Victor Davis Hanson Ping !
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Note: victorhanson.com is a MUST EXCERPT website :^(
Posted on 09/23/2004 7:16:32 PM PDT by quidnunc
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 UN 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 Madeline Albright proud, without the Churchillian ‘victory at any cost rhetoric.’ Good luck.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at victorhanson.com ...
FYI
The UN has forsaken its potential as a facilitator for civilized nations and has become the epitome of bureaucratic malaise. There are many who stubbornly cling to an idealistic vision of the UN, but ignore what it has become.
We need to ask ourselves if the UN has any hope of relevancy for the future.
'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.'
Tell it like it is Victor!
The UN lost its relevancy in 1950 as 300,000 ChiCom troops flooded across the Yalu. By not permitting the reunification of Korea after Kim Il Sung's troops had been driven to defeat, the UN showed that it was never interested in freedom, but was just interested in it's own existance.
I can not be the lone individual who actually remembers the late 1970s and the early 1980s media hyperbole regarding quasi-religious cults.
Anyone remember the Moonies at the airport?
Deprogramming specialists?
Cult intervention techniques?
Charles Manson?
Islam is Manson on steroids, before Jim Jones prescribed the Kool-aid as the only sure cure for the cult minded individual.
Call the evil, evil, and half the problem is solved.
I don't understand professed Jews and Christians who tap dance around the subject in the socialist proscribed worship of secular PC.
Tolerate evil intent my @ss!
It seems to me a whole bunch of people need to decide which side they will side with, in this latest fight of the eternal battle of good vs evil.
Basic spirituality, people!
Non-denominational, basic choices.
Are you with God?
Or are you with his nemesis?
The hard truth is that the UN is stronger than ever.
Taking part in the "coalition of the willing" has finished Aznar and deeply damaged Blair and Howard. And that fact limits severely our options on Iraq and Syria. Bush and Rumsfeld can forget about putting together any coalitions to deal with them.
Bush went to the UN because that was the political price the "coalition of the willing" demanded of him. They needed that political fig leaf for domestic political consumption because that is what their voters demanded. However the political cost for them has been so high that any future "coalition of the willing" will demand 10 UN resolutions authorizing force up front before putting their heads on a political chopping block.
Let me know if you want in or out
Note: victorhanson.com is a MUST EXCERPT website :^(
Inside the Asylum
Why the United Nations and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think
http://www.townhall.com/bookclub/babbin.html
By Jed Babbin
Review by Charles Mitchell
To be honest, one can discern Jed Babbin's main theme in Inside the Asylum having read only the subtitle: it is a scathing indictment of the United Nations and "old" European countries like France, Germany, and Belgium. After watching him turn his rhetorical guns and national defense expertise on Kofi Annan and our so-called allies across the Atlantic, one wonders how a principled conservative like Babbin was able to get a job in the first - and distinctly un-conservative - Bush administration.
In the very first chapter, the former deputy undersecretary of defense writes, "One definition of insanity is doing the same thing, in the same way, over and over again expecting different results." Thus the book's title becomes clear: Babbin considers the UN to be an "asylum" in which democratic countries suffer from that specific type of insanity. Specifically, Babbin writes,
[Diplomatic nations] always want to give the UN another chance to be what it was supposed to be: a forum for nations of good will to meet and settle disputes peacefully without resort to war. Instead, today's UN is a diplomatic version of the Mad Hatter's tea party, where good is evil, right is wrong, and every dictator or despot is given the same rights and privileges as the leaders of free nations.
Turning to his native country, he continues:
For the United States, the UN is a quagmire of diplomacy in which wars can be lost but not won, alliances can dissolve but not be formed, the birth of nuclear terrorism is being watched but not aborted, and no adult supervision is imposed on a Third World playground where anti-Americanism is the favorite game.
