Apr. 11, 2005 - 19:37 MDT

A Strange Bedfellow

Strange that occasionally people who belong to different schools of thought come to a similar conclusion about one thing or another. Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution has a column in the Rocky Mountain News today, in part:

Get the U.N. out of U.S.

"The U.N. arose out of the ashes of World War II and was the dream of Western idealists who sought to enact liberal notions of human rights and jurisprudence on a global scale."

"Well here we are in 2005 with nearly 60 years of the U.N. -- and more people have been lost in wars since 1945 than during World War II itself. Americans now distrust the U.N.'s record as much as they might applaud its idealism in theory. Why ? A half century of Soviet bloc politics poisoned the body."

"Dictatorships that had killed millions of their own won an equal say to many Western democracies. Third-World countries were silent about the 80 milliion butchered by Stalin and Mao -- and the millions more lost in tribal and religious wars in African and Asia."

"Instead, more than 400 U.N. resolutions gratuitously targeted tiny democratic Israel -- without equal condemnation of its autocratic neighbors or commensurate concern for China's annexation of Tibet or Russia's absorption of the disputed Sakhalin Islands."

"The terrorist Yasser Arafat addressed the General Assembly with a holster -- to applause. Autocratic Cuba, Iran, Libya and Syria sat on or even chaired the U. N. Commission On Human Rights. U.N. blue helmets could not do anything to save innocent millions in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Balkans and Darfur."

"Any council is only as good as its membership. Thus, allowing a Sudan, Cuba, Iran or North Korea into the General Assembly gave those nations as much de facto legitimacy as a democratic Brazil, Holland or South Africa."

"If the United States nearly 150 years ago fought a war to end slavery, why does the U.N. still welcome a country like Sudan that will not ? Many delegates vote only when they come to the U.N. They would never offer their own people the same rights that their spokesmen take for granted in New York."

"The hallowed Western liberal idea that collective reason should trump force works with democracies, but how does one persuade a Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il or Saddam Hussein to stop murdering his own and others, without some credible threat of forceful deterrence ? And if the American legislative, judicial and executive branches check one another, who or what watchdogs the U.N. ? Why not INSIST upon a democratic constitution as a PREREQUISITE for a nation to qualify for U.N. membership ?"

"Then there is the location itself of the U.N. headquarters in Turtle Bay. Diplomats live the Manhattan high life a world apart from the crises that they are supposed to be addressing in Africa and Asia."

"Global media coverage from nearby studios -- "live from New York" -- tends to provide an electronic meagaphone for fashionable anti-Americanism on the cheap. Never have so many delegates wished to live in a place for which they profess such a public dislike."

"The U.N. should move to a Bolivia, Congo or West Bank where hunger, war and strife could be monitored and addressed first hand."

Yes, the United States should still retain its membership and pay its dues, predicated on a whole series of radical structural reforms."

"But in the meantime, to restore their lost symbolic capital, let these well heeled utopians practice their craft where the world's crises -- rather than its easy rhetoric -- reside."

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I guess that we could quibble to an eternity as to what makes one a liberal or a conservative with side arguments about the importance of degree of either. And the fact that Mr. Hanson bandies the words idealistic and liberal as being the ones to blame for the world's problems does tend to put my teeth on edge. Just thinking that the non-idealists and conservatives were in Congress all this time too and I can't reall they really put up much of a stink over any of these things he is talking about.

My opinion of what the U.N. has become is about the same as his, I also feel that there is no commonsense being used there nor has there been for many years. When you let the fox chair the henhouse, who will have feathers on his whiskers ? Human rights, what do they mean to the bulk of the U.N. ?

One of the most important things I think Mr. Hanson wrote was, "Why not insist upon a democratic constitution as a prerequisite for a nation to qualify for U.N. membership ?" And why not indeed ? ? ? Could possibly level the playing field. Could we be setting our country up for a dictatorship if we condone the things the U.N. does or has done, not done when it should have ?

I respectfully agree to disagree with Mr. Hanson on many things, but the essence of what he says makes a great deal of sense to this man at the keyboard . . . . or is that a too liberal, idealistic attitude for me to assume ?

Yes, I guess this man is A Strange Bedfellow . . . . . . .

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