At least 21 billion in bribes/corruption, arguably the largest corruption scandal in international history, and Kofi's still got backing...
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/041202/ap/d86ngopg0.html
Time to end this waste.
Seriously though, how can the UN ever be a creditble and functional body when it's strongest members (including the US) pick and choose the resolutions they want to adhere to?
Bush has been every so critical but unless he's (or any future US president) willing to work with them and actually COMPRIMISE at times, then having a world body is pointless.
the UN is just a place for countries to at each other... oh yeah, and to make money off saddam
Set aside Bush's Iraq situation with the UN for a minute.
You've got genocide happening in multiple places around the world, and the UN doesn't give a damn about stopping it.
You've got a corrupt election in Ukraine, with do ented involvement of a UN member (Russia), and no effort by the UN to correct the situation.
You've got terrorism emerging as a global threat. Not just towards the US, but you're seeing those critical of Islam (van Gogh, Dutch politicians, etc.) either getting killed or having threats against their lives made, no effort by the UN.
The UN's origin was to prevent sovereign nations from invading one another. We're in a new day and age, and outside of the new "reform" movement to get UN approval for any preemptive strikes, I don't see the REAL reforms that are needed taking place ( the UN doesn't even see terrorism as the biggest threat to international peace).
They need to change their mission to eliminating genocide, taming terrorism, and I don't see them changing it. And that's on top of the largest international corruption scandal in world history, done with the approval and knowledge of (and probably involvement of) the UN Secretary General.
Time to pull the plug.
Bush is a crack pot who only wants the UN's help when it benefits his ass.
Who give a rat's ass about what is going on in Sudan since it doesn't effect the pocket books of the neocons. Perhaps if there were some oil fires Cheney and Halliburton would be on it like white on rice.
Asia TimesNeo-cons jump on anti-UN bandwagon
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Daunted by setbacks in Iraq and the prospective difficulties in achieving "regime change" in Iran and North Korea, neo-conservative hawks have joined the US extreme right in training their sights on a much weaker target, the United Nations, beginning with its secretary general, Kofi Annan.
Jumping on reports that Annan's son remained on the payroll of a Swiss auditing firm hired by the world body to monitor the implementation of the "oil for food" program in Iraq for four years after he left the firm, two prominent neo-conservative voices - New York Times columnist William Safire and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal - called on Monday for the secretary general's resignation.
The two columns immediately were seized on by the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News television channel, presumably to draw more attention to the issue. It noted that the New York Sun, another Murdoch-owned media outlet, had broken the story about the US$2,500 monthly payments by Cotecna Inspections to Kojo Annan that followed his departure from the firm five years ago.
Safire, who has been writing for months about alleged UN complicity in the skimming by ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein of billions of dollars from Iraqi oil sales under the program, declared that the latest disclosures marked "the end of the beginning of the scandal".
"Its end will not begin until Kofi Annan, even if personally innocent, resigns - having through initial inep ude and final obstructionism brought dishonor on the Secretariat of the United Nations," wrote Safire.
At the same time, the Journal's editorial page, which, like Safire, has been playing up the oil-for-food scandal for months, ran a column by right-wing blogger Glenn Harlan Reynolds, publisher of InstaPundit.com, calling for Annan's replacement with the former president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel.
Conveniently, Havel now serves as co-chairman of the international wing of the new Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a neo-conservative-dominated group that believes President George W Bush's "war on terrorism" is the equivalent of "World War IV".
"The UN is losing what shreds of moral legitimacy remain, even among those who were once sympathetic, as the extent of its corruption becomes too obvious to ignore," wrote Reynolds, noting growing discussion about replacing or supplementing the world body with a "community of democracies ... that would draw its support from legitimate governments, not thugs and kleptocrats".
The two columns appear to be the latest in a campaign to discredit the United Nations that has been building steadily in neo-conservative and far-right circles here since the United States and Britain invaded Iraq in March 2003 without the Security Council's blessing.
Indeed, on the day of the invasion, Richard Perle, a leading neo-conservative and former chairman of the Pentagon Defense Policy Board (DPB), wrote a column in London's The Guardian that celebrated the death of "the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order".
Relying on the Security Council to ensure world order and international law, Perle wrote, was a "dangerously wrong idea that leads inexorably to handing great moral and even existential politico-military decisions to the likes of Syria, Cameroon, Angola, Russia, China and France".
