Friday, September 16, 2005

Sustainable Corruption

 
Terrorist preaches to the empty pews.Yesterday Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad was treated to the diplomatic version of “Talk to the Hand.” Playing to a house of empty seats, Mr. Ahmadinejad preached on a variation of the Islamofascist theme of Muslim supremacy, Iranian style.

Last we heard, the US was not going to honor this thug’s visa. What with the breathless 24/7 Katrina coverage, Ahmadinejad must have somehow slipped by the Customs agents while they watched nonstop death-and-doom New Orleans. Or maybe the State Department weenied out again.

This whole affair would be disturbing except for one thing: the UN — corrupt and degraded beyond any possible salvage — has rendered itself irrelevant. When you think of the UN, think of a bunch of decrepit eunuchs singing “Stouthearted Men.”

Having John Bolton holding down the Fort on First Avenue is George Bush’s greatest joke. The perfect subterfuge, it lulls everyone into thinking the Administration gives a damn about what goes on at Turtle Bay. Bolton is a man of integrity set down in a cesspool, a “diplomat” who has said that he would like the top ten stories of his bailiwick done away with. Just the man for the job of watchdog. Sheepdog. Guard dog.

And what is he guarding, precisely? Why, nothing. That’s the beauty of the whole thing. Sending Bolton sends the message that we care about the UN, and we want the best possible person in there, taking care of business.

With that sleight of hand, we can now simply ignore the UN. Sure, the President will show up for speeches and will make all the proper noises at the appropriate time, but the reality is that we will ignore the whole dog and pony show while maintaining the polite fiction of paying attention. A kind of “listening between bathroom breaks” attention.

That’s why we need Kofi Annan in charge. Or, rather, we need not to waste energy on having him removed. As Mark Steyn says,
    …if, as I do, you believe 90 per cent of UN ‘reforms’ are likely to be either meaningless or actively harmful, a discredited and damaged secretary-general clinging to office is as good as it’s likely to get — short of promoting Didier Bourguet, the UN staffer in Congo and the Central African Republic charged with running a paedophile ring. A UN that refuses to hold Kofi Annan to account will be harder to pass off as a UN that represents the world’s ‘moral authority’, in Clare Short’s blissfully surreal characterisation.
You see, there is no cure for the UN. It can’t be reformed, regrouped, or ever made into anything resembling an effective bureaucracy (pardon the oxymoron).

So let’s keep Kofi:
    What’s important to understand is that Mr Annan’s ramshackle UN of humanitarian money-launderers, peacekeeper-rapists and a human rights commission that looks like a lifetime-achievement awards ceremony for the world’s torturers is not a momentary aberration. Nor can it be corrected by bureaucratic reforms designed to ensure that the failed budget oversight committee will henceforth be policed by a budget oversight committee oversight committee. The oil-for-food fiasco is the UN, the predictable spawn of its utopian fantasies and fetid realities. If Saddam grasped this more clearly than Clare Short or Polly Toynbee, well, that’s why he is — was — an A-list dictator and they’re not.
Wasn’t that easy? The UN done and dispensed with. Crossed off your to-do list. Now we can get on with the job of building strong alliances with our real friends, the ones in the Anglosphere.

Sail on, Kofi. Sail on.


Hat Tip: Jihad Watch.

10 comments:

El Jefe Maximo said...

Steyn is onto something here. As I have said before, I've always been believer in keeping Kofi right where he is...

That is, until today...

I, El Jefe Maximo, announce the formation of the "Draft Didier Bourguet for Secretary General Committee (DDBSGC). Carrying on in the worthy footsteps of Kurt Waldheim, Boutros of the Two Names, and Kofi, DiDiBo is just the man to bring the UN into the 14th Century.

All power to DiDiBo !

John Sobieski said...

UN is a corrupt cesspool. We can ignore it as much as we can, but we still pay the Dhimmi tax, oh we pay.

Meanwhile, the Left still fantasizes that the UN is a meaningul institute. The Left is fighting for all the wrong things. It used to not be this bad, but they stepped off the cliff years ago, and we still haven't heard the splat, but it's coming.

al fin said...

I recommend this entity as the next UN Secretary General. She is every bit as intelligent as any of the third world types who have filled the role recently, and with some added enhancements she might be able to persuade recalcitrant dictators to behave properly, using charms unavailable to Kofi or the other low-rent SGs.

She can be programmed to work for the advancement of all mankind, and is impervious to bribery.

