Among the many benefits the United Nations confers upon its members is something that international relations scholars call "lowering transaction costs." In other words, international institutions like the UN streamline international cooperation by offering standard procedures by which individuals and countries can interact.  For example, the fact that we have a World Health Organization makes it easier to coordinate a global response to the H1N1 outbreak than if the WHO did not exist.

This is one of the great (though often unheralded) benefits of having a United Nations organization. You know who apparently agrees? Glenn Beck. That's right. The hard-line television and radio personality filed a petition with the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) against a Glenn Beck parody site, glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com. Among other things, WIPO handles disputes arising from cyber-squatting and domain name abuse and Beck has appealed to the authority for arbitration through a procedure known as the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy.

Of course, most Americans would tell you that parodies like that are probably protected as free speech under the first amendment. Indeed, Beck himself has opined in the past in the utility of appealing to international law. Here he is with guest Jay Sekulow having a fit over the nomination of international law scholar Dean Harold Koh of Yale Law School to be the State Department Legal advisor.

SEKULOW: And we have to meet these systems from foreign countries and apply that to United States. And here's the real danger on this and this is a danger. Now, here's the danger. Dean Koh is a smart guy, don't — listen, nobody should not question he's an intelligent guy. But what he is proposing is to take the State Department — he is not going to be a senior lawyer at the State Department, he is going to be the lawyer at the State Department, the chief counsel, and he is basically saying, we take our American experience and if it doesn't mesh with the rest of the world, the rest of the world wins.And that, frankly, is — I call — it's — a lot of people are calling this "lawfare," it's utilizing the law as a weapon.

BECK: Oh, yes.

SEKULOW: And that's where you got to be very, very concerned.

BECK: And, America, you know this. When they can't get you to vote for something, they kick it up to the legal — into the legal system. If they can't win in the legal system, they kick it up to the United Nations or to the E.U. or whatever. (emphasis mine)

"They" certainly do, don't they.

(H/t http://twitter.com/evgenymorozov/)

Credit where credit is due, John Bolton sounds fairly reasonable in this interview with the Springfield, Missouri News-Leader:

Question: Should the U.S. engage in long-term nation-building in Afghanistan?

Bolton: "It's not within our power to create a stable country there. Hopefully, the people will do that for themselves. There are probably ways we can help out. But that's not the same as saying it's a strategic interest of the United States. And I say that because on the one hand, you've got people who already think we ought to withdraw from Afghanistan -- in the Democratic Party on the left side. People who think that, I think is a mistake. On the other side, you've got people who say we may be there for a long, long time, doing nation- building. I think that's a mistake, too.

It's a fair point, though I do disagree with Bolton's framing of this along a typical left-right axis.  Supporters of our current engagement in Afghanistan include both the Obama administration and a coalition of neoconservatives.  On the other side, left liberals like Russ Feingold are joining conservatives drawn from the realist tradition, like George Will, to question the wisdom and utility of a drawn out commitment in Afghanistan 

Also, earlier in the interview, Bolton frames American strategic interests in Afghanistan in a way that I *gulp* would largely agree. 

"The U.S. has an important strategic interest in Afghanistan, and that's making sure that neither the Taliban or a l-Qaida can use it as a base for terrorist operations against the United States, No. 1, and No. 2, that their combined efforts in both Afghanistan and Pakistan don't result in the overthrow of the Pakistani government." 

  </Cognitive dissonance>

Whatever one thinks of Ban Ki-moon's diplomatic style as Secretary-General, to describe his policy of meeting with rather unsavory foreign leaders as "jetting off for tete-a-tetes" or having "discreet chats" with autocrats, as Colum Lynch does in his WaPo piece today, certainly shifts the tenor of the argument in a derisive direction. I imagine that much of the subtle rhetorical slant in Lynch's article has to do with finding an appealing hook for an old story: that there are plenty of foreign policy crises that are not going very well, and that the strategy and performance and of Secretary-General in dealing with these issues has been controversial.

