The Union Leader has a little fun with the professional bureaucrats - Listening to the U.N.: Maybe someone does after all
CLARE SHORT, the former British cabinet minister who last week accused British Prime Minister Tony Blair of spying on U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, is said by members of her own party to have boasted long before the Iraq war that she would one day resign from the government and “bring (Blair) down with her.”Spying on the UN is cool, but how about a little sabotage? First step, get the Food Workers Union to go on strike.
Last year she resigned from Parliament after accusing Blair of having planned the Iraq war in secret meetings that excluded her. Then last week she made her spying allegations. If true, they would prove one thing: There is at least one country that listens to the United Nations.
The U.N.’s reaction to Short’s charges is another example of why no one (save possibly Britain) listens to it. “We’re throwing down a red flag and saying that if this is true, please stop it,” Annan’s spokesman Fred Eckhard said.
“Please stop it”? How fitting. That’s the same reaction the U.N. had to Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, Slobodan Milosevic, Kim Jong Il, and every other dictator who openly thumbed his nose at international law and basic human rights.
The only people who take the U.N. seriously are U.N. staffers and university faculty members. Everyone else knows that it is as effective at international diplomacy as thug-style rapper Eminem would be. (Come to think of it, Eminem might get better results.) That’s why the United States, Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy, Poland and other nations had to act “unilaterally” to bring justice to Saddam Hussein and the Taliban (not to mention Milosevic). If the U.N. carried enough credibility to make people other than spies listen to it, the world wouldn’t have to rely mostly on the United States military to right so many wrongs.
