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The U.N.? Who Cares?
BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
These are surreal times. Americans in Iraq are beheaded on videotape. Russian children are machine-gunned in their schools. The elderly in Israel continue to be blown apart on buses. No one--whether in Madrid, Istanbul, Riyadh, Bali, Tel Aviv or New York--is safe from the Islamic fascist, whose real enemy is modernism and Western-inspired freedom of the individual.

Despite the seemingly disparate geography of these continued attacks, we are always familiar with the similar spooky signature: civilians dismembered by the suicide belt, car bomb, improvised explosive device and executioner's blade. Then follows the characteristically pathetic communiqué or loopy fatwa aired on al-Jazeera, evoking everything from the injustice of the Reconquista to some mythical grievance about Crusaders in the holy shrines. Gender equity in the radical Islamic world is now defined by the expendable female suicide bomber's slaughter of Westerners.

In response to such international lawlessness, our global watchdog, the United Nations, had been largely silent. It abdicates its responsibility of ostracizing those states that harbor such mass murderers, much less organizes a multilateral posse to bring them to justice. And yet under this apparent state of siege, President Bush in his recent address to the U.N. offered not blood and iron--other than an obligatory "the proper response is not to retreat but to prevail"--but Wilsonian idealism, concrete help for the dispossessed, and candor about past sins. The president wished to convey a new multilateralist creed that would have made a John Kerry or Madeleine Albright proud, without the Churchillian "victory at any cost" rhetoric. Good luck.
The real problem with the U.N. is that it exists in a cocoon. These guys are diplomats and stafffers, and they live in a different world without real-world problems of daily life. It's easy to talk about resolutions, and conferences, and grievances, because no one there does any real heavy lifting -- not professionally and not in their own lives.

Best thing for the U.N. would be to move it to Dar-el-Salaam or to Lagos. Don't exile it to Paris or Geneva or Rome. Drop it into a real third world country with teeming multitudes all hoping for a better life. Make the diplomats and staffers live in a city where electricity is spotty, sanitation is worse and the air smells of diesel, charcoal and cooking fires. They'd have to ditch the designer suits and the snooty attitudes and maybe, maybe, just maybe, they'd start to understand that much of the world just plain sucks. Then there's actually a chance that the U.N. might evolve so as to be worth something.

Posted by: tipper 2004-09-23
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=43993