Mark Steyn: Just Like E.F. Hutton
The old axiom of the eighties was "When E.F. Hutton speaks, people listen." This should be equally as true for Mark Steyn. Mark, as our readers know, is an excellent columnist, blogger, and pundit. He has an uncanny knack of being able to drive the point home through irreverent humor and knowledge that would shut up even the most staunch liberals. He recently had a speech at Hillsdale college. It's long, and I'm not going to cite it here. (Our readers eyes are likely to glaze over from Marcie's piece this afternoon; I'm not going to force them to sleep.) That doesn't mean that his speech is boring. It's not. But two extremely long posts in one day is a bit much, so I am simply going to cite this area of his speech which concerns the United Nations.
In fact, however, the UN is a shamefully squalid organization whose corruption is almost impossible to exaggerate. If you think—as the media and the left do in this country—that Iraq is a God-awful mess (which it’s not), then try being the Balkans or Sudan or even Cyprus or anywhere where the problem’s been left to the United Nations. If you don’t want to bulk up your pension by skimming the Oil-for-Food program, no need to worry. Whatever your bag, the UN can find somewhere that suits—in West Africa, it’s Sex-for-Food, with aid workers demanding sexual services from locals as young as four; in Cambodia, it’s drug dealing; in Kenya, it’s the refugee extortion racket; in the Balkans, sex slaves. On a UN peace mission, everyone gets his piece.
Didier Bourguet, a UN staffer in Congo and the Central African Republic, enjoyed the pleasures of 12-year-old girls, and as a result is now on trial in France. His lawyer has said he was part of a UN pedophile network operating from Africa to southeast Asia. But has anyone read anything about that? The merest glimpse of a U.S. servicewoman leading an Abu Ghraib inmate around with girlie knickers on his head was enough to prompt calls for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, and for Ted Kennedy to charge that Saddam’s torture chambers were now open “under new management.” But systemic UN child sex in at least 50 percent of their missions? The transnational morality set can barely stifle their yawns. If you’re going to sexually assault prepubescent girls, make sure you’re wearing a blue helmet.
This particular issue, regarding the sex scandals, have been covered by both Marcie and myself. Appalled doesn't even beging to cover how upset we are over this. The UN, when first confronted about this, attempted to sweep this under the carpet. They even cited the excuse we used for Abu Ghraib, which was that this was only a few people. They tried that, but it ultimately failed as more and more reports kept coming out about the various sex scandals in UN missions across the globe. Whether it was "Kofi's dollar girls" in the Congo to other missions where sex was traded for food, the UN has a mess on it's hands, and it's equal in gravity to the Oil-For-Food scandal.
And at least the Pentagon put a stop to Abu Ghraib. As a British UN official in the Congo told my newspaper in London: “The crux of the problem is that if the UN gets bolshie”—that’s Britspeak for complaining aggressively—“with these governments then they stop providing the UN with troops and staff.” That’s the system in a nutshell: when a British bigwig is with British forces, he’ll enforce British standards; when a British official is holed up with an impeccably “multilateral” force of Uruguayans, Tunisians, etc., he’s more circumspect. When in Rome, do as the Visigoths do. In Congo, the UN had to forbid all contact between its predatory forces and the natives. The rest of the world should be so lucky.
The child sex racket is only the most extreme example of what’s wrong with the UN approach to the world. Developed peoples value resilience: when disaster strikes, you bounce back. A hurricane flattens Florida, you patch things up and reopen. As the New Colonial Class, the UN doesn’t look at it like that: when disaster strikes, it just proves that you and your countrymen are children who need to be taken under the transnational wing. The folks who have been under the UN wing the longest—indeed, the only ones with their own permanent UN agency and semi-centenarian “refugee camps”—are the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the earth: the Palestinians. UN territories like Kosovo are the global equivalent of inner-city housing projects with the blue helmets as local enforcers for the absentee slum landlord. By contrast, a couple of years after imperialist warmonger Bush showed up, Afghanistan and Iraq have elections, presidents and prime ministers.
And while life there isn't the best, it's far better than what they had four or five years ago. Both nations still have quite a ways to go, but not having the UN there to oversee everything helps in their natural transitions. President Bush made it clear that the UN's mission in both nations was to supply humanitarian relief, and they aren't even handling that very well. The Iraqis and Afghanis have had to rely on Uncle Sam to help them. The UN, apparently still peeved at President Bush for going into Iraq despite their protests, have barely lifted a finger. And it is all in regard to the fact that both nations refuse to be victims of the world. They have seized the day, and their destiny as free nations.
