It's Time for the UN to PackUp, Go Home
.... 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....
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."
.... in 2009, [the U.N. is] planning to hold its "Durban II" conference. [Yael notes: Iran is on the planning committee, which not incidentally is headed by Libya.] 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....
See also Melanie Phillips:
Last week, I happened to meet America’s former Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. He was utterly dismayed about Annapolis. President Bush, he said, had torn up everything he believed in. Bolton thought the main reason this had happened was that Bush was simply so determined to get Iraq right that he had left absolutely everything else to Condoleezza Rice and the depredations of the State Department.The result was that at Annapolis, terror had been rewarded, its Israeli victims offered up as sacrificial lambs and the Bush doctrine fed to the flames.
If Bush did allow his attention to wander so dangerously, another spectacular car crash has been Bolton’s successor as UN Ambassador, the much-lionised Zalmay Khalilzad, in the immediate aftermath of Annapolis. In a startling departure from diplomatic protocol, last Thursday Khalilzad tried to present to the Security Council, on the penultimate day of its chairmanship by Indonesia, a US resolution endorsing the Annapolis joint statement — without even showing Israel the text first. No wonder: Israel would have undoubtedly gone ballistic, since such an endorsement would have given teeth to the Annapolis suicide note and involved Israel's mortal enemies in overseeing the ‘peace process’. When this piece of treachery was discovered, the US hastily withdrew its resolution.
It turns out that Khalilzad may have one or two agendas of his own. Last Tuesday, American eyebrows hit the roof when Fox News discovered US Ambassador Khalilzad having lunch with George Soros, the billionaire anti-Bush activist and funder of Moveon.org. As Fox observed, on the surface the two of them would appear to have had little to talk about.
Strange how Soros keeps popping up in this kind of context — he is of course a close associate of Britain’s controversial minister for the UN Lord Malloch Brown, whose peculiar appointment to the British government no-one has yet been able to explain....
Posted by: tglennon | Sunday, 30 December 2007 at 09:04 PM