On just the second day of the invasion, the Journal, which has long espoused the idea of what it calls a "league of democratic nations" to replace the UN, published a column led "Au revoir, Security Council" that called for the US to leave the body in order to "strip [it] of the pretense of legality and seriousness and remove it as an obstacle to genuine collective security".
In the same vein, neo-conservatives and the extreme right continued to warn against giving the UN any responsibility for running Iraq during and after the occupation, even as it became clear that without greater international participation, the burden on the US military and Treasury was fast becoming too much.
It was during Bush's re-election campaign in September, however, when Annan said in reply to a reporter's question that the invasion had been "illegal" under the UN Charter, that the anti-UN campaign became both more personalized and fiercer.
"Kofi votes Kerry", ran one column in the Journal by former US defense secretary Caspar Weinberger, while another, by the editorial staff, suggested that the secretary general might have been trying to divert attention from the US Congress's probes of the oil-for-food program.
Since then, the op-eds and essays in right-wing and neo-conservative media, such as the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and the National Review, have been coming fast and furious.
In addition to the alleged corruption of UN officials in the oil-for-food program, and the refusal to comply with demands to hand over do ents on the program to congressional investigators - the UN is conducting its own investigation headed by former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker - these articles have made much of various issues.
They include the world body's failure to intervene forcefully to stop what the US government has called "genocide" in Darfur, Sudan; Libya's chairmanship of the UN Commission on Human Rights; continuing Security Council resolutions censuring Israel's behavior in the Palestinian territories as evidence of its moral bankruptcy; and Annan's caution against a major military offensive in Fallujah, Iraq.
The suggested remedies have been varied - from leaving the UN altogether, to creating a community of democracies as an alternative, to withholding or reducing the US contribution to the UN budget - as Washington did beginning in the late 1980s through much of the 1990s - in order to impose certain changes to its liking. Washington currently is obliged to contribute 22% of UN financing.
"President Bush has a mandate to rethink American relations with the United Nations," Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow at the Hudson Ins ute, another neo-conservative think-tank, wrote in the National Review Online just after the election.
"The campaign," she went on, "smoked out something more sinister than impotence or inep ude at Turtle Bay; namely, a UN secretariat dedicated to undermining the president's success." (Turtle Bay is the New York neighborhood where the UN headquarters is located.)
Of course, right-wing hostility to the UN is not new. The extreme right in the United States has sought Washington's withdrawal from the world body - and the UN's departure from US territory - from its very birth, believing it to have been a plot by communists, socialists, and, in some versions, Jews and Freemasons, to create a world government that would destroy US sovereignty and the freedom of its citizens, beginning with their right to bear arms.
Neo-conservatives began moving against the United Nations after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and accelerated that after the 1973 October war, when Israel found itself repeatedly isolated and assailed in the General Assembly and the Security Council by the Soviet Bloc and the Third World countries in the Non-Aligned Movement.
In reaction, UN-bashing in the late 1960s became a staple of Commentary magazine, a monthly that has been the major exponent of neo-conservative thought. Just last month, for example, it published a seven-page essay by Joshua Muravchik, a colleague of Richard Perle's at the American Enterprise Ins ute, led "The case against the UN".
The article, which castigates the organization above all for its "overweening animus toward Israel" and "the UN's complicity in legitimizing terrorism", concluded that the threat or use of US military power over the past 60 years has been far more effective at safeguarding "international peace and security" than the Security Council.
Take your medication Johnny! You're gonna blow a gasket. You need to go to the record store and buy some new ones cause those Cheney and Haliburton records are getting old. While you're at it go on over to the U.N. and make a contribution to Sudan. Kofi will surely protect your donation.Newsflash.....Kerry lost!
Last edited by Hook Dem; 12-02-2004 at 10:51 PM.
AHF, that's like asking us to set aside the horse riding accident when questioning why Reeves couldn't walk. Lack of US backing has rendered the UN impotent. President Bush asked the UN to step up to the plate or become irrelevent before Iraq, and it's now become irrelevent. He didn't want them to decide, he wanted them to go along with his administrations wishes, and that is a big difference.
Anyhow, he's not the sole culprit. You look back upon successfull UN actions such as the first Persian Gulf War and you find US support. But the problem is that the United States is the might behind UN resolutions and it picks and chooses when to go along with the rest of the world.
The US isn't the only guilty country by far. But the problem is that when France disagree's, the UN can still act because the power behind it has always been the US. When the US disagree's, the UN has no recourse.
