UN-Predictably

"[T]he prevailing practice of seeking to use the UN almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable. You will lose the UN one way or another." said United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown yesterday. Mr. Brown, Numero Dos at Turtle Bay, was commenting on “Power and Super-Power: Global Leadership in the Twenty-First Century.”

What's that? Hey, folks. It's the UN, remember? It's a US-bashing symposium sponsored by the Century Foundation and George Soros The Center for American Progress.

Mr. Brown says he really likes the United States, though, and took every opportunity in his address to say so. He even admitted that the UN has had a few problems here and there over the years . . . none of which are the fault of "arguably the UN’s best-ever Secretary-General, Kofi Annan" or the "misunderstood" UN.

It's <gasp> the US's fault for not providing more leadership. (Huh?)

According to Mr. Brown, this is the way it works:

When John Bolton, our ambassador to the UN, tried to get the UN to reform its Human Rights Commission and after the only change to its decades of pathetic performance was changing Commission to Council and the US walked away and said we don't want any part of that joke, the US should have laughed right along with everyone else and said, "This is great!" and participated anyway!

And that business about only funding the UN for six months instead of two years unless and until it got its act together and stopped practices like the corruption in the Oil for Blood Program? Well, the UN hasn't gotten around to that but with money running out June 30, the US should laugh right along with everyone else and say, "No problem!" and here's the money anyway.

That hell hole of a building the UN is in, too. Renovating it shouldn't be controversial "[b]ut the only Government not fully supporting the project is the US."

Too much unchecked UN-bashing and stereotyping over too many years -- manifest in a fear by politicians to be seen to be supporting better premises for overpaid, corrupt UN bureaucrats -- makes even refurbishing a building a political hot potato.

According to Mr. Brown, the people living under repressive regimes in developing countries member states have a far more favorble image of the UN than the poor, deluded saps in "Middle America," whose only information on the wonderful things the great and generous UN is doing and has done is denied them by FoxNews and Rush Limbaugh.

Not pleased with Mr. Brown's remarks that Americans are dumb, John Bolton went to Kofi asking him to separate himself from and repudiate the remarks:

"I spoke to the secretary-general this morning. I said, 'I've known you since 1989, and I'm telling you this is the worst mistake by a senior U.N. official that I have seen in that entire time,'" Mr. Bolton told reporters today. -- [source]

Cricket churping.