...The larger picture Egeland fails to appreciate is that America's wealth and prosperity - partly sustained by low taxes — is a greater bulwark against human suffering than the United Nations ever has been or likely will be. America guarantees global stability by keeping the sea lanes open, by preventing North Korea from invading South Korea and China from seizing Taiwan. We did it by preventing Saddam from keeping Kuwait. We ignored the United Nations and intervened to stop genocide in Yugoslavia, and we have 150,000 troops in Iraq working to create a democracy — while the United Nations is still too scared of terrorists, and too anti-American, to help.

Meanwhile, American citizens, partly thanks to those stingy low taxes, send some $34 billion in private aid around the world every year. That's ten times the United Nations total budget. America's Christian ministries, private foundations, and agencies all do far more in direct charity and aid than the United Nations. But bureaucrats — some who've grown fat on Oil-for-Food money — measure stinginess in terms of support to the bureaucracy, not to the constituency the bureaucracy was intended to help.

It is our prosperity that drives global development, our courage and goodwill that keeps the peace, and our example that shines the path to liberty, not "blue papers" from Turtle Bay.