The UN can be revived, but it's not going to happen anytime soon because the US refuses to compromise on things.
You've got genocide happening in multiple places around the world, and the UN doesn't give a damn about stopping it.
You've got a corrupt election in Ukraine, with do ented involvement of a UN member (Russia), and no effort by the UN to correct the situation.
You've got terrorism emerging as a global threat. Not just towards the US, but you're seeing those critical of Islam (van Gogh, Dutch politicians, etc.) either getting killed or having threats against their lives made, no effort by the UN.
The UN's origin was to prevent sovereign nations from invading one another. We're in a new day and age, and outside of the new "reform" movement to get UN approval for any preemptive strikes, I don't see the REAL reforms that are needed taking place ( the UN doesn't even see terrorism as the biggest threat to international peace).
They need to change their mission to eliminating genocide, taming terrorism, and I don't see them changing it. And that's on top of the largest international corruption scandal in world history, done with the approval and knowledge of (and probably involvement of) the UN Secretary General.
Time to pull the plug.
I think that's a very narrow minded view of the UN was intended to do.
Let's be honest here. No American government wants a world organization that is more powerful than it. The United States simply does not want to give up it's dominance. It doesn't want to have a real world body where decisions are made collectively because at times this would conflict with US interests.
What our government really wants is an organization that will cater to it's needs. Nevermind what the rest of the world says, if WE decree something, that's the way it's going to be.
What the United States really wants is a body that will cater to it's "my way or the highway" at ude.
Manny...thats a pretty narrow view if you will stop to think. Let's take Iraq for example. Sheites and sunnis. Both Iraqis....right? Both want things alligned to their way of thinking. Democrats and Republicans. Both Americans...right? Both want things alligned to their way of thinking. My point being is that it is human nature to advance one's ideas. Every member country of the U.N. is guilty of that. Not just the United States. Why must you make an example of just The United States? What about all of the stealing scandal going on and growing more each day? Is that solely the fault of The United States? The current situation at the U.N. is the fault of world greed. There is enough blame to go around for everyone. You can draw parallels to this in almost everything. Take the NFL for example. I don't like the Eagles but it appears that they have done a better job than anyone else in doing it right. Should I really run them down when my Cowboys have failed miserably? No...I should try to learn from the example. Just my opinion. A spade is a spade no matter what you call it.
Because the United States is the preeminate power and it's influence goes MUCH farther than anyone else in the world!
Who gives a flying if camaroon disagree's because they have no way to force their agenda on other countries.
There is one country with the ability to do that, and we both live in it.
Everyone is going to look out for their best interests, and that's a given. Like I said many countries are guilty of what I am saying here, but the reality is that the US is really the only one that matters because of it's power.
I don't think it's "my way or the highway."
I think at this point in the history of the world, we are in the midst of the fight for modern civilization. Radical Islamic terrorists want us to go back to the tribal days of the 800s, and is trying to drag down the civilized, modernized, Westernized world with it.
Some in the US administration recognize this and realize this is a fight we must take on NOW, and it is a fight we must win. No compromising, no treaties, we have to win. For the sake of our way of life in the US, and stepping outside the box for a moment for the sake of the rest of the globalized world.
Problem is a lot of people at the UN don't realize this, or don't want to admit it. Some don't have bombings in their countries, some have autocratic regimes in charge of their country who rule with an iron fist and keep Islamo-fundamentalist BS out or contained.
The Spurs game I went to the other night, the father of one of the guys who went with us works for the UN. The guy got into an argument with me about the UN. You know what he said? That genocide isn't taking place world wide, because his father says it isn't.
Even when I brought up Darfur, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, etc., he said those weren't genocide. Why? Because his dad is a staff member on the UN Human Rights Commission for France and they don't see any genocide going on, just "revolution."
People at the UN don't even want to admit there is a problem, let alone deal with it. Like you said, the UN is only important with US backing, and you can call it cavalier if you want but Bush's "you're either with us or against us" wasn't some American bravado.
It was recognizing that we are in a fight for the future of the world, for the world of your and my children, and that the US can't do it alone. The sooner people worldwide wake up (and ironically the death of Theo van Gogh is doing something on this that bureaucratic politics at the UN couldn't) the better chance the civilized world has of winning.
I agree with you on some points, but the fact is that we went to the UN for a mandate for war, and didn't get it, and didn't follow what they said.
If you are going to have an international organization and try to make it work, it means going along with things EVEN when you don't agree with them.
