{"id":15746,"date":"2012-06-30T11:10:45","date_gmt":"2012-06-30T16:10:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=15746"},"modified":"2012-06-30T11:10:45","modified_gmt":"2012-06-30T16:10:45","slug":"writing-the-uns-epitaph-in-advance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/06\/30\/writing-the-uns-epitaph-in-advance\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing the UN’s epitaph in advance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Conrad Black<\/a> on the increasingly useless United Nations (although he urges reform instead of abandonment):<\/p>\n

For the past 45 years the United Nations has become steadily over-populated by poor states, failed states, petty despotisms and militant Muslim counties chiefly preoccupied in diplomatic matters with the harassment and denigration of Israel. Most of the agencies have become sink-holes of patronage and corruption for poor countries paying themselves with the contributions of rich countries and polemically biting the hands that feed them.<\/p>\n

It has become a source of payola windfalls for corrupt agency officials as well as a substitute for theatre and psychiatry for many of the world\u2019s most disreputable regimes. Muammar Gadaffi\u2019s Libya was elected to the chair of the Human Rights Commission (precursor of the present Human Rights Council), and the whole hierarchy of the UN was implicated in the scandalous misappropriation of many millions of oil dollars supposedly destined for humanitarian purposes in Iraq. The chief humanitarian beneficiaries were Saddam Hussein and crooked UN officials. Many of the peace-keeping missions are staffed by unqualified soldiers from very poor countries, which rent themselves out to the warring factions for cash; and thereby increase, rather than control, local violence.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Canada was, for most of the UN\u2019s history, far too indulgent of it. First, as a victorious ally and charter member, it was part of the Anglo-American governing consensus. Then, after Lodge gave Pearson the Suez peacekeeper idea (and Pearson forgot that it wasn\u2019t his originally), the foreign policy establishment in Ottawa began to view the UN as a way for Canada to distinguish itself from the U.S. at little cost, and to allow itself, with a modest foreign aid budget, to pander to Third World countries without seriously annoying our traditional allies. This gradually developed into the Chr\u00e9tien government\u2019s endorsement of \u201csoft power,\u201d a phrase originated by former U.S. president Bill Clinton\u2019s national security adviser Joe Nye, which was a soft alternative to the use of American military might. It is a concept that has any validity only when there is a hard power option, which Canada did not possess. As practised by this country, soft power was a fraud, it was just more softness.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Undoubtedly, there will be those in Canada who decry the Harper government\u2019s comparative friendliness with Israel and call for appeasement of Pillay and her foaming claque. What we should do instead is lead agitation for a massive transformation of the United Nations \u2014 back to the defence of Eleanor Roosevelt\u2019s Universal Declaration on Human Rights (which is not subject to Shariah law or any other such barbarities), jettison the antiquated Security Council and propose a variable system of voting in the General Assembly, where votes are accorded to countries and groupings of countries according to a combination of their population, economic strength and objectively assessed respect for human rights.<\/p>\n

Canada is well placed to organize the support for such measures by the countries that pay most of the UN\u2019s bills. This would be a much more appropriate stance for Canada, now that it has been so unjustly pilloried by the anthill of bigotry of a Human Rights Council, than continued reverence for this citadel of hypocrisy. The United Nations is both a mad cow and a sacred cow; it is in desperate need of radical reform.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conrad Black on the increasingly useless United Nations (although he urges reform instead of abandonment): For the past 45 years the United Nations has become steadily over-populated by poor states, failed states, petty despotisms and militant Muslim counties chiefly preoccupied in diplomatic matters with the harassment and denigration of Israel. Most of the agencies have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,6,53],"tags":[363,432,691],"class_list":["post-15746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-cancon","category-politics","tag-corruption","tag-diplomacy","tag-unitednations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-45Y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15746"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15748,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15746\/revisions\/15748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}