El Jefe Maximo said...

Al Fin definitely has an idea worthy of study. The UN should appoint a Blue Ribbon Commission, with its own stationery, offices and a budget of millions to look into it. If his candidate is not considered "seasoned" enough to be SecGen immediately, perhaps "she" could serve an "apprenticship" as DiDiBo's executive assistant

Baron Bodissey said...

I'm sure ceratin folk at the UN are looking forward to the day she is "fully functional", if you get my drift...

They may be in the market for some cyber-boys, too.

bordergal said...

Yep, but we still get to pay 23% of it's budget.

I think I would prefer to let the UN "sail on" without my taxpayer dollars.

Redneck Texan said...

Don't underestimate the potential danger of any world political body such as the UN. Because conflict is always in somebody's best interest it will always fail in its designed purpose of spreading freedom to every corner of the globe, but now that there is no soviet boogieman its the perfect vehicle for global socialism and anti-Americanism to flourish in. 95% of its members have a legitimate self-interest driven agenda that would benefit with a weaker America. Why we would ever support such an institution is beyond belief, and its usefulness is as dated as France having greater political clout than Japan, Germany, or India is. We put France in the role of tie-breaker when foreign occupation and Soviet atrocities were still fresh in their mind and that short-sighted decision on our part has come back and bit us in the arse more than once.

Reading your fine article, I kept waiting for the "Anglosphere" shoe to drop, and was not disappointed, but I would like to expand that into the "responsible-sphere".

Lets just humor ourselves for the moment and pretend that we don't see an obvious disparage in corruption levels between English speaking, European descendant founded nations and the majority of member states at the UN. The main reason the UN is corrupt is simply because there is no qualification for membership. Its strives for inclusiveness without regard for character. A brutal dictator or irrational Theocrat has as equal a vote there as a nation that genuinely strives to make a positive contribution to humanity and world peace. The UN's charter makes no distinction between the forces of good or evil, but then pretends to have the global high moral ground at the same time...the perfect recipe for irrelevance and functional paralysis.

We need a global body where initial membership is based on your nation's track record, and continued membership is based on your present day actions. Yes, the Anglosphere nations would all be automatically members, but any nation that met the stringent prerequisites could join, though dues would be honestly distributed according to their GNP, and the first perquisite is that they can't be a member of the corrupt UN. I would not even require them to be a Democracy, a benevolent dictator can act in the best interests of his society if he chooses to. I can see many...er..some non-Anglosphere nations meeting that criteria. Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan, and possibly some Western and Eastern European nations could slide in there based on merit. Economic policies should give member states preference in trade policies, with a healthy penalty for non-member states. That fact alone, compared to the blind inclusiveness of the UN, would make the new world body a real catalyst for inciting currently corrupt nations to consider real reform.

Of course this new body would need to have a military component to counter the forces of the corrupt majority of non-member states, but at least the decision to use it could be based on facts and not just a single veto wielder's best interests, or a compromise with nations that want a weaker America.

There again I am not a big believer in the entire concept of friends among nations period, maybe no world body is the ticket.

But at any rate Baron, I just cant imagine the US walking away from its post-war diplomatic creation, no matter how corrupt and anti-American it becomes. It would be a violation of every diplomatic principle we have ever exercised to suddenly start doing the right thing now. We are going to continue to harbor fantasies of reforming this corrupt body no matter how irrelevant it continues to be. We act like its some kind of freakin honor to have all the world's dictators and tyrants come to New York for a meeting, hell we are fixin to fund a remodel of their US taxpayer funded 5-star hotel. There is no way a current or future political environment here would allow us to break away from the blind inclusiveness of the UN to form a union with the other members of the Anglosphere, perhaps because many in our nation don't recognize that we are a member of it now, and by the time the UN implodes we probably wouldn't meet the requirements anymore ourselves.

The US is becoming like a mirror of the UN, we carry more brands of cultural baggage every year. We have voluntarily discarded our founding identity to the point that our founding fathers would no longer recognize their creation, and we are teaching our children that that is a good thing....because from what I gather via our monitoring our modern media our founding fathers were some evil racists chauvinist pigs by today's standards, how could they possibly know anything about freedom and liberty anyway, multiculturalism wasn't even in their primitive vocabulary.

Dymphna said...

Redneck T. --

Salient points all. I won't -- can't -- address all of them, but here's a few.