But what's frustrating is that Lynch takes the very easy way out of this jam, reducing complex issues of diplomacy, political causality, and the place of rhetoric in effecting change into a depiction of "We can talk" seances with dictators. There's nothing wrong with criticizing the approach of meeting with foreign leaders; after all, Ban is surely aware that, lamentably, much of what comes out of these meetings are photo-ops, such as the one that adorns the Post article, of the S-G shaking hands with Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa. But this is, as Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch clarifies, as quoted by Lynch, only the image that people have of Ban. This distorted image, of a carefree, amoral, and ineffective shaker-of-hands, comes partially from these photo-ops and people's own rash interpretations; but it also comes, in a major way, from articles like Colum Lynch's.

It may seem an insufficient response to criticism to argue that Ban Ki-moon's job is perhaps the hardest in the world, but, well, Ban Ki-moon's job is perhaps the hardest in the world. Lynch touches on this, quoting U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice deflecting Lynch's agenda by offering up this exact argument, but one could easily read the article and resentfully surmise that Sri Lanka's military slaughtered civilians because Ban Ki-moon didn't mount a loud enough protest.

The S-G's only weapon is the podium, and it is one whose power many seem to overestimate. Might fewer Sri Lankans have died if Ban had issued harsher words? Might Burma's ruling junta have allowed Aung San Suu Kyi to participate in next year's elections, rather than extend her interminable house arrest once again, if Ban had "demanded" as much? Might Omar al-Bashir have committed to a robust peace deal in Sudan if Ban had refused to meet with him? All are extremely unlikely, and all of which is to say that if these are the expectations for a Secretary-General, then we might as well resign ourselves for ineffectiveness.

In The Wall Street Journal today, John Bolton -- the "Glenn Beck of foreign policy," in Dan Drezner's words -- demonstrates once again his uncanny ability to pen ludicrous partisan blindsides and convince major editorial boards to give him the spotlight.  His targets this time include former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, the older (and vastly distorted) demon of the 2001 World Conference Against Racism ("Durban I" in conservatives' no-holds-barred teleology), and, naturally, the entire UN itself.

Mark, citing Matt Yglesias, has already capably dismissed the alleged "furor" over President Obama's decision to award Robinson a Presidential Medal of Freedom (a thought: leave it to self-avowed freedom-fighting neoconservatives like Bolton to invest such a symbolic honor with such life or death significance).  As human rights commissioner, Robinson's job was to criticize abuses of human rights.  Some of these occurred in one of the UN's 192 member states that is particularly sensitive to criticism: Israel.  This meant that Mary Robinson on occasion criticized certain policies of the Israeli government.  In the blinkered view of rabid pro-Israel hawks like Bolton, this means no less than that Mary Robinson was unabashedly anti-Israel -- no ifs, ands, or buts. (Marty Peretz, unsurprisingly, goes even further off the deep end, disgustingly calling her "a real bigot."  Bolton relegates his ad hominem attacks to deriding her "ceremonial" position as first female president of Ireland.)

This is, quite bluntly, utter hogwash, as intellectually dishonest as it is factually untrue and insulting.  Bolton's criticism of Robinson for her role in the Durban conference fares little better.  As High Commissioner for Human Rights, one of Robinson's responsibilities was to chair the Durban anti-racism conference.  She bears no more responsibility for the inexcusably anti-Semitic or anti-Israel antics that did occur there than does Colin Powell, who led the U.S. walkout that Bolton so admiringly cites.  In lampooning Robinson's characterization of the conference's outcome as "remarkably good," Bolton nowhere recognizes the reality that the overwhelming majority of the Durban outcome document had nothing to do with Israel.  While NGOs did produce an unrelated document (which Bolton misleadingly conflates with the official one) that was indeed deeply offensive to Israel, Bolton does he mention the fact that Robinson refused to even touch this loathsome piece of juvenalia.

One of Bolton's objections to Mary Robinson receiving a Presidential Medal of Freedom is -- I kid you not -- that she once uttered the words "civilian casualties are human rights victims."  When a former high-ranking U.S. official is boisterously claiming that protecting human rights undermine national security, the extent of his fall (and of the country's rise) is all too apparent.