after Islamic Terrorists when they have the ever popular Israel to pick on.

Israel is a threat to the entire world! Do you know that Israel EXPORTS it's remarkable terroristic skills in farming, medicine and technology and anti-terrorism throughout the world!

Israel is a cancer that must be stopped at all costs and that is why the UN and all those Arab Nuke inspectors they have play wink-wink with Iran.

Iran will solve the UN's problem once and for all.

Excellent piece.

Here's a little bit more from the piece:

The Taliban and Saddam Hussein were once the United Nations' twin embarrassments, rogue regimes that thumbed their noses at weak U.N. protestations, slaughtered their own, invaded their neighbors, and turned their outlands into terrorist sanctuaries. Now they are gone, despite either U.N. indifference or veritable opposition to their removal. The United States sought not dictators in their place, but consensual government where it had never existed.
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.

Well worth reading.

Let's call a spade a spade. Saddam Hussein wasn't primarily an "embarrassment" to the UN. He was their sugar daddy, their milk cow. The Oil for Food Program provided them with more slush money than the entire over-the-table UN budget. No wonder they fought tooth and nail to prevent his ouster. No wonder they are furious at Bush for taking away 3/4 of their expense account money.

My favorite part:

Deeds, not rhetoric, are all that matter, as the once unthinkable is now possible. There is no intrinsic reason why the U.N. should be based in New York rather than its more logical utopian home of Brussels or Geneva.

.........and my other favorite part:

So the Americans once gushy support for the U.N. during its adolescence is gone. By the 1970's we accepted at best that it had devolved into a neutral organization in its approach to the West and by the 1980' sighed that it was 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.

Yes -- indeed, Hanson does go on to a longer paragraph on the oil-for-food scandal and the U.N.'s complicity:

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.

Hanson has done a very good job; the piece is well-written, and covers a lot of ground.

"Let's call a spade a spade. Saddam Hussein wasn't primarily an "embarrassment" to the UN. He was their sugar daddy, their milk cow. The Oil for Food Program provided them with more slush money than the entire over-the-table UN budget. No wonder they fought tooth and nail to prevent his ouster. No wonder they are furious at Bush for taking away 3/4 of their expense account money."

Plus almost every weapon used to kill out soldier came from France, Germany, and Russia. Right up to the very day we attacked Saddon was assured by France that we wouldn't. Saddam didn't even order his military to take a stand until it was well underway.

The Book "Treachery" is the best book I have ever read and I am not even done with it yet.

There were more dictatorships represented in the UN in the past than there are today. That explanation of its decline therefore does not wash. No, what has happened is that the first world left has thrown in with them, abandoning any pretence of concern for human rights. Before that much of is was pretence - the left supported Stalin and Mao who were bloody butchers - but they bothered to pretend. Now they do not.

Agreed. As postwar Europe slowly slid into the unenergetic mire of neo socialism, they lost the drive that led Europe to colonize the world and drive the world to the heights of civilization and technology that they did before American ascendence.

Old and creaky in demeanour, they fell into a more rigid and stratified mode of thought which took them from confronting and conquering evil to reluctant coexistance with it to embracing it or at least making deals with it.

The Americans, young, lean, hungry, and with a strong drive are looked at as the enemy, in part because it reminds them of themselves in their youth and in part because it's so damn annoying to get beat in every way.

The Israelis are put into the same category.

So the UN is a perfect body in which the reluctant, the weak, the corrupt and the evil can come together on an even playing field and cast stones at the few achievers that are left and have anything to loot.

I don't believe in youth and age metaphors applied to entire nations. Yes Europe has lost something by embracing soft socialism, also just by being wards of the US throughout the cold war. But the main change has been intellectual. They believe ideas that are unwilling to acknowledge the real world they live in and above all, unwilling to make clear moral distinctions and stands. This is not a function of age. People don't become incapable of moral judgment as they get older, or unwilling to engage in it. It is a philosophical or cultural development, at bottom, one with political symptoms and feedbacks certainly. It is not a biological phenomenon. Let's avoid those metaphors; they have been badly misused in the hands of European pseudointellectual ideologies too recently to revive them, and don't deserve revisiting.

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