This is one the official guides to the Olympics won’t be handing out, but it is vital to understanding the true context of the spectacle we are about to witness in Beijing. Created and circulated by people who have kept faith with the Chinese democracy movement:
showing street locations in Beijing where on June 4, 1989, 150 of the demonstrators were killed, or the hospitals where their bodies were taken. As the text accompanying the map explains, the total number killed “remains unknown although estimates range from several hundred to several thousand.” The information for this map was gathered by a group called the Tiananmen Mothers, started by Ding Zilin, a mother of one of the victims.
Nineteen years have passed, but as one of the eye-witnesses in the Beijing streets and in Tiananmen Square itself to that night of June 3-4, 1989, I look at this map and in memory can still hear the first cracks of the bullets, feel the treads of armored personnel carriers shaking the pavement, and see the people looking grimly at the advancing rows of helmets, silhouetted against the burning roadblocks. They were clutching bricks and bottles against the guns of their own country’s army. I remember a young man I saw closeup, shot in the chest, one of seven with bullet wounds I saw carried to a makeshift medical tent at the north end of Tiananmen Square during the final hours — and wonder if any of them are named in this document. I remember the demonstrators sitting in the spring breeze, shortly before dawn, on the steps of the monument to China’s Revolutionary Heroes, surrounded on three sides by tens of thousands of soldiers in the final standoff in Tiananmen Square — and facing off against the huge portrait of Mao, the white Goddess of Liberty statue that stood in Tiananmen for less than a week before China’s rulers knocked it down.
Here’s the account I filed that June 4th, recording what I had witnessed, and trying to answer my editor’s question, what does it mean? “The Party Pulls the Trigger.”
In that 1989 article, in the closing paragraph, I tried to set down something that still applies today; not least as visitors to Beijing survey the massive security efforts, not all of which are intended strictly to protect the Olympics:
“No doubt when the Chinese government has finished dealing with its people, the tidy square will be presented again as a suitable site for tourists, visiting dignitaries and the Chinese public to come honor the heroes of China’s glorious revolution. It will be important then to remember the heroes of 1989, the people who cried out so many times these past six weeks, ‘Tell the world what we want. Tell the truth about China.’ “
On this massacre map, one of the important truths that stands out if you look at the ages of some of those who died that night, is that the Tiananmen uprising was not solely a student movement. Some of the people who in their passion for liberty tried to face down the guns of their own government were in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. Nor were they all killed in Tiananmen Square. From what I saw, my best estimate is that more were shot or crushed to death in the surrounding streets, trying to stop the advancing troops from reaching Tiananmen — which had become a symbol of the desire for freedom and justice.
Now come the 2008 Olympics, and while wishing the athletes well, I have little to add to what I wrote in early 2001, when Beijing was competing with Osaka, Istanbul, Paris and Toronto to host these games.
“…Trying to imagine the Olympic torch lit in Beijing, I keep remembering another torch, put there not at the behest of the communist regime, but by the protesters who nearly 12 years ago rose up by the millions to defy China’s tyranny. It was the torch held in both hands by the Chinese Goddess of Democracy — patterned after our Statue of Liberty — that for almost a week stood in Tiananmen Square, until it was destroyed by government troops on June 4, 1989.
When that symbolic flame of freedom can be safely lit again in China, it will be fitting to award Beijing the Olympic Games. Until then, the Olympics can better keep faith with human dignity — especially that of the Chinese people — by going somewhere else.”
If that sounds promising — as in, maybe the UN is finally zeroing in on Cuba’s gross violations of human rights — think again. The Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council has just picked a new chairman for its Advisory Committee, an 18-member body of “experts” who come together as a “think tank” to help guide the Council’s work. This being the UN, naturally they picked a Cuban.
And no, this UN-anointed mentor of human rights is by no stretch a Cuban dissident. He’s 73-year-old Miguel Alfonso Martinez, a former Cuban diplomat and former spokesman for Havana’s foreign ministry. His expertise in human rights includes running interference at the UN for the regime of Saddam Hussein after the Halabja Massacre. Reporters San Frontieres records that faced with “the images of the bodies of five thousand Kurdish women, children and old men lying on the ground in this ghostly area drenched with nerve gas,” Alfonso Martinez’s move at the old UN Human Rights Commission was to co-sponsor a “no action” motion.