First, your idea of a "club" based on meritocracy is spot on. Some group, maybe a member of the Freedomist Network, has a database of all countries, rating them by various freedoms (speech, voting, property, etc.) and tracks their record over several years. I found it via Mark Humphrys' web site (see our blogroll), but don't remember exactly how.

Second, the US deserves a little credit for eventual maturing and complexity. Ol' George glad-hands everybody and smiles and smiles. That's the Texas version of Chinese inscrutable. "Ah so, Mr. Annan."

A few triumphs: went to Iraq over everyone's objections; blithely continue to incur global hatred because we support Israel; refuse to sign on to the Kyoto suicide pact, etc.

I disagree. We are not a mirror of the UN. Our elites are, but so what? They are a very thin crust on the body politic. A crust so thin it has holes in places -- holes where some of those self-satisfied mandarins are falling through even now.

As for what we're teaching our children, the tide is turning. Go read The Common Room.

Redneck Texan said...

Sorry Dymphna, I need to look at who authors all the fine work here, before I start rambling mindlessly. I see where the Baron gets all his good material from. ;-)

So can you imagine a scenario where the US abandons and ejects the UN, and do you think we could coerce some friendly nations to start over with us?

Or do you think we will just keep playing their game, and acting unilaterally when it supports our best interests?

It just seems like if threatening Iran and North Korea with "taking them to the UNSC" is an obvious waste of time, but we seem to have adopted a mentality that its a necessary step for legitimacy.

Surely we realize taking that step will be a fruitless delay....so why do we even bother? Veto wielders have both of their backs. Why are we going through the dog & pony show?

Are we trying to stall long enough to pass the problem off to yet another administration?

Papa Ray said...

"what I gather via our monitoring our modern media our founding fathers were some evil racists chauvinist pigs by today's standards, how could they possibly know anything about freedom and liberty anyway, multiculturalism wasn't even in their primitive vocabulary."

Well, your right aout "multiculturalism' not being considered. What they wanted was stated in the preamble to the consitution, not a bunch of different "groups" trying to make it on their own and not trying to be "gung ho". Look it up, if you don't know what it means.

Oh, you forgot about mentioning our "higher learning instutions" and how they are governed and taught by the most extreme liberals in this Nation..if not the world.

Skipping over your excellent thoughts, [sorry] to..

"Are we trying to stall long enough to pass the problem off to yet another administration?"

Well, if you mean the Bush Administration( with all the associated advisors), passing it off, that may be true to some extent.

Of course, they are planning on passing it off to a right wing republican who will continue the fight that Bush has started.

First let me say this.

The Military is saying (believe me this is true) we can't do enough now to be sure of containing the increased terrorism if we attack any more countries.

In case you forgot, the present U.S. Military is in transision and is not yet equipped or trained to fight the "next war". They are training and working as hard as they can while fighting the continuing terrorists attacks in several countries. Believe me when I say, our SO people are hard at work.

That said, why don't "we" just forget about talking and pleading with the U.N.? Well, because we need the help of other countries? That would be nice, but we would have to kiss so much ass and give so much money to get it...
We are never going to try it, at least, pass the verbage we have to say to sound civilized to the rest of the socialist and America hating world.

The reason is: If we don't, the left, the Muslims and the socialist world will have more ammo{amplified] to say we are an unresponsible, uncaring conquerer of poor unprotected, innocent nations and peoples.

Which of course, WE ARE, except for the unresponsible and uncaring parts.

We want to protect them and to give them the chance to determine their destiny. "Nation Building".

Now there has been another joker thrown in the deck. Yes, the disaster that has overtaken our Nation in LA,MS and AL.

Forget the cost, that WILL be overcome. But the commitment and the need to show that our focus is on repairing and restoring that area, is going to interfer with any other plans, the present administration had or has concerning the ME.

Does that mean the next administration will have the U.N.,ME [Islamic Conquest] and the continuing disaster recovery[s] to continue to take care of?

Yes, to all. They all will continue way past 2008. The fight against the Islamic Conquest of the World will continue on for generations. The fight to keep NO above water for as long as we decide to keep it there.

The fight to clean up and make the U.N. what it should be will be forever as long as "they" allow terrorist states and dictators to be member states.

You can't have the fox (several sly ones) in charge of security of the world.

There are no easy answers to all the problems the U. S. and the "western world" faces.

But...[I love that word] the only answer to Islamic overthrow of the world is to STOP them however, whenever we can.

Because, they are not going to quit until they are all dead or behind bars of steel [with no virgins of any kind].

Papa Ray
West Texas
USA