The persistent drumbeat among the right regarding Oil-for-Food continues, though typically ignored among the rest of the media, who would rather tell us that New Orleans is still underwater. For myself, I'm of two minds, about this scandal and the U.N. itself.
The basics first: Oil-for-Fraud may well indeed be the most disgusting display of bureaucratic vileness seen in modern times, a scheme so venal it would have done Boss Tweed proud. And I'm not interested in the excuses or the equivocation. The U.N. bureaucracy and the governments of several Western Nations either sold out the suffering people of Iraq to get their hands on oil, or looked the other way, and in doing so, made the Butcher of Baghdad more wealthy, and his stranglehold on his people more powerful.
But...what were we expecting? The right has been castigating the U.N. as a dictator's club for years. Nations with human rights records scarcely better than Saddam's get to sit on the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Nations that refuse to grasp the economic benefit of private property get to draw up expansive tracts on the "just economic order" required to lift themselves out of poverty. Nations that burn brown coal get to wag their fingers at the U.S. and call Bush an "environmental tyrant" because he refused to pay attention to a treaty that our Senate rejected. This is the usual Lower Manhattan Two-Step, whereby thugs and bloated office-seekers transform themselves into the Saviors of the Poor and Friends of the Earth.
But let us step beyond cynicism. I fear that the right's U.N. denunciation is wrongheaded. The U.N.'s purported mission is to represent the world, and in this case, I think it has done so. The source of the organization's problem isn't within. If the U.N. were to vanish tommorrow, the thugs and bloated office-seekers would still be there, and be yet more naked in their brutality and fawning. The world is the real dictator's club. If we could lose the tyrants, we could find dealing with the bureaucrats easier. At any rate, there'd be somewhat less obstruction, and much less need for baby blue helmets to stand around watching genocide.
Ah, but how? Imperial Democracy is not an act that's regularly repeatable, even if it works (I'm confident, but the jury is still out). Probably the best we may hope for is the War on Terror to morph into a Cold War on Tyrants, whereby both parties agree that the security of the U.S. requires diplomatic and occasionally military action against despotic regimes, whatever their strategic value. The logic is not difficult to follow:
1. Tyrants brutalize and engender poverty.
2. Angry, poor people are easily recruited into terrorist and criminal activity.
2a. Tyrants also tend to serve as terrorist and criminal enablers.
3. Terrorists and criminal syndicates, being non-linear threats, have a tendency to encourage free states to greatly increase their security apparati, leading to free societies becoming less so.
And if we can swallow that without protesting our own sinfulness, we can set about doing what must be done.
Update Mark Steyn agrees that U.N. reform is pointless, but doesn't give the same rational. (registration required)
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