Under the umbrella of the UN Human Rights Council, Cuba is also currently serving as rapporteur for the committee now preparing a nasty reprise of the anti-Israel, anti-U.S. 2001 Durban conference — which got so ugly that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell pulled out the U.S. delegation. The preparatory committee for Durban II, scheduled for next year, is chaired by Libya’s Najat Al-Hajjaji (who in 2003 chaired the UN Human Rights Commission) and features such star planners as Russia and Iran.
Recall that this is the work of the new, “reformed” UN Human Rights Council, set up to replace the old, utterly discredited Human Rights Commission. This was advertised by the UN at the time as one of the crown jewels of Kofi Annan’s final round of “reforms,” and hailed in a UN press release as an “historic” achievement, approved in the General Assembly by an overwhelming vote of 170 for, and only four against (those four holdouts being the U.S., then represented by Ambassador John Bolton; and Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau).
If you can stomach any more of this stuff, the stalwart, Geneva-based UN Watch has recently put out a report, “The Right to Name and Shame,” evaluating the performance of former UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour, who just stepped down after four years as the diva of this UN human rights choir. UN Watch goes to great lengths to be fair, and gives Arbour credit for her criticisms of a few of the world’s worst regimes, including Burma, Zimbabwe and Sudan. But Arbour, while also criticizing the U.S., and lambasting Israel, “was silent, or spoke out no more than once, on systematic human rights abuses committed by China and Russia, both permanent members of the Security Council, and on those committed by Egypt, a powerful player at the UN.”
There’s more, much more, including some illuminating tables in the report. But here’s the money quote: “Most troubling of all, Arbour published no statements at all for victims of 153 countries, including many with human rights situations that range from poor to appalling, such as Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Burkina Faso, North Korea, Gabon, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Vietnam and Yemen.”
Wow. Nothing at all on North Korea. Nothing on Saudi Arabia. Nothing on Syria. Nothing on Libya. Oh, and according to the tables in the report, nothing on Cuba, either. Which, with its new chair on the Advisory Committee, brings us back to where we tuned in to this latest episode of Your UN at Work: The Human Rights Council.
Looks like Obama could be running into some serious celebrity backlash. Gwyneth Paltrow, resident in London, stars in an internet video ad exhorting expat Americans around the globe to get out those absentee ballots and vote, vote, vote – for Obama. Check it out, as detailed in the U.K.’s Telegraph online, but don’t stop with the article and video, look at the 300+ comments so far. If this is rigged, someone’s done quite a job; and if it isn’t, Gwyneth, give it a rest. To quote from one: “My Brit brothers and sisters… Keep her.” To quote another: “He is not the Messiah” — (One more reason in these revelatory times to dust off Monty Python’s Life of Brian — “He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy.”)
“If” –?? What is Bush talking about? That ship has sailed. That train has left the station. That bomb is out of the bag.
North Korea already has a nuclear weapon, and more likely it has a number of them. According to the Bush administration’s own State Department, North Korea in 2003 was ranting away about bolstering its ”nuclear deterrent force.” In 2005, North Korea declared it had “manufactured nuclear weapons,” declared itself a “nuclear weapons state,” and in 2006 tested a “nuclear explosive device” (which, in non-diplomatic English, we call a nuclear bomb).
Surely Bush knows all that. So why, in this interview released Wednesday by the White House, would he utter this bizarre rewrite of reality?
Part of the answer might be that this interview — in which Bush mainly discussed his excitement about going to the Olympics in Beijing – was already such a triple-helping of diplomatic mush that it was easy to conflate North Korea (which has the bomb) with Iran (which is racing to get it). Asked about the former, Bush gave the potted response for the latter.
But there’s a bigger problem here, which encompasses both North Korea and Iran, and slops into plenty of other places as well. Bush was simply speaking the language of “soft power,” which his second-term team has been whispering into his ear for the past three years. In this approach to the prospect of malign, terror-loving governments (and their terrorist pals) acquiring weapons of mass destruction, there is no more “axis of evil,” no more “dead or alive,” no more “with us or against us,” no more “history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”
Instead, there is the lingo of Secretary of State Condi Rice; or special envoy to the Six-Party Talks, Chris Hill; the jargon of the Annapolis conference and the ever-proliferating UN resolutions. America now speaks with the voice of a fretful nanny, scolding a naughty child even as she stuffs his pockets with sweets. Or – in the holistic spirit of this eco-era – carrots.
