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April 12, 2005
Bolton's Battle
The Democrats have now decided that supporting the United Nations is an issue that will lead them back to majority status. As such, John Bolton is anethema and must be opposed at all costs.
This may sound rather curious. After all, aren't we talking about the same UN that is corrupt, anti-democratic, and anti-semetic? Consider this partial list of scandals and misdeeds that I posted last month:
- Oil-for-Food ('nuf said there)
- Sex Abuse - Peacekeepers in Congo, Somalia, Kosovo, and elsewhere raping and otherwise sexually abusing the very people they are supposed to be protecting
- Tsunami Relief - Failure to provide relief to the victims of the recent tsunami, and then attackin the United States for forming a coalition of nations who were successful in bringing aid
- Sudan - Failure to stop what is just about genocide in Sudan
- A Security Council that will not enforce its own resolutions
- A Security Council that passes an ever-increasing number of resolutions to little or no effect on the world scene
- Human Rights Commission- They put the worst human rights violators on the planet in on the UN Human Rights commission
- UN Committee on Disarmament - Iraq under Saddam was voted chair of the UN Committee on Disarmament
- A General Assembly that, in general, is virulently anti-Semitic and shows it in their actions and speech
- The World Conference on Racism, held in Durban South Africa 2001, turned into an anti-Semitic and anti-American hate-fest
- Kyoto - They promote fatally flawed treaties such as the Kyoto protocol on "global warming", which would have the effect of crippling the US economy
- World Court - The promotion of the World Court, whose purpose would be to prosecute Americans and Israelis, while largely ignoring third-world kleptocrats
The situation today is even worse than it was in the 1970's when the excreable Andrew Young was our ambassador to the UN and spent much of his time there apologizing for the United States. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's appointee, had to clean up his mess. If anything, the next ambassador faces an even bigger task than the one Kirkpatrick had to deal with.
At this point a reasonable person might say that the UN needs a good hard kick in the rear. No more nicey-nice, go-along-get-along, let's-not-say-bad-things-about-each-other.
So what are the Democrats doing? Opposing John Bolton tooth and nail. As Rich Lowry put's it, they're essentially saying "Don't be mean to the United Nations."
And as Lowry further points out, Bolton has been anything but unilateral in his past diplomacy. It's just that he actually looks out for US interests first, something that seems to enrage the left.
Because the Democrats can't find any factual evidence against Bolton, they've taken to decrying his "style". Their entire argument seems to come down to saying that he has not been "respectful" of the UN. Bill Kristol:
...the assault on Bolton has been pathetic. What does it amount to? He's a longtime U.N. skeptic--appropriate, one would think, given the U.N.'s "Zionism is Racism" history during the Cold War, and its ineffectiveness (to be kind) in Rwanda in the '90s and in Sudan in this decade. But he's worse than a skeptic, the critics say: He has been disrespectful of the august body in which he will represent us. Why, he once joked, "The Secretariat Building in New York has 38But it's precisely a new style that is needed. Unless the UN kleptocrats are hit over the head they'll never get the message.stories. If it lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." Well, truer words were never spoken.
If the Democrats want to propose a policy for reforming the UN that is different than the administrations, fine. I would welcome it. But as Kristol says, this is pathetic. John Bolton may or may not be confirmed (although he probably will be), but if the Democrats want to be taken seriously they need to grow up.
Update
In case you haven't gotten your fill of UN corruption, read this piece in today's Washington Post. It's a column by a legal aid worker who went to Sierra Leone in 2003, shortly after Kofi Annan released his "zero tolerance" policy on sexual harassment.
I found abuse of a sexual nature almost every day -- zero compliance with zero tolerance, as one investigator was to write. U.N. leaders had simply not expended any effort beyond lip service to carry out this zero tolerance policy.
In fact, abuse at these camps went beyond sexual violations: Injustices of one sort or another were perpetrated by U.N. missions or their affiliated nongovernmental organizations every day in the camps I visited. Corruption was the norm, in particular the embezzlement of food and funds by NGO officials, which often left camp resources dangerously inadequate. Utterly arbitrary judicial systems in the camps subjected refugees to violent physical punishment or months in prison for trivial offenses -- all at the whim of officials and in the absence of any sort of hearing.
Posted by Tom at April 12, 2005 10:37 AM
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