UNITED NATIONS (CNN) -- After years as an international pariah, Libya on Thursday ascended the world stage, taking over the rotating post as president of the U.N. Security Council.
Labels: folly, libya, UN Corruption
Read the whole commentary, from Investors Business Daily .United Nations: The U.N. voted 178-1 to hike its spending 10% next year to an all-time high of $4.2 billion. The lone standout in voting against the record rise in spending? The U.S., which again finds itself alone at the U.N.
The U.S. has tried for some time to rein in the runaway United Nations and its various extremist political factions and bureaucracies, but to no avail. Now, the U.S. has become an outcast in the very organization it founded and has funded for 60 years.
Last Saturday, the U.N. announced its "marathon talks" had resulted in a $4.17 billion basic budget — even though the U.S. dissented. By the way, our dissent is meaningless, since we're still obliged to pay just under a quarter of that budget, or roughly $922 million.
But we in fact pay much more than that each year.
In 2005, the most recent year for which data are available, we spent more than $5 billion on the U.N. and related activities, ranging from food programs to peacekeeping. That's a rise of 67% during George Bush's first term alone. So much for stingy Americans.
Too bad we're not getting our money's worth. In fact, the U.N. has become such a massive, unwieldy, corrupt organization that, at this point, it seems beyond repair.
To list the U.N.'s multitudinous sins here would require something the size of a phone book. Suffice to say, in recent years the U.N. has been involved in a variety of policy debacles and outright crimes.
These include the oil-for-food scandal, the largest financial scandal ever; charges that U.N. peacekeepers abused and prostituted young girls in Africa and the Balkans; did nothing about the genocide of millions of people in Darfur and Rwanda; turned its back on democratic Taiwan in favor of communist China; allows Iran to expand its illicit nuclear enrichment program; and so on.
Why such a bad record? Part of the problem is the U.N., which was started after World War II with the best of humanitarian intentions, has been hijacked by a variety of left-wing and anti-Semitic agendas, pushed by an aggressive pack of anti-U.S. and anti-democratic nations that tend to vote as a bloc in the U.N.
According to Heritage Foundation fellow Brett Schaefer, these U.N. voting blocs include the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the so-called Non-Aligned Movement, and the Group of 77 developing nations (which has 130 members — not 77.) All these groups are, in fact, anti-American, anti-West and anti-free market.
"So, where the U.N. actually could have a role in advancing economic policies that enhanced freedom, that enhanced opportunity, that enhanced economic development," former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton recently explained, "the mind-set of the U.N. itself as played out in its conference rooms and corridors is actually exactly to the contrary."
The U.N., in short, has become a major way for nondemocratic, noncapitalist countries to siphon wealth from the wealthy countries — without doing anything that remotely looks like democratic, pro-market reform in their own countries.
The U.S. goes along mainly because there are many people out there — call them UNICEF-Americans — who actually believe the U.N.'s propaganda about saving "the children."
But, in fact, if you're a child in the Third World, you have righteous cause to curse the U.N. and the nongovernmental organizations it empowers to control your life. Where the U.N. goes, democracy doesn't necessarily follow. Nor does development.
Just look at the Palestinian problem, which has festered for more than a half a century due to the U.N.'s never-ending solicitude for the Arab world's hatred of the Jews.
Again in 2006, Israel topped the list of countries subjected to human rights criticism — not China, not Zimbabwe, not Venezuela, not North Korea, not Sudan, not Cuba, places where millions have been murdered, imprisoned and denied the most basic of human rights and freedoms. (The U.S., by the way, came in fourth.)
This sick fixation on Israel and the U.S. has ruined the U.N. Yet, in 2009, it's planning to hold its "Durban II" conference. The last conference of the type, held in the summer of 2001, was a monthlong hate-fest against both Israel and the U.S. Perhaps not coincidentally, just days after it ended the 9/11 attacks occurred.
We've had enough, thank you. The U.N. wastes billions each year, while corruption flourishes. It's time for the U.S. to pull out.
Let the tyrants and bureaucrats go home. Maybe we can form a new organization based on the 89 countries classified as "fully free" by the nonpartisan human rights group, Freedom House. That would give us almost half of the U.N.'s 192 current members — a good start for a new beginning.