In these realms, what matters is “stability” and “process.” You don’t confront threats, or defeat enemies. Instead, you express your “disappointment” and “concern” over “destabilizing” and “troubling” developments… such as their missile tests, rapidly advancing nuclear weapons programs, or the test explosion of a nuclear bomb device. If North Korea turns out to have been building a secret nuclear reactor in Syria with no clear purpose other than to crank out plutonium for weapons, you don’t immediately congratulate the Israelis for their courage in destroying it, and move swiftly to punish the proliferators. Instead, you let the story age quietly in the White House fridge for a couple of months, and then issue a statement that the reactor was “not intended for peaceful purposes,” and — here comes the penalty — you are “seriously concerned” (which is, of course, much more ferocious than being “concerned,” but not “seriously” so).
And if you must bring up such ideas as freedom and democracy, you go out of your way not to offend those who actively deprive their people of these abstractions. Thus, in this same interview with Chinese state TV, Bush explains that he is going to the Olympics in Beijing because “It’s much more likely a Chinese leader will listen to my concerns if he knows I respect the people of China.” Again, what is Bush talking about? He’ll be paying his respects to China’s dictator-in-chief, President Hu Jintao (in this interview, he already did: “I respect the man a lot”). Meantime, Hu’s secret police are busy censoring the internet and sweeping up democrat dissidents, lest the people of China interfere with the Olympic festivities.
And on all these soft fronts, after all the carrots, sticks and diplo-babble, the Bush administration is stuck in the mud. That may seem less and less relevant, as he prepares to leave office in less than six months. But in some of the worst hotspots, the world is moving fast right now — and not in a good direction. North Korea has been raking in cash, aid and political concessions; but apart from shutting down the aging Yongbyon reactor (again), there’s no sign that Kim Jong Il has surrendered an ounce of plutonium, or given up his uranium enrichment projects, or abandoned or even begun to disclose his proliferation networks. In Iran, the centrifuges are spinning, and Ahmadinejad is thumbing his nose — a model for fellow despots.
As for the interview Bush gave this week to the state-controlled CCTV of the People’s Republic of China, I can think of a number of reactions it might reasonably inspire, but respect is not on the list.
There is, of course, one important arena in which Bush, to his great credit, has not gone soft; in which he has stuck by his original promise and principles: Iraq. That, as it happens, is where America is now winning.
So, while the U.S. Treasury is trying to tighten sanctions on Burma’s thug government, the United Nations has been busy funneling millions of dollars to the Burmese regime — thanks to a classic artificial foreign-exchange rate dodge, which the UN finally acknowledged in public only after weeks of questioning by Inner-City Press (see post below).
This latest in the long list of UN gifts to dictators came about as part of the relief mission launched in May to help Burmese victims of Cyclone Nargis. In a press conference yesterday at the UN’s New York headquarters, the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, John Holmes, appeared not to understand the niceties of how the Burmese exchange-rate fiddle actually works. Nor, as Holmes told it, had other UN officials been paying much attention; they “were not aware of the extent of the loss.” Holmes’s estimate is that “probably less than $10 million so far” has flowed into the wide abyss between the market rate of Burma’s currency (the kyat), and the official rate, set by the Burmese junta, which is what the UN has been buying into.
The actual amount of money thus disappeared in Burma is still desperately unclear (”the losses are significant, but not absolutely gigantic,” was another of Holmes’s locutions yesterday on the subject) …. This is the UN, where officials have no hesitation in spelling out to the last decimal point their multi-year plans for the GNP of every developing country on the planet, or issuing an appeal for $482 million in emergency relief for Burma, or lamenting shortfalls in their elaborately calculated funding targets. But when it comes to accounting for where exactly the money goes, the UN is suddenly a place of missed messages, ignorance and confusion. They didn’t notice, they hadn’t realized, they never knew, they were not aware … this is the endless refrain, in Oil-for-Food, in Cash-for-Kim, and now in Burma Shave…
They “were not aware” … That’s highly questionable, in light of a June 26 UN internal document obtained and posted by Inner-City Press, which records in-house concerns more than a month ago that the Burma relief operation was suffering ”a very serious 20% loss on foreign exchange.”
But let us assume that a UN official, especially in discussing the handling of millions in other people’s money, would never tell a lie.