Let’s just take one of the scandals that go widely unreported in the American media—the UN Oil-for-Food program. Among the targets of the corruption investigation was Kofi Annan’s son Kojo—who had a $30,000-a-year job but managed to find a spare quarter-million dollars sitting around to invest in a Swiss football club. The investigators then broadened their sights to include Kofi’s brother Kobina Annan, the Ghanaian Ambassador to Morocco, who has ties to a businessman behind several of the entities involved in the scandal—one Michael Wilson, the son of the former Ghanaian Ambassador to Switzerland and a childhood friend of young Kojo. Mr. Wilson is currently being investigated for bribery involving a $50 million contract to renovate the Geneva offices of the UN World Intellectual Property Organization.
The actual head of the Oil-for-Food racket, Kofi sidekick Benon Sevan, has resigned, having hitherto insisted that a mysterious six-figure sum in his bank account was a gift from his elderly aunt, a lady of modest means who lived in a two-room flat in Cyprus. Paul Volcker’s investigators had planned to confirm with auntie her nephew’s version of events, but unfortunately she fell down an elevator shaft and died. (That's a shame, but convenient--too convenient--for Mr. Sevan.) It now seems likely that the windfall had less to do with Mr. Sevan’s late aunt than with his soliciting of oil allocations for a company run by a cousin of Kofi Annan’s predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
Despite current investigations into his brother, his son, his son’s best friend, his predecessor’s cousin, his former chief of staff, his procurement officer and the executive director of the UN’s biggest ever program, the Secretary-General insists he remains committed to staying on and tackling the important work of “reforming” the UN. Unfortunately, his Executive Coordinator for United Nations Reform has also had to resign.
Whoops. That certainly puts a damper on the "reform" idea Kofi has. So, does this mean that the reformation is off? Do we not have our own Martin Luther in the UN right now that can nail the 95 theses to Kofi's forehead for reference? John Bolton has done an absolutely superb job as ambassador to the UN. He's been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize because of his work in regard to Iran. He has been pushing for serious reform from day one, and he hasn't let up. Kooky Uncle Kofi had better wake up, and soon. The world has a gripe with his organization, and with his lack of leadership.
You’d think that by now, respect for the UN would be plummeting faster than Benon Sevan’s auntie down that lift shaft. After all, these aren’t peripheral figures or minor departments. They reach right into the heart of UN policy on two of the critical issues of the day—Iraq and North Korea. Most of the Ghanaian diplomatic corps and their progeny seem to have directorships at companies with UN contracts and/or Saddamite oil options.
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, say, Katie Couric or John Kerry, well, that’s why he is—was—an A-list dictator and they’re not.
No, more bureaucracy will not solve the problem. More oversight isn't going to solve the problem. Part of the solution to this problem is that the United States needs to cut off all funding to this corrupt organization. If it collapses, oh well; so much the better. The United Nations hasn't abided by it's charter in years; to my knowledge, they haven't since the day of my birth. In 1972, they were still screwing around, giving legitmacy to people like Fidel Castro. And that is something that should offend every common sense thinking individual in the world. The UN loves to prop up, and give credence to, the worst scum of the earth. From Castro to Kim Jong-Il, from Saddam Hussein to Yasser Arafat, the UN has embraced each of these people. That, in my opinion, is reprehensible. They should have been ignored and contained, not embraced.
Why was there an Oil-for-Food program in the first place? Because back in the 90s, having thrown a big old multilateral Gulf War and gotten to the gates of Baghdad, the grand UN coalition then decided against toppling Saddam. So, having shirked the responsibilities that come with having a real policy, America and its allies were in the market for a pseudo-policy. And where does an advanced Western democracy go when it wants a pseudo-policy? Why, the UN! Saddam correctly calculated that the great powers were over-invested in Oil-for-Food as a figleaf for their lack of will, and reasoned that in such an environment their figleaf would also serve as a discreet veil for all kinds of other activities. He didn’t game the system; he simply understood far better than Clinton and Bush Sr., John Major and Tony Blair how it worked.
And that is the ultimate problem with the UN. The do have the wherewithal to deceive the world to suit their own means and ends. It's time to toss the UN. It serves no purpose in this world--in a 21st Century world. In this world, today, the thugs around the world are equally as brutal, but more determined than ever to obtain the means to hold the world hostage through fear and intimidation. And that is what the UN is about. From their peacekeeping missions to their thieving principles, these people are all about anxiety and coercion. They use fear as a tool over Third World nations, and brow-beat them into accepting the UN as a part of their lives.
We have a president that decided that this organization was ineffective and irrlevant. However, I don't feel he's taken the moves necessary to really pound that point home. It's time to cut them off before they screw us over again, and at the expense of those still suffering under tyrannies around the world.