Labels: Foreign Aid, foreign policy, taxes, UN Corruption
Today Iranian "President" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bragged that Iran has now built 3,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges, and are ever closer to their goal of becoming a nuclear power. When it comes to defying the so-called international community Ahmadinejad knows no bounds. And why would he, when there are never any consequences?
For example, see the reaction of the Italian premier:Italian Premier Romano Prodi said Tuesday that Iran has every right to develop a peaceful nuclear program, while the international community has an equal right to verify its peaceful nature using the existing judicial measures.
In a speech delivered to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, on a visit to Rome, Prodi also said that Italy opposes any military action against Iran over Tehran's contentious nuclear program because such an attack could destabilize the entire Middle East.
Italy, as of this year a non-permanent member of the UN. Security Council, traditionally has good relations with Tehran and maintains a strong presence in Iran's gas market through Italian oil and gas giant Eni SpA.
Well I hear Sharia law is very "stable," Mr. Prodi. And by the way, last time I checked, the West's 60-year post-World War Two policy of "stability at any cost" is exactly what brought us to this point of illiberal despots acquiring doomsday technology.
At least the new German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, seems to recognize that potential Iranian nuclear weapons are, on the contrary, the very definition of destabilization. But when it comes to Europe those like Merkel seem to be the exception.
This is doubly true regarding the League of Perpetually Debating Unelected Corrupt Statesmen, also known as the United Nations. As with Iraq for 12 years of worthless unenforcable sanctions, the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency and the law of unintended consequences are increasing the likelihood that individual states use military force because its own incompetence.[WSJ] So Mohamed ElBaradei finds it "distressing" that neither Israel nor the U.S. shared information with him about an apparent Syrian nuclear program before Israeli jets destroyed it on September 6. Imagine that: Not everyone is prepared to entrust the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency with their national security.
For the past year, Mr. ElBaradei has been running an independent foreign policy from his IAEA perch. People tell him he is "doing God's work" -- or so he tells the New York Times. In August, he announced a nuclear agreement he had reached with Iran's mullahs, without consulting his political superiors at the agency. Even the Europeans protested that one.
The agreement made no reference to the U.N. Security Council's demand that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment program, a demand Mr. ElBaradei himself dismisses as moot. The agreement also allowed the Iranians to dribble out information on the dozen outstanding questions the IAEA has yet to resolve.
Mr. ElBaradei has coasted on the IAEA's reputation as the authoritative source of information on the world's nuclear secrets. Yet this is the same agency that was taken by surprise by nuclear projects in Libya, North Korea and Iraq in the 1980s. And now in Syria, which in September was voted co-chair of the IAEA's General Conference.
All this is reason enough for the U.S., Israel and any other country serious about stopping nuclear proliferation to refuse Mr. ElBaradei's not-so-good diplomatic offices. Not surprisingly, the Syrians are hailing the IAEA chief for saying neither Israel nor the U.S. had provided "any evidence" to suggest Damascus was in the nuclear business. Satellite images show the Syrians have now covered their tracks in the desert.
Finally comes a similar warning from Investors Business Daily through a more historical approach: the lessons of Carter's Hostage Crisis, Reagan's Iran-Contra, and Clinton's September 11-Bosnia and Khobar Towers affairs should be seared into our collective memory. 30 years of presidency were all bitten by the false hope of Iranian reasonability.
Labels: Iran, proliferation, UN Corruption
The Philidelphia Inquirer published my letter criticizing Stu Bykofsky's column:According to Stu Bykofsky, Bush I did everything right. Then why are we still dealing with Iraq today? Perpetual no-fly zones. Troops in the Middle East, a common raison d'guerre from Islamic terrorists to this day. The unenforceable sanctions regime that empowered a multibillion-dollar U.N. oil-for-food corruption scheme. Bill Clinton's 1998 Operation Desert Fox campaign. All of these are but an iceberg's tip of problems that came to fruition because Bush I did everything wrong.
You may have already read this though.
Labels: 9-11, Bush 41, Clinton, Gulf War, Iraq, Oil-for-Food, UN Corruption
In a Philly.com column cited on The Drudge Report, columnist Stu Bykofsky makes a great number of childish logical errors.