In that case, one has to marvel at the parade of astounding naifs who rise to top ranks of the UN, apparently without ever learning to look out for even the simplest of financial scams and outrages. Take these innocents at their word, and one can only conclude that the UN specializes in promoting an extraordinary tribe of irredeemable dupes. Clueless, and apparently ineducable, they roam the first-class hotels of the Third World, dispensing billions worth of other people’s money and resources, indefatigably oblivious to fiddles that a six-year-old street grifter in any of these places could spot faster than you can say “millennium development goals.”
Tiered exchange rate schemes? Over-invoicing? After-sales-service kickbacks? Phony consulting fees? Oil buyers posing as end-users in Liechstenstein? Front companies run by Russians in Switzerland? A Mercedes shipped to Africa in the name of the Secretary-General? Double-billing in the Middle East by UNICEF? Counterfeit cash in the Pyongyang office safe? Cash transfers to North Korean front companies linked to nuclear proliferation?
From Kofi Annan to Ban Ki-Moon; from the UN Development Progam’s former administrator Mark Malloch Brown to the current Kemal Dervis; from the UN’s former humanitarian coordinator Jan Egeland (who promised transparency in funding of the 2004 tsunami relief efforts, and never delivered) to the current John Holmes (apparently so blindsided by Burma’s currency shave); from nameless officials deep in the UN alphabet soup to the scores of Assistant and Under-Secretaries-General floating like croutons on top; so very many UN officials would have us believe, as Holmes described his own operation, that they are “arguably a bit slow” to notice the stock mechanisms by which money meant to help the sick, the hungry, the stricken, somehow keeps flowing into the pockets of tyrants.
Maybe instead of fielding a toothless ”Ethics Office,” the UN as a sort of remedial education service for its own top management should set up an agency of Bribery, Rackets, Insider Boondoggles and Extortion (call it UN-BRIBE), devoted to explaining, cataloguing and quantifying for the record the scams, cons, schemes and fiddles to which UN programs are so endlessly prone. Right now, the institutional memory for such stuff appears to consist solely of whatever will fit in Ban Ki-Moon’s wastebasket.
UN-BRIBE could perform the handy service, for instance, of providing public benchmarks for what level of bribery, scam, pay-off, rake-off, etc., qualifies at the UN as ”significant, but not absolutely gigantic.” Or maybe, for ease in budgeting, provide graft-and-skimming schedules custom-tailored (and inflation-adjusted) to the habits of individual member states, UN departments, and so forth. No one could reasonably expect such an exercise to actually clean up the UN; it would almost certainly succumb at speed to its own arts — and in short order would probably have Burma, North Korea, Zimbabwe and Iran on its executive board. But hey, if this is how the UN works, why not at least make it official?
In fairness, of course, not everyone at the UN is so staunchly oblivious. There are also the whistleblowers, without whom many of the UN scandals would never come to light at all. But they are the exception; they lead an endangered existence, far less likely to be promoted than expelled, especially if their names become known to the perennially surprised innocents who run the institution – just ask former UNDP contractor, whistleblower in the North Korea Cash-for-Kim scandal, Artjon Shkurtaj.
If ringing rhetoric and nifty stage-sets could save the world, there’d be no problem about changing our national anthem — Yes, we can! — to ”Kumbayah.” But global reality comes crammed with more than serial exclusive TV interviews and 200,000 happy Germans snacking on bratwurst. There are also tyrants, terrorists, schemers, crooks and con men, whose take on citizens-of-the-world exhorting enraptured crowds to ”stand as one” is that it’s an excellent opening for all sorts of thuggery.
Take Burma. While Barack Obama has been touring 8 countries in 9 days, refining a foreign policy based on the spontaneous coming-together of the world (or was it the “planet?”), a sordid tale has been oozing out of Burma — with almost no attention from the American mainstream media. In this case, the change-seekers are the members of Burma’s brutally repressive junta, led by Than Shwe. And the change they’ve been seeking — and getting — is hard-cash foreign exchange, skimmed out of the massive United Nations relief operation for victims of the cyclone that hit Burma in May.
How has Burma’s junta been managing this racket? In brief, by requiring the UN to change hard-currency into Burmese currency, the kyat, at lousy, below-market rates — with the Burmese regime pocketing as much as 25% of every dollar exchanged.