Publius II
The old axiom of the eighties was "When E.F. Hutton speaks, people listen." This should be equally as true for Mark Steyn. Mark, as our readers know, is an excellent columnist, blogger, and pundit. He has an uncanny knack of being able to drive the point home through irreverent humor and knowledge that would shut up even the most staunch liberals. He recently had a speech at Hillsdale college. It's long, and I'm not going to cite it here. (Our readers eyes are likely to glaze over from Marcie's piece this afternoon; I'm not going to force them to sleep.) That doesn't mean that his speech is boring. It's not. But two extremely long posts in one day is a bit much, so I am simply going to cite this area of his speech which concerns the United Nations.
In fact, however, the UN is a shamefully squalid organization whose corruption is almost impossible to exaggerate. If you think—as the media and the left do in this country—that Iraq is a God-awful mess (which it’s not), then try being the Balkans or Sudan or even Cyprus or anywhere where the problem’s been left to the United Nations. If you don’t want to bulk up your pension by skimming the Oil-for-Food program, no need to worry. Whatever your bag, the UN can find somewhere that suits—in West Africa, it’s Sex-for-Food, with aid workers demanding sexual services from locals as young as four; in Cambodia, it’s drug dealing; in Kenya, it’s the refugee extortion racket; in the Balkans, sex slaves. On a UN peace mission, everyone gets his piece.
Didier Bourguet, a UN staffer in Congo and the Central African Republic, enjoyed the pleasures of 12-year-old girls, and as a result is now on trial in France. His lawyer has said he was part of a UN pedophile network operating from Africa to southeast Asia. But has anyone read anything about that? The merest glimpse of a U.S. servicewoman leading an Abu Ghraib inmate around with girlie knickers on his head was enough to prompt calls for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, and for Ted Kennedy to charge that Saddam’s torture chambers were now open “under new management.” But systemic UN child sex in at least 50 percent of their missions? The transnational morality set can barely stifle their yawns. If you’re going to sexually assault prepubescent girls, make sure you’re wearing a blue helmet.
This particular issue, regarding the sex scandals, have been covered by both Marcie and myself. Appalled doesn't even beging to cover how upset we are over this. The UN, when first confronted about this, attempted to sweep this under the carpet. They even cited the excuse we used for Abu Ghraib, which was that this was only a few people. They tried that, but it ultimately failed as more and more reports kept coming out about the various sex scandals in UN missions across the globe. Whether it was "Kofi's dollar girls" in the Congo to other missions where sex was traded for food, the UN has a mess on it's hands, and it's equal in gravity to the Oil-For-Food scandal.
And at least the Pentagon put a stop to Abu Ghraib. As a British UN official in the Congo told my newspaper in London: “The crux of the problem is that if the UN gets bolshie”—that’s Britspeak for complaining aggressively—“with these governments then they stop providing the UN with troops and staff.” That’s the system in a nutshell: when a British bigwig is with British forces, he’ll enforce British standards; when a British official is holed up with an impeccably “multilateral” force of Uruguayans, Tunisians, etc., he’s more circumspect. When in Rome, do as the Visigoths do. In Congo, the UN had to forbid all contact between its predatory forces and the natives. The rest of the world should be so lucky.
The child sex racket is only the most extreme example of what’s wrong with the UN approach to the world. Developed peoples value resilience: when disaster strikes, you bounce back. A hurricane flattens Florida, you patch things up and reopen. As the New Colonial Class, the UN doesn’t look at it like that: when disaster strikes, it just proves that you and your countrymen are children who need to be taken under the transnational wing. The folks who have been under the UN wing the longest—indeed, the only ones with their own permanent UN agency and semi-centenarian “refugee camps”—are the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the earth: the Palestinians. UN territories like Kosovo are the global equivalent of inner-city housing projects with the blue helmets as local enforcers for the absentee slum landlord. By contrast, a couple of years after imperialist warmonger Bush showed up, Afghanistan and Iraq have elections, presidents and prime ministers.
And while life there isn't the best, it's far better than what they had four or five years ago. Both nations still have quite a ways to go, but not having the UN there to oversee everything helps in their natural transitions. President Bush made it clear that the UN's mission in both nations was to supply humanitarian relief, and they aren't even handling that very well. The Iraqis and Afghanis have had to rely on Uncle Sam to help them. The UN, apparently still peeved at President Bush for going into Iraq despite their protests, have barely lifted a finger. And it is all in regard to the fact that both nations refuse to be victims of the world. They have seized the day, and their destiny as free nations.
