The Worthless United Nations

United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown has taken a new step towards adding a desired amount of legitimacy to the UN. Instead of working to correct illegalities, corruption, and to repair the UN's failing credibility, he chose to attack the US for its supposed place in not supporting the UN.

He begins with a very strange comparison of the UN with the failings of the League of Nations. I'm not sure if anyone but me has ever made the comparison that the UN is just as worthless, and I find it very intriguing that this comparison is made (because it is becoming more and more obvious that they have startling similarities, a thought not missed by the Deputy Secretary-General).

He then goes on to simply mock the US.

... the world’s one super-Power -- arguably more super in 1946 than 2006...

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But that is not well known or understood, in part because much of the public discourse that reaches the US heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. That is what I mean by “stealth” diplomacy: the UN’s role is in effect a secret in Middle America even as it is highlighted in the Middle East and other parts of the world.

The US is weaker now than in 1946; FoxNews has polluted the American psyche; middle America is a bunch of stupid simpletons. I get the idea, Mr. #2 at the UN.

Laughably, he goes on to comment on his boss:

Today, we are coming to the end of the 10-year term of arguably the UN’s best-ever Secretary-General, Kofi Annan.

Holy crap, I hope not. The man who received a "no confidence" vote from the general assembly? Who allowed members of the security council to be bought off by Iraq in order to save itself from international action? The man who let his own son circumvent the will of the world to make money off of Iraq's sanctions? If this man is the best we can do then I say lets pull out of the UN - today.

My favorite Ambassador, John Bolton, had a few things to say - if you can believe it:

Well, on that speech, this is a very, very grave mistake by the Deputy Secretary General. We are in the process of an enormous effort to achieve substantial reform at the United Nations. And it's a difficult effort, but it's an effort that we feel very strongly about. And to have the Deputy Secretary General criticize the United States in such a manner, can only do grave harm to the United Nations. Even though the target of the speech was the United States, the victim, I fear, will be the United Nations. And even worse was the condescending and patronizing tone about the American people. That fundamentally and very sadly, this was a criticism of the American people, not the American government, by an international civil servant, it's just illegitimate.

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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 UN official that I have seen in that entire time. That's why the only hope I think is that the Secretary General comes to the rescue of the organization and repudiates the speech.

I agree. But Bolton wasn't done. In London now he went on to say:

"Mark Malloch Brown has a sentence in his speech where he says the role of the UN is a mystery in Middle America,” he said. “Maybe it is fashionable in some circles to look down on Middle America, to say they don’t get the complexities of the world and they don’t have the benefit of continental education and they are deficient in so many ways,” Mr Bolton added. “It is illegitimate for an international civil servant to criticise what he thinks are the inadequacies of citizens of a member government.”

“Congress has the power of the purse and they feel quite strongly on a bipartisan basis that America has a right to know how their tax dollars are being spent, even people from Middle America,” he said, with a note of sarcasm. “I don’t think we have seen the end of it.”

I like the sound of that. I think it is nearing time to realize a bad investment, and cut our losses.