Thursday, September 23, 2004
UN: anachronistic, incompetent, corrupt, obsessed
"On Tuesday, four days after a U.N. agency told Iran not to do it, Iran announced that it has begun processing 37 tons of yellowcake (milled uranium) into a gas as part of a process to produce a compound that can be used in nuclear power plants but that also can be a precursor of highly enriched uranium for weapons."
- George F. Will , September 22
Right-wing (and these days that includes anyone and anything pro-US) interests appear to have hit back effectively and hard at UN Secretary-General Annan following his recent Iraq-invasion-as-"illegal" tango with the BBC. They have raised some valid, and consequently sad, points. See in particular the recent items from Claudia Rosset and Victor Davis Hanson in the WSJ, which I am about to paraphrase shamelessly.
Leading off though is Israeli Foreign Minister Shalom, who yesterday urged the General Assembly to end it's (truly amazing) obsession with Israel.
Is it an "obsession", you ask (duly implementing scare quotes where any "official", "Israeli" statement is made)?
Well, consider the staggering fact that (per Hanson) "nearly half of (UN) resolutions in the past half-century have been aimed at punishing (democratic) Israel!"
As Shalom* reminds us, just in the last 2 years the UN has passed something like 26 anti-Israel resolutions. This while paying scant attention to, oh, nuclear scares from North Korea and Iran, beheadings and slaughters of innocents in Iraq, starvation and genocide in Sudan.
Not to mention the offer of reward payment by erstwhile Iraqi dictator Hussein to families of Jew-mauling murder bombers (something like a US-equivalent $25,000 a ... pop, if memory serves me correctly). Nor to mention the daily headlines in Israeli newspapers about - think about this, perhaps - missile attacks on civilian suburbs in Israel launched from Palestinian areas, and the many, many suicide attacks that are foiled or otherwise do not succeed.
Not much UN tut-tutting about any of this, not compared to the endless horn-honking about Israel.
But the UN is a body where Libya has chaired the Commission on Human Rights (of which Zimbabwe is a member), where France sits on the Security Council while Germany, India and Japan do not, and where many of the same dictators who might be removed from power or jailed in the name of democratic liberty are voting members and control large voting blocs.
Is it an anachronism? If not, how competent is it at a decision-making body?
Adding considerable and perhaps devastating weight to such questions are the recent revelations about rampant UN corruption, prevalent and suspected over many years and raising it's head this time in the form of the so-called "oil-for-food" graftocracy. Even as Nobel Peace hero and self-styled international legal expert Kofi "I can do business with Saddam" Annan is accused of stonewalling various investigations, accusations are pouring out about the possible involvement of his own son in corruption.
There appears to be damning evidence that top UN administrators received enormous bribes.
Worse, despite the huge - billion-dollar - fees earned by Annan's secretariat in running the program, it seems a safe bet that Saddam reaped spanking personal profits, didn't miss a beat in building his weapons arsenal, continued to deprive people of basic necessities, and funnelled loads and loads of cash to terrorists.
* Salaam