This tale only came to light thanks to the intrepid efforts of the small but feisty Inner-City Press, whose UN-based reporter, Matthew Russell Lee, in a series of articles over the past few weeks, has dubbed the scandal “Burma Shave.” Back in June, Lee began asking the unsexy but hugely important question of what exchange rate the UN was getting from Burmese authorities for relief funds spent in local currency inside Burma. Following the usual pattern of UN scandal, the UN’s first response was no answer at all, except that someone would look into it. A fortnight later, having pressed the question again, Lee was assured there were no “dodgy deals.” He kept digging. Last week the UN finally admitted to going along with a Burmese government dodge involving the UN purchase at inflated rates of “Foreign Exchange Certificates” which the Burmese government requires in order to buy Burmese kyat.
So, while the UN has been collecting hundreds of millions in emergency funding for Burma’s cyclone victims, how much of that money has the UN been forking over to the Burmese junta in hard cash? (Hey, this is the UN. What matters is that donors stand as one to give money; not where the money goes). As Lee reported this past weekend, it’s still unclear what the numbers really are — though with the de facto exchange fees ranging from about 17% to 25%, the transfer of UN relief funds to Burmese junta coffers has likely been on a scale of millions. Lee asks a very good question: “Why were these losses never disclosed while funds were being raised, including in UN appeals for $200 million and then, earlier this month, $300 million more?”
While Inner-City has been trying to extrude information about this scam from UN officials, the UN has been busy bemoaning a funding crunch for its relief efforts in Burma (the Burma Shave foreign-exchange scam gets a brief mention way down in the final paragraph of this July 25th article in The Christian Science Monitor).
So, what’s just happened here? Burma is hit by a terrible cyclone, with vast devastation, including an estimated 140,000 or so people dead. The reason the Burmese are so especially vulnerable is that the country is kept miserably poor under the boot of one of the world’s worst governments — the same regime that last fall slaughtered peacefully protesting monks. To help the cyclone victims, the UN raises hundreds of millions in aid from generous donors. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon makes a personal visit to Burma, where he says, “The whole world is trying to help Myanmar.” He sits down to talk with high-ranking officials, including the head of the junta, Than Shwe. From that meeting, Ban emerges to say, as reported by the UN public information office, that “substantive progress was made on all critical issues at hand regarding humanitarian assistance to Myanmar… .”
And now we learn — thanks not to the UN, or the MSM, but to the internet-based Inner-City Press — that in this coming-together and talking-to-dictators relief operation, the Burmese junta, dignified by a personal visit and happy words from the UN Secretary-General, buoyed up by a tide of relief money and goods from abroad, has been pocketing one heck of a lot of change. As with Oil-for-Food in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Cash-for-Kim in North Korea, aid to Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, funds to Gaza under Hamas … it’s an approach that helps keep Burma under the jackboot, while the world, standing as one, coming together, don’t-bother-us-with-realities, sings kumbayah. Yes, they can.
“People of Berlin — people of the world — this is our moment. This is our time.”
What is he talking about? Time for what, exactly? Time for Obama round the clock, round the world, round and round the rhetoric goes, and where it stops…?
With Obama’s voice echoing from the TV set every time I switch on the news, I’ve tried to stay focused on some immediate projects involving the grand stew of corruption, cover-ups, petty sleaze, big scams, moral bankruptcy and gross failures going on at the chief seat of the “people of the world,” a.k.a. the United Nations — where so many of Obama’s collectivist visions are already well advanced in practice. But I’m a member of the media, and no one of that tribe can afford to by-pass what is evidently the hottest story ever: Barack Obama on world tour with the message that this is our time, this is the moment, we are the change we seek, change we can believe in, powered by hope and yes, we can!
OK, so maybe it does sound like something assembled out of word-kit refrigerator magnets. And yes, if a car dealer tried to sell me a vehicle “powered by hope,” I’d be nervous. But this is a presidential campaign; apparently different standards apply.
So, here I am we are, as the opening lines of Obama’s Berlin speech reverberate yet again from the TV. And it strikes me us (we have to get used to referring to ourselves in the plural) — as the loop endlessly replays– that ”powered by truth,” he couldn’t even get past the salutation without telling a come-hither lie:
“Tonight I speak to you not as a candidate for president, but as a citizen, a proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world.”
Oh, come on. Obama didn’t go to Berlin because he felt an abrupt personal itch to commune with a crowd of Germans. Neither was a hole discovered in the ozone over the Brandenburg Gate that only the speech of an Illinois Senator could fill. We, you, he, she, it, they and I all know it was a campaign stunt. And if that sounds so obvious that it’s not worth caviling over, then the least Obama could do is respect the intelligence of voters back home enough to skip the fiction.
