a day or so before John Bolton's recess appointment as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was announced, columnist Charles Krauthammer opined on Fox News that he was being sent on "a fool's errand."
For all those on either the right or the left still bloviating about what reforms Bolton will achieve during his tenure representing the U.S., let me suggest the answer is "Not much." His is a symbolic appointment. It is a stick in the eye of the bleating Democrats/Liberals who keep calling him "a bully" or, having savaged his record of diplomatic service, describe him now as "damaged goods."
It is a warning to Kofi annan and the rest of the gangsters gathered to represent the UN membership that this U.S. President is really fed up. For the record, Bolton has had a long and distinguished service as a diplomat, but you wouldn't know that after the Democrats got through smearing him. Moreover, many americans share his antipathy to the United Nations.
I confess that I still don't understand why the U.S. continues to maintain membership in the United Nations, given its history of failure, particularly as regards its primary mission of bringing about peace in the world. It is well known that the US pays 22 percent of the UN's budget and contributes millions more to various other UN initiatives and programs. This continues despite the UN's unrelenting efforts to undermine our own and every other nation's sovereignty in order to become a world government.
If you don't believe me, you can always read Our Global Neighborhood, a UN report that outlines how it wants to have the power to tax all people in all nations, to have its own independent military to enforce its mandates, to ban everything from guns to smoking, and a wish list of socialist programs, whose failure is a matter of record.
Granted that the U.S. is just one among 190 member nations, what most americans don't realize is that the UN consistently votes against our efforts to extend democracy and freedom worldwide. For example, of the various arab member nations, their representatives vote against american resolutions an astounding 74 percent of the time, despite the fact that a number of them, like Egypt, are recipients of billions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid.
The Oil-for-Food scandal will surely rank as the greatest act of financial criminality in history. The collusion of UN personnel, along with its beneficiaries, is already generally known, but every effort to delay and defuse the scandal has been going on since the fall of the Saddam regime.
Starting shortly after its founding, the UN responded to North Korea's invasion, but it was america with a handful of allies that did the fighting to keep South Korea from falling prey to one of the world's most depraved dictatorships. We sacrificed more than 53,000 men and, today, South Korea stands in stark contrast to a rogue nation that has become a nuclear supermarket posing a threat to the entire world. Iran's nuclear ambitions are yet another example of UN impotence.
along with the Korean conflict, the UN has voted only one other time for intervention and that was when Iraq invaded Kuwait. By 2003, there had been 291 wars resulting in 22 million deaths since the UN was founded. The UN has never taken any action against a member nation that was systematically killing its own citizens.
The list of other UN failures is long. Tibet was invaded by China and remains its captive to this day. While Rwanda became a synonym for the slaughter of thousands, UN "peacekeepers" were nowhere to be found. This same indifference is being repeated today in the Sudan. The Balkan conflict between Serbia and Islamic insurgents was another conflict the UN was unable and unwilling to prevent, requiring U.S. and NaTO intervention. The UN fled Iraq when its headquarters there was bombed.
Consistent with its indifference--except for the usual lip service--to the rise of the Islamic jihad and its use of terrorism throughout the world, has been its failure to facilitate any resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Having given its blessing to the establishment of Israel, the UN has spent more than a half century pouring billions into the maintenance of the Palestinians as the world's oldest group of refugees. There were 20 arab states that could have absorbed people who did not wish to live in Israel, but the UN permitted the father of modern terrorism, Yasser arafat, to thrive, inviting him at one point to address the General assembly.
Today, its efforts to "reform" include expanding the membership of the Security Council, its real center of power, from 15 to 24 members; all the better to subvert america's objective to extend democracy and exercise regime change as an antidote to the many dictatorships and the threat of the global Islamic jihad.
This is the same UN that has had some of those dictatorships chair its Human Rights Commission. at present, Cuba, Saudi arabia, and Zimbabwe serve on the five-member panel that makes decisions on which human rights petitions get heard in closed proceedings before the full 53-member Commission. This is an offense to humanity.
The UN also maintains a huge bureaucracy devoted to "environmental" issues. It is the facilitator of the Kyoto Protocol that demands industrialized nations cut back greenhouse emissions while exempting nations such as India and China. One by one, those who are signatories have discovered their economic growth threatened and have ignored its mandates. The U.S. Senate unanimously voted to avoid participation. Meanwhile, the UN is the nexus of opposition to the benefits of biotechnology that can help reduce famine and enhance the health of the world's population.
Like its predecessor, the United Nations is an utterly failed, utterly corrupt, experiment that followed in the second of two world wars in the last century. It cannot be reformed. It has not and cannot prevent new conflicts. Its humanitarian programs for refugees and in the field of health can be undertaken by new international agencies devoid of the egregious socialist politicization of their agendas.
The best thing ambassador John Bolton can do during his brief tenure representing the United States would be to announce our withdrawal from the UN so that it can continue its present implosion. The U.S. needs to renounce the mandates of the many UN treaties that do nothing but attack our national sovereignty.
The United States needs to promote the creation of a new organization composed only of truly democratic nations who would come together to insure and protect the expansion of freedom throughout the world.
John Bolton will speak for George W. Bush. I suggest you listen very closely. If he says, "We're outta here", break out the champagne.