The Senate vs. the U.N.
If that title sounds like a court case, that might be because the investigation by the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations into the UN's Oil-for-food (OFF) program might as well be, as Robert Novak seems to say. (Hat Tip: Power Line.) Hearings on the OFF program begin today at noon EST. (That's 17:00 UTC for the international readers out there.) First witness: Charles A. Duelfer, author of the famous report that bears his name, the one we heard so much about in the final weeks of the Presidential campaign. (Almost all we heard about this report was wrong, BTW. Read it for yourself and you'll see.)
Nor is Norm Coleman the only outraged Senator, and I'm not even talking about Senator Carl Levin, Coleman's Democratic ranker counterpart, signing off on Coleman's demand letter to the UN. Richard Lugar has this report from his Foreign Relations Committee. (You'll need the Adobe Reader to read this report.)
The bottom line: This is another one of those "no solace" moments, in which activists and commentators on both sides of the American political divide suddenly raise a united voice in outrage against someone. When Robert Novak says that "]t]he United Nations and its secretary-general are in a world of trouble," he's not kidding.
First prize, frankly, would be that the US withdraws from the UN (and, by so doing, buys a season of restraint against the coming of the one-world Beast of Revelation). The more likely prize will probably be forcing Kofi Annan and a bunch of other un-worthies at the UN to resign. The problem: I don't share the "lofty" ideals of the UN. Having a bunch of hand-in-the-till hypocrites presuming to wag their fingers at us is bad enough--but given the depths to which their credibility has sunk, we're frankly free to heed them or not, and if we don't, the fishwrap media has already predicted that we wouldn't. Result: we lose no esteem in the world by quietly asking them, as Josef Stalin asked the Pope, how many divisions they have. (Answer: none, because they're our divisions to begin with.) But if their replacements are squeaky-clean idealists, and if, furthermore, those replacements make a big show of sending Kofi Annan and his cronies to jail and expropriating their ill-gotten gains, they can then turn to the USA and say, "See? We got rid of the bad apples. Now we can start to build the kind of UN that Dag Hammarskjold wanted us to be." What shall we say to that? I'll admit it right now: it's a lot easier to make a case against an ideal you despise, if the practitioners of that ideal are conducting themselves in a non-ideal, or frankly cynical, manner.
Of course, the UN could act really stupidly and say to us, in effect, "It is not for you to question the make-up of an international institution." In which event the case for withdrawal from the UN remains as strong as ever.
UPDATE: The Hearings link above is still active, and now has links to the testimonies of yesterday's witnesses, including Duelfer and Assistant SecTreas Zarate, both of whom--among others--say that the graft that Saddam got from the OFF program was twice as bad as originally feared--$21 billion worth. But don't expect to read about it, except over at The Power Line and on Fox.
Nor is Norm Coleman the only outraged Senator, and I'm not even talking about Senator Carl Levin, Coleman's Democratic ranker counterpart, signing off on Coleman's demand letter to the UN. Richard Lugar has this report from his Foreign Relations Committee. (You'll need the Adobe Reader to read this report.)
The bottom line: This is another one of those "no solace" moments, in which activists and commentators on both sides of the American political divide suddenly raise a united voice in outrage against someone. When Robert Novak says that "]t]he United Nations and its secretary-general are in a world of trouble," he's not kidding.
First prize, frankly, would be that the US withdraws from the UN (and, by so doing, buys a season of restraint against the coming of the one-world Beast of Revelation). The more likely prize will probably be forcing Kofi Annan and a bunch of other un-worthies at the UN to resign. The problem: I don't share the "lofty" ideals of the UN. Having a bunch of hand-in-the-till hypocrites presuming to wag their fingers at us is bad enough--but given the depths to which their credibility has sunk, we're frankly free to heed them or not, and if we don't, the fishwrap media has already predicted that we wouldn't. Result: we lose no esteem in the world by quietly asking them, as Josef Stalin asked the Pope, how many divisions they have. (Answer: none, because they're our divisions to begin with.) But if their replacements are squeaky-clean idealists, and if, furthermore, those replacements make a big show of sending Kofi Annan and his cronies to jail and expropriating their ill-gotten gains, they can then turn to the USA and say, "See? We got rid of the bad apples. Now we can start to build the kind of UN that Dag Hammarskjold wanted us to be." What shall we say to that? I'll admit it right now: it's a lot easier to make a case against an ideal you despise, if the practitioners of that ideal are conducting themselves in a non-ideal, or frankly cynical, manner.
Of course, the UN could act really stupidly and say to us, in effect, "It is not for you to question the make-up of an international institution." In which event the case for withdrawal from the UN remains as strong as ever.
UPDATE: The Hearings link above is still active, and now has links to the testimonies of yesterday's witnesses, including Duelfer and Assistant SecTreas Zarate, both of whom--among others--say that the graft that Saddam got from the OFF program was twice as bad as originally feared--$21 billion worth. But don't expect to read about it, except over at The Power Line and on Fox.
posted by Temlakos at 10:13 AM
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