Such themes are emphasized throughout the book. Babbin sets out to prove that the UN is so bad that the United States needs to stop wasting time trying to fix it and just get out - indeed, one chapter is entitled "UN Reform: A Fool's Errand." He continually goes back to the idea that the UN considers dictatorships and democracies to be morally equivalent, allowing the former to tie down the latter. Because of this, the UN is failing at the purposes for which it was established in 1945.
Babbin makes several startling claims about the UN that are sure to provoke a reaction from his readers. For instance, he labels the UN the "handmaiden of terrorism" for funding terrorist groups, providing terrorists with a base of operations in the U.S. (at its headquarters, so long as they are ostensibly there as diplomats), and turning a blind eye to nuclear proliferation and the crimes of Yassir Arafat. He also castigates the fraud and waste in the UN's Oil-for-Food Program, dubbing it "Kofigate," after UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. That scandal is only one of the various charges he levels against the UN's head honcho, whom he sees as centralizing an unprecedented amount of power around himself in order to stymie the United States and UN reform.
In the second half of the book, Babbin turns his sights to target "Old Europe," freely appropriating Secretary Rumsfeld's term for our traditional allies in Western Europe. Not surprisingly, he is outraged by the obstructionist efforts of France, Germany, and Belgium toward the United States, particularly during the days leading up to the Iraq war.
More interesting than this rather traditional conservative fare, though, is Babbin's take on European unification and NATO. He is deeply suspicious of further EU centralization, not understanding how there can be one single "European" foreign policy, and seeing the whole enterprise as a Franco-German effort to unify Europe as a counterweight to the U.S. He sees NATO, on the other hand, as a large part of the solution to the problems he points out with regard to the UN and the EU. Unlike the UN, he says, NATO is made up of democratic nations - so the U.S. does not have to worry about kowtowing to the likes of Syria and Libya. So while Babbin argues that the U.S. should disengage from the UN, he favors further engagement with NATO, particularly its "New European" members. Such a policy shift, he says, will end the harmful practice of engaging in endless and useless UN "diplomacy" while allowing the U.S. to shed its mistaken reputation of being unilateral.
Babbin buttresses his arguments (particularly his claims about nefarious UN activities) with 50 pages of primary sources in an Appendix. That added credibility, combined with his easy-to-read writing style, makes Inside the Asylum an enjoyable and informative read. However, a word of caution: Babbin's book is only applicable to a certain audience. Someone who does not already think the UN and Old Europe are bad is not likely to, as the subtitle suggests, believe that they are "worse" - and due to the book's length constraints, the argument for why they are bad simply is not there. The book performs its purpose excellently; one just needs to keep in mind what that is.
In Inside the Asylum, Babbin tackles his subject as if he were a great military leader: he decides exactly what his mission is, enters the arena, wipes the floor with the enemy, and gets out. We can only hope the leaders of today follow his example and don't waste their time with useless chatter.
Charles Mitchell is a summer 2004 Townhall intern. He is entering his senior year at Bucknell University, where he serves as president of the Bucknell Conservatives Club and executive editor of its magazine, The Counterweight.
Yes Bush went to the UN. And what did he do...read them the riot act.
And that fact limits severely our options on Iraq and Syria. Bush and Rumsfeld can forget about putting together any coalitions to deal with them.
How has our options been severely limited? Lets remember why we went into Iraq, and what we're trying to do, and it's not kill terrorists (although that's always a good thing).
Our options have been limited by the fact that absent the UN we simply no longer have the diplomatic capital to put together another "coalition of the willing". Bush's voters feel no need of a UN license, but Blair's, Howard's, Berlusconi's, and Aznar's definitely do.
Iraq has hardly whetted the appetite of the American public for more MidEast military adventures. The next president who wants a ground war in the Mid East will get nothing like the blank check Bush did.
BTTT
No more UN for US-list
If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
Yes, but first we must turn off the money spigot.
And FoxNews has been almost silent on the Oil for Food scandal. Such a disappointment!
In the next day or two, I'm going to freepmail you on a couple of items I have saved. If 10% of it is true, (I want your opinion), we should be very afraid.
Bush needs to take this opportunity to get us out of the U.N. but he won't.
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