The problem was in place long before Iraq however, and that's not the cause. But I do think the US has contributed to it in many ways.
And in some of those places, we are talking about revolutions, and horrible things happening. However, that doesn't always mean you need to have an international body step in. I think in cases like Sudan and what happend in Rawanda, then YES, intervention is needed. However, I also think that people at times have to earn their own freedom.
But in this case, a lot of the reason they said no to going into Iraq is coming out now thanks to Deulfer - they were bought out.
I have a hunch we knew about the bribes, and that's why we went ahead with things. We knew we wouldn't be getting their votes and that it'd come out later why.
Manny, that's my point on the genocide. This guy said that the UN feels there is no genocide taking place, just good old fashioned revolution. That's bull .
I think the UN is great when it agrees with the US and sucks when it doesn't.
And that is all I have to say about that.
AHF, you have to understand how sick the rest of the world is with America sticking it's head everywhere, it's a form of backlash.
It's a bad situation all around and at some point we need to start grooming the world to take care of it's own problems so we don't have to have such a huge freaking military.
Manny, I understand that.
On your comment about the world taking care of its own business, when has it ever? We bailed everyone's asses out in WWI, WWII. France asked us to help with Vietnam, then bailed.
We had to go save the day in Korea. We had to rally the troops when Saddam went into Kuwait. What came to be the EU, as well as NATO, couldn't handle Bosnia so we had to go do the dirty work there.
The last 90 years have been nothing but "dear USA please bail us out", and then when we do, we get stabbed in the back.
Now we need help in the war on terror and no one could be bothered, save Israel, Britain, Poland, Russia, Australia, and a few others (but most of the ones we bailed out have turned their backs on us).
Like I said, it's ironic that the murder of a Dutch filmmaker has done more for the discussion of radical Islam than anything the UN's ever done has.
In other words....Bail us out when we need help and you when you need help. Thats the truth in a nuts . No getting around it.
Honestly AHF,
I think that one of the biggest bull lies of our country is convincing it's citizens that it's always out to bail the world out.
We look after our own interests, but we love to wrap them in the cloth of doing well.
I'll post some stuff on this later, I don't have all the info with me.
The GOP has been pissing on the UN for probably 10 years, refusing to pay dues, etc. This is NOT something new, or somethign cause by Iraq. As Manny said, the powers that be do NOT want an international org stronger than the US.
Joe Chalupa has the typical American at ude towards the UN, great when they agree with us, terrible when they don't.
Yeah, well you're a communist.
Fact checK: it was Clinton who refused to pay UN dues, citing the fact we were already funding 21% of the UN, and pointing out what a ruse the Human Rights Comm. was becoming with such upstanding countries as Syria being chair of said comms. He, along with Congress, insisted that the UN cut some of its pork to cut costs before we'd be willing to pitch in more (the cuts insisted on were reduction of staffs, elimination of some BS pork projects, and streamling of procedures to cut costs).The GOP has been pissing on the UN for probably 10 years, refusing to pay dues, etc
http://www.mir.com.my/lb/un/html/15mar98a.htm
ex just has the typical liberal at ude that it's all the GOP hate towards the UN that is the problem.However, he visited Washington on Wednesday to meet Clinton and members of his administration, to discuss not only Iraq but also the debilitating problem of the US $1.3 billion (RM 5.2 billion) in back dues that the US owe to the UN. The US has not paid its UN dues in full and on time for some years. In 1995 it paid less than half of its total assessment. These gaps have never been closed.
Joe is calling it like it is. Look at most of Europe: begged us to bail their asses out of WWII, now we need help they're in a political pissing match over "world power."
It's a two way street here. The US certainly isn't free from blame, but at the same time the world could back us once in a while when we want to do do something (say, wipe out Al Qaeda).
Unfortunately I think it's going to take the armies of Al Qaeda walking down the Champs Elysses and other hallmarks of Europe before the rest of the UN pulls its head out of its ass on terrorism, and guess what will happen then... they'll come running to the US to bail them out... AGAIN.
Yeah, well you're a communist
Why I oughta....
^^^Rack^^^^
Yeah I agree with you here totally, EXCEPT....It's a two way street here. The US certainly isn't free from blame, but at the same time the world could back us once in a while when we want to do do something (say, wipe out Al Qaeda).
Who doesn't want the US to destroy Al Queda? It's the iraq invasion (which anyway you slice and dice it up, is not al queda) that they had problems with.
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