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Tuesday May 4, 2010

Why Do We Need The United Nations?

New Yorkers have long been sick and tired of having obnoxious, arrogant diplomats from Third World countries pull that diplomatic immunity tripe over everything from traffic violations to hard-core felonies.

By Alicia Colon

When did the United Nations become the League of Nations? This intergovernmental agency is just as totally inept as the League yet for some strange reason continues to have far too much influence over the United States.

For that matter why do we care so much about what the international community thinks of us? I'll bet that many of the voters who chose Barack Obama for president did so hoping that our reputation would improve abroad. Not much luck with that now, was it?

Liberal judges want our laws to reflect international ones and recently the Obama administration via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has indicated that it would support a U.N.-proposed treaty to impose strict controls on firearms and other weapons. This treaty is probably just a global gun-control scheme designed to register, ban, and confiscate firearms owned by private citizens. This would be in violation of our Second Amendment, and the idea that currying to the U.N. would improve our foreign relations is laughable. I may just join the NRA even though I don't own a gun nor even like them, but the Bill of Rights is near and dear to my heart.

New Yorkers have long been sick and tired of having obnoxious, arrogant diplomats from Third World countries pull that diplomatic immunity tripe over everything from traffic violations to hard-core felonies. That once-revered institution resting on primo real estate on the East River belongs in Europe not here in the country it clearly holds in contempt.

I was still in school when the U.N. held an international summit in New York that brought the USSR's Nikita Khrushchev and Cuba's Fidel Castro to town. President Eisenhower rightly dubbed them "troublemakers" and they certainly lived up to their name.

Nevertheless, the U.N. meant something at that time because it was dominated by the major nations of the world and its secretary-general was the esteemed Dag Hammarskjold.

The U.N. membership now includes many Third World countries ruled by despots who continuously vote against the concerns of this nation and those of our allies. The only human rights violators they seem to regularly target are Israel and the United States. I ask again why we even have to belong to the U.N. About the only thing we can depend on it for in international conflicts is that the once-august body will come down on the side of our adversary.

Much is made about the fact that we couldn't find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq once we finally went to war there.

The biggest mistake President George W. Bush made was trying to get the approval of the U.N. even though Saddam Hussein had violated the terms of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 by kicking out the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency searching for WMDs. He wasted valuable time that gave the Iraqi dictator time to remove the weapons to Syria. That's just a rumor spread by the Republicans to excuse the Iraq War, right?

Except that the charge came from the No. 2 official in the Iraqi Air Force, General Georges Sada, who wrote in his book, "Saddam's Secrets," that Iraq had moved WMDs into Syria before the war by loading them onto civilian aircraft that had had their passenger seats removed.

Mr. Bush should also have known that both France and Russia had oil contracts with Saddam and would veto any move to invade Iraq. In other words, going before the U.N. was a colossal waste of valuable time.

Consider how thoroughly inept the U.N. was during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that killed nearly 20% of that country's population.

The only thing that the U.N. was good for then was getting white Europeans out safely, even though the U.N. mandate allows interference when faced with genocidal activity.

In 2005 a classified U.N. report forced Secretary-General Kofi Annan to admit that U.N. peacekeepers and staff had sexually abused or exploited war refugees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These alleged abuses - some captured on tape - included pedophilia, rape, and prostitution. Similar allegations were made in neighboring Burundi.

Three years earlier, another U.N. report found "widespread" evidence of sexual abuse of West African refugees. Whatever happened to those investigations and how likely are we to read about them in the leftwing press?

The Washington Post had an article by Colum Lynch in 2008 about the release of hundreds of confidential U.N. audits and investigation reports on a U.S. government Web site. Mr. Lynch wrote:

"Together, the nearly 500 documents and thousands of pages constitute a trove of U.N. secrets stretching back over five years, including allegations of bribes paid for tsunami relief projects in Indonesia, of sexual harassment in Gaza and a revelation that a U.N. antidrug official ran a presidential campaign while receiving a U.N. paycheck. The pages also document a spree of alleged criminal activities, including a bribery scheme at the airport in Kosovo, gold trading by U.N. peacekeepers in Congo and the theft and resale of food rations by Ukrainian pilots serving the United Nations in Liberia."

Remember the "Oil for Food" scandal that implicated Mr. Annan?

How about the U.N.'s mercy mission to earthquake-devastated Haiti? Even Reuters had to report: "Clutching automatic assault rifles, truckloads of U.N. troops patrolled the streets of Haiti's shattered capital on the day after the earthquake hit last month, seemingly oblivious to the misery around them. Cries for help from people digging for survivors in collapsed buildings were drowned out by the roar of heavy-duty engines as the troops plowed through Port-au-Prince without stopping to join rescue efforts, much less lead them."

The article went on to say, "Unfortunately, U.N. troops in Haiti have over the years gained a reputation for toughness and abuse more than for easing suffering in the poorest country in the Americas."

Last month, I read a report by the executive editor of Fox News, George Russell, that said: "The United Nations has quietly upped this year's peacekeeping budget for earthquake-shattered Haiti to $732.4 million, with two-thirds of that amount going for the salary, perks and upkeep of its own personnel, not residents of the devastated island."

The absurdity and gall of the U.N. knows no bounds. Fox News reported on Thursday: "Without fanfare, the United Nations this week elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women, handing a four-year seat on the influential human rights body to a theocratic state in which stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged 'immodest.'"

Need I say more?

Alicia Colon resides in New York City and can be reached at aliciav.colon@gmail.com and at www.aliciacolon.com

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