Here's the worst: According to Bykofsky, "Bush I did everything right."
Really? Then why are we still dealing with Iraq today?
Perpetual no-fly zones. Troops in the middle east - a common raison d'guerre from Islamic terrorists to this day. The unenforceable sanctions regime that empowered a multi-billion dollar United Nations oil-for-food corruption scheme. Bill Clinton's 1998 Operation Desert Fox campaign (conducted on the basis that Iraq had WMD, conveniently forgotten by Bush II administration critics). All of these are but an iceberg's tip of problems that came to fruition because Bush I did everything wrong, not right.
George H. W. Bush's solution was to deal with Iraq by not actually dealing with Iraq. And it was hardly just Bush's paradigm. It was shared by foreign policy analysts on both left and right, cited to this day from both Madaline Albright to James Baker as the proper policy. But we know now it was an ignorant application of Cold War logic to new enemies. These old guard Clinton and Bush I associates were - and some still are - stuck in the past.
People may reasonably debate as to the wisdom of our current war in Iraq, "mistakes made," and all that nonsense we never discuss regarding past wars, and certainly not during them. But to label the 1991 Gulf War a success is to redefine the word in Orwellian terms. It was procrastination, nothing more.
Labels: Bush 41, Clinton, Gulf War, Iraq, Oil-for-Food, UN Corruption
Disgraced antiwar British MP George Galloway troubles are only beginning writes Christopher Hitchens in Slate.I do not think that an 18-day suspension from the House of Commons is anything like enough punishment for what Galloway has done, first on behalf of a sadistic and genocidal megalomaniac and second to steal food and medicine from the mouths of desperate Iraqis. We ran into each other a few times on his debate-tour, and on the last occasion on which we exchanged views, when he told me that he would never debate with me again (which he has since consistently refused to do), I told him that we were not done with each other. I would, I told him, be waiting to write a review of his prison diaries. The Senate subcommittee has now referred his "false and misleading" statements under oath (a crime under 18 USC Section 1001) to the Department of Justice. Prosecutors in Manhattan (location of the banks through which some of the shady transfers were made) have also been handed the relevant papers. And the evidence adduced by the House of Commons must necessarily be considered by Scotland Yard, because it goes far beyond the damage done to the honor of Parliament. In the meantime, it will be interesting to discover whether Galloway's former wife, or the associates of his campaign who also received "Oil for Food" money [first payment for $150,000, the second for $120,000], ever declared the income or paid any tax on it. And if I was the editor of the Daily Telegraph in London, whose printed documents about Galloway appear to have been vindicated by the parliamentary inquiry, I would want to revisit the judgment for libel that Galloway astonishingly managed to win, even under a notoriously oppressive law, in an English court. His troubles are only now beginning.
Just look at the gang that strove to prevent the United Nations from enforcing its library of resolutions on Saddam Hussein. Where are they now? Gerhard Schroeder, ex-chancellor of Germany, has gone straight to work for a Russian oil-and-gas consortium. Vladimir Putin, master of such consortia and their manipulation, is undisguised in his thirst to re-establish a one-party state. Jacques Chirac, who only avoided prosecution for corruption by getting himself immunized by re-election (and who had Saddam's sons as his personal guests while in office, and built Saddam Hussein a nuclear reactor while knowing what he wanted it for), is now undergoing some unpleasant interviews with the Paris police. So is his cynical understudy Dominique de Villepin, once the glamour-boy of the "European" school of diplomacy without force. What a crew! Galloway is the most sordid of this group because he managed to be a pimp for, as well as a prostitute of, one of the foulest dictatorships of modern times. But the taint of collusion and corruption extends much further than his pathetic figure, and one day, slowly but surely, we shall find out the whole disgusting thing.
And as with all things disgusting, they usually involve the United Nations.
Speaking of which, Melanie Kirkpatrick explains a year long investigation of the United Nations Development Program -- financed in large part by US taxdollars, by the way -- finds that the agency "procured and delivered to North Korea in May 2006 technology that could be used for military purposes."
Nice.
Labels: Iraq, North Korea, UN Corruption
