In the Pittsburgh Tribune Review an interview with anti-UN activist Nathan Tabor quickly descends into bizarre conspiracy mongering. Tabor, who authored a book called The Beast on the East River: The U.N. Threat to America's Sovereignty and Security, tells the Tribune Review that the United Nations has effectively taken control of American National Parks.
At various times, blogs like Atlas Shrugs and Michelle Malkin hurl sundry invectives at the UN and its Secretary General for allegedly coddling terrorists in Lebanon. Invariably, these criticisms are always more bluster than fact-based, so I am hardly surprised that these two have been silent on a recent positive development in Lebanon.
My french may be a bit rusty, but I can't help but think that the outrage in this Martin Peretz post is a bit misplaced. At issue is a Ban Ki-moon interview in Le Monde in which Mr Ban says (roughly) that the United Nations should be more responsive to the needs of its member states.
Any casual UN observer knows that this is a wholly uncontroversial statement. It is perhaps the equivalent of a new football coach saying he looks forward to working with his players.
As reported in the Washington Post today, the U.N. General Assembly has suspended voting for a week as it tries to find a solution to the deadlock caused by competing bids for membership on the Security Council from Venezuela and Guatemala. Guatemala, backed by the United States, has led over 35 rounds of voting, but has yet to secure the necessary two-thirds majority. Some have predictably and irrationally labeled this as an example of UN inaction. This claim not only betrays a basic misunderstanding of the workings of international politics but of the overwhelming benefit of multilateral versus unilateral outcomes both for the United States and the rest of the world.
Writing in the National Review Online, Mario Loyala suggests that South Korea's policy toward the North means that the new Secretary General will be an agent of Chinese interests at the UN. His argument is basically this: because Beijing and Seoul have strategies for confronting North Korea that are more similar to each other than to America's own strategy for dealing with the regime, South Korea's foreign minister-turned-next Secretary General will stand up for Chinese interests as a whole at the UN. This is a quite a sweeping assertion, particularly as it is based on an extrapolation from precisely one circumstance in which the foreign policy interests of these two countries temporarily align.
After taking issue with Ted Turner's positive take on the UN's handling of the North Korea crisis, Schraged at Redstate asks, "Can anyone Provide any evidence that the UN has ever actually accomplished anything beyond spending US Tax Dollars, providing a platform for Terrorists and Tinpot dictators to spew the Anti-American filth, and provide a retirement for corrupt burocrats [sic] like Kofi Anan [sic]?"
I can.
The Drudge Report is featuring a link to a YouTube video of Ted Turner speaking at the National Press Club. In the thirty-second video, Turner is clearly expressing his reservations about the wisdom of invading Iraq in 2003, but the Drudge headline reads, "Ted Turner says he can't pick sides in War on Terror."
This is little more than a smear-job coordinated by a YouTube user who has dishonestly edited a portion of CSPAN's coverage of the event.
In his op-ed lambasting the "ineffective" United Nations, the Miami Herald's Carlos Alberto Montaner seems to forget that the United Nations has a Security Council with five veto-wielding members. Throughout the editorial he repeatedly cites the large membership of the General Assembly as a sui generis barrier to solving international crises, but he fails to ever mention the smaller Security Council, which is the United Nations organ entrusted to take on global crises as they emerge.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, Jonah Goldberg gnashes his teeth over the apparent failure of United States Ambassador to the UN John Bolton to win Senate confirmation. And in the process of praising Ambassador Bolton, the conservative columnist goes out of his way to trash the UN and simply make things up about Kofi Annan.