Let’s just take one of the scandals that go widely unreported in the American media—the UN Oil-for-Food program. Among the targets of the corruption investigation was Kofi Annan’s son Kojo—who had a $30,000-a-year job but managed to find a spare quarter-million dollars sitting around to invest in a Swiss football club. The investigators then broadened their sights to include Kofi’s brother Kobina Annan, the Ghanaian Ambassador to Morocco, who has ties to a businessman behind several of the entities involved in the scandal—one Michael Wilson, the son of the former Ghanaian Ambassador to Switzerland and a childhood friend of young Kojo. Mr. Wilson is currently being investigated for bribery involving a $50 million contract to renovate the Geneva offices of the UN World Intellectual Property Organization.
The actual head of the Oil-for-Food racket, Kofi sidekick Benon Sevan, has resigned, having hitherto insisted that a mysterious six-figure sum in his bank account was a gift from his elderly aunt, a lady of modest means who lived in a two-room flat in Cyprus. Paul Volcker’s investigators had planned to confirm with auntie her nephew’s version of events, but unfortunately she fell down an elevator shaft and died. (That's a shame, but convenient--too convenient--for Mr. Sevan.) It now seems likely that the windfall had less to do with Mr. Sevan’s late aunt than with his soliciting of oil allocations for a company run by a cousin of Kofi Annan’s predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
Despite current investigations into his brother, his son, his son’s best friend, his predecessor’s cousin, his former chief of staff, his procurement officer and the executive director of the UN’s biggest ever program, the Secretary-General insists he remains committed to staying on and tackling the important work of “reforming” the UN. Unfortunately, his Executive Coordinator for United Nations Reform has also had to resign.
Whoops. That certainly puts a damper on the "reform" idea Kofi has. So, does this mean that the reformation is off? Do we not have our own Martin Luther in the UN right now that can nail the 95 theses to Kofi's forehead for reference? John Bolton has done an absolutely superb job as ambassador to the UN. He's been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize because of his work in regard to Iran. He has been pushing for serious reform from day one, and he hasn't let up. Kooky Uncle Kofi had better wake up, and soon. The world has a gripe with his organization, and with his lack of leadership.
You’d think that by now, respect for the UN would be plummeting faster than Benon Sevan’s auntie down that lift shaft. After all, these aren’t peripheral figures or minor departments. They reach right into the heart of UN policy on two of the critical issues of the day—Iraq and North Korea. Most of the Ghanaian diplomatic corps and their progeny seem to have directorships at companies with UN contracts and/or Saddamite oil options.
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, say, Katie Couric or John Kerry, well, that’s why he is—was—an A-list dictator and they’re not.
No, more bureaucracy will not solve the problem. More oversight isn't going to solve the problem. Part of the solution to this problem is that the United States needs to cut off all funding to this corrupt organization. If it collapses, oh well; so much the better. The United Nations hasn't abided by it's charter in years; to my knowledge, they haven't since the day of my birth. In 1972, they were still screwing around, giving legitmacy to people like Fidel Castro. And that is something that should offend every common sense thinking individual in the world. The UN loves to prop up, and give credence to, the worst scum of the earth. From Castro to Kim Jong-Il, from Saddam Hussein to Yasser Arafat, the UN has embraced each of these people. That, in my opinion, is reprehensible. They should have been ignored and contained, not embraced.
Why was there an Oil-for-Food program in the first place? Because back in the 90s, having thrown a big old multilateral Gulf War and gotten to the gates of Baghdad, the grand UN coalition then decided against toppling Saddam. So, having shirked the responsibilities that come with having a real policy, America and its allies were in the market for a pseudo-policy. And where does an advanced Western democracy go when it wants a pseudo-policy? Why, the UN! Saddam correctly calculated that the great powers were over-invested in Oil-for-Food as a figleaf for their lack of will, and reasoned that in such an environment their figleaf would also serve as a discreet veil for all kinds of other activities. He didn’t game the system; he simply understood far better than Clinton and Bush Sr., John Major and Tony Blair how it worked.
And that is the ultimate problem with the UN. The do have the wherewithal to deceive the world to suit their own means and ends. It's time to toss the UN. It serves no purpose in this world--in a 21st Century world. In this world, today, the thugs around the world are equally as brutal, but more determined than ever to obtain the means to hold the world hostage through fear and intimidation. And that is what the UN is about. From their peacekeeping missions to their thieving principles, these people are all about anxiety and coercion. They use fear as a tool over Third World nations, and brow-beat them into accepting the UN as a part of their lives.
We have a president that decided that this organization was ineffective and irrlevant. However, I don't feel he's taken the moves necessary to really pound that point home. It's time to cut them off before they screw us over again, and at the expense of those still suffering under tyrannies around the world.
Publius II
posted by Syd And Vaughn | 4:21 PM
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