Mark Steyn in The Spectator says Let’s quit the UN:
Earlier this week, on NBC’s Today Show, Katie Couric, America’s favourite wake-up gal, saluted the fallen heroes of the Columbia: ‘They were an airborne United Nations - men, women, an African-American, an Indian woman, an Israeli....’More by following the link. "US out of UN now" is OK, but I kinda like "Screw the UN" myself.
Steady on, Katie. They were six Americans plus an Israeli. And, if they had been an ‘airborne United Nations’, for one thing the Zionist usurper wouldn’t have been on board: the UN is divided into regional voting blocs and, Israel being in a region comprised almost entirely of its enemies, it gets frosted out from the organisation’s corridors of power; no country gets so little out of its UN membership.
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But, as Katie demonstrated, no matter what the UN actually is, the initials evoke in her and many others some vague soft-focus picture of Danny Kaye, Audrey Hepburn or some other UN ‘special ambassador’ surrounded by smiling children of many lands. There were many woozy Western liberals who felt - and still feel - that the theoretical idealism of communism excused all its terrible failures in practice. The UN gets a similar pass but from a far larger number of people.
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UN support for the war presently depends on Washington giving certain understandings to France. Nothing very moral about that. Some of us think the Iraqi people should be allowed to decide for themselves whether, post-Saddam, they want anything to do with the dictator’s best pal, M. Chirac. But no, apparently the moral position is to hole up in the smoke-filled rooms until Jacques comes around.
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In the real world, Libya is an irrelevance. So is Cuba, and Syria. In the old days, the ramshackle dictatorships were proxies for heavyweight patrons, but not any more. These days President Sy Kottik represents nobody but himself. Yet somehow, in the post-Cold War talking shops, the loonitoons’ prestige has been enhanced: the UN, as the columnist George Jonas put it, enables ‘dysfunctional dictatorships to punch above their weight’. Away from Kofi and co., the world is moving more or less in the right direction: entire regions that were once tyrannies are now flawed but broadly functioning democracies ? Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America. The UN has been irrelevant to this transformation. Its structures resist reform and the principal beneficiaries are the thug states.
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There’s a farmer not far from me, on Route 10 between Lisbon and Littleton, who for over a decade has had painted in huge letters filling the entire side of his barn the slogan ‘US out of UN now’. It never seems to fade, so I figure he re-touches it every few years, which I guess means this isn’t just some passing political bugbear. When I first saw it, circa 1990, I believe I gave a wry chuckle positively Pattenesque in its amused sophistication: to be sure, the UN contains its share of rum coves but no serious person would entertain the notion of US withdrawal. Now I think he’s dead right, and that it’s only smug conventional-wisdom laziness that stops the idea being up for grabs.
