Your Money or Your… Money

Yesterday morning I posted about the pirates in the Strait of Malacca, including the two recent attacks on UN aid-carrying ships. It made me wonder if the UN should designate the pirates as NGOs, and thereby eliminate piracy with a bureaucratic stroke of the pen.

Well, Fellow Peacekeeper does not really consider this a joke. In the comments he said this:

Actually, you may be joking about not joking but I think it’s not a joke.

At a guess the UN-hired ships were in cahoots with the “pirates” (if the pirates were not actually hired for the purpose) and took a cut of the profit. And that is pretty much UN standard practise. The aid was probably purchased from friends and relatives for inflated prices, and quite possibly destined to be resold commercially by the party receiving the aid. Consequently it is only logical that the transport side join in the game, and oops! pirates stole the aid! For extra bastard points the stolen aid may be sold again to the UN in order to be stolen again to… etc. All this insecurity demands more security staff, who may or may not be qualified but since they are not actually providing security that doesn’t matter. Of course security staff decrease the margin for piracy by adding another layer to those receiving a cut, but hey, as long as New York is happy…

You see? International cooperation at work. Corruption is your friend, and Kofi’s! It cuts out that uneccessary violence and everybody profits. The UN staff, their friends and relatives and associates in the logistics and supply and security and distibution businesses and NGOs, and governments both receiving and giving and transiting. That’s many many many people. Just neither the ones who pay for this, nor those who really need it.

Anyone think I’m joking?

In a later post yesterday I wrote about the “Demonic Convergence” of Islam and crime:

The theology and ideology of Islam are eminently compatible with criminal behavior, and an operational jihad organization is functionally indistinguishable from a criminal enterprise.

Is this why the UN and the Arab League get on so well together? Does this help explain the virtually unanimous votes against the rule of law by the representatives of Muslim countries in the General Assembly?

Turtle Bay, Barbary Coast — how can you tell the difference?