Andrew C. McCarthy at Benador Associates asks: the UN, what is it good for?
Why do we continue to participate in a vast international charade?Maybe Sudan will finally be able to do what a couple of Intifadas and the systematic mass murder in Rwanda could not. Maybe the latest Sudanese genocidal atrocity, hot on the heels of the Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal — not to mention the last Sudanese genocidal atrocity — will finally convince Americans that the risible, anachronistic, dysfunctional and quite likely criminal enterprise known as the United Nations is an international calamity that is doing far more harm than good. [...]
While the killing proceeds day after day, the U.N. dithers day after day. Initially, the Security Council spent untold weeks trying to decide whether what was underway in Darfur was really, strictly speaking, a "genocide," or merely a lot of people being killed in the same place at the same time. Perhaps they should simply have asked General Bashir, who plainly has some expertise in this area. Nonetheless, having evidently exhausted that legalism as a justification for its torpor, the U.N. is onto yet another scintillating exercise.
As reported in the New York Times on Wednesday, the United States has placed on the table a resolution (you may recall how well those worked in Iraq) raising the specter of "sanctions" (oh my goodness) against Sudan's sharia-crats and its oil industry if they persist in their unseemly failure to hold the barbarity in Darfur down to a dull roar. But the resolution is stalled over a knotty problem.
The original U.S. draft, you see, said the Security Council "shall take" action in the very likely event Sudan ignores it. This upset China and Pakistan, which do big oil business with Sudan. So those two notoriously staunch defenders of human rights are holding out for "shall consider" — the semantic leap from take to consider possibly being enough to persuade them not to vote for, but to abstain from, the resolution so it can go through. In any event, we've now courageously agreed to modify this latest exercise in hand-wringing, ensuring for Darfur whatever additional weeks of delay it requires [for] 15 disparate countries to consider sanctions, versus to decide what sanctions to take. The shrill sound you just heard was either the last dying screams of another western tribesman or General Bashir laughing his head off — I'm not sure.
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