But fiction — messianic fiction — is the element in which he swims. Kennedy and Reagan went to Berlin because they were the elected leaders of the United States, and it was a flashpoint in the mighty showdown between the U.S. and U.S.S.R that shaped the second half of the 20th century. Obama dropped in under the urgent imperative of needing some quick-fix foreign footage to bulk up his campaign resume. Thus did he announce:
“Now, the world will watch and remember what we do here — what we do with this moment.”
That might be a little confusing for those who thought the “moment“ had already come in June (when he started to heal the earth) or January (during the early primaries). But on Obama-time, it is always “the moment” — which goes far to explain why he sees no contradictions in his own flip-flops. Whatever he said in previous moments, about Iraq, Iran, Jerusalem, his own associates, whatever, that was then, this is now, and anyway, it’s all “change.”
In his Berlin ”moment,” Obama specified that the world will ”remember what we do here.” The phrase carries an echo of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; except Lincoln, with his presidential war-time credentials, was rather more modest: ”The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”
No such deference from Obama. But what exactly did he, or they, or “we” do that the world will remember? His German audience turned out some 200,000 strong (many, but not as many as the one million or so that some had predicted) gave the biggest cheers over the broadest hints that America might soon be wilting its way toward the local brand of peacenik, tree-hugger Euro-socialism, and then – they went home.
Obama, the we-in-chief of this worldly gathering, gave a history of the Berlin airlift in which he neglected to mention who flew the planes (the Americans and the British, including 70 airmen who gave their lives to save West Berlin — was that not worth remembering?). Instead, in Obama-world, the planes just sort of materialized. It was the “spirit” of “global commitment to progress” that “led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads.”
What else did Obama do during his moment in Berlin (apart from scrap a visit to wounded American troops)? He did a bang-up job rearranging some of those refrigerator magnets. In Germany, “we” are not simply “powered by hope,” but have become a people of “improbable hope“… “resolve“… “history” … “destiny” … and - yes — “this is the moment” when “we“ (seeking the yes, we can, change we are) are all going to “stand as one,” ”come together,” tear down walls, reduce carbon emissions, save the planet, “give our children back their future” and under the “burdens of global citizenship“ join in “global partnership.”
OK. But what does that mean? If, at some moment in this global partnership of future and destiny, Iran, protected by Russian air defenses, uses a North Korean-engineered missile to land a nuclear bomb on Israel, what would he do? Phone Reverend Wright?
If there’s another catastrophic attack on America’s shores, what would he do? Calculate the carbon footprint?
Come to think of it, where does America itself figure on Obama’s list of polymorphous priorities?
In his narrative as a private oracle of global destiny, Obama offers this tid-bit to the German crowd: “I know my country has not perfected itself” …”We’ve made our share of mistakes”…”there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.” Fair enough. But what makes that all right? Well, it seems the prime redeeming factor, the first one Obama mentions, is all about himself: “But I also know how much I love America.” In his magnanimity, this citizen-of-the-world forgives America its imperfections, so maybe, in the thrill of “the moment,” America will be loved by all because everyone will be Obama.
The problem here isn’t lack of foreign-policy experience, but a gospel in which there is no clear distinction between I and we; no clear line between American presidential candidate and citizen-of-the-world (whatever that really means); no clear sense of the vital difference between the defense of individual freedom and the debilitating pursuit of collective utopia. History tells us the cost of this worldview can be colossal. But hey, it’s a rockin’ roadshow, and on we go, yes we can…improbable hope…change…destiny…this is the moment…no, this is the moment…and this… and this…this is our time…we are the change we seek…
Condi Rice has just accused Iran of being “not serious” in negotiations meant to halt its uranium enrichment program. She’s got to be kidding.
It’s the endless charade of an EU-plus-minus-U.S.-or-whatever negotiated “threat management” diplomatic solution that’s not serious.
It’s the farce of UN sanctions that’s not serious.
It’s the pretense that this is not a clear and present danger that’s not serious.
It’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the President, the national “intelligence community” and too many members of Congress (including Barack Obama, now on his virgin celebrity tour of assorted hotspots) who aren’t serious.
The Iranians have been buying time for years to develop nuclear bombs, and they have just bought themselves some more.
One way to bury a scandal is to hold a confidential investigation, ignore the findings and pension off the alleged culprit. The United Nations, helped along by diplomatic immunity, does this with such expertise that it’s surprising they haven’t set up entire agencies devoted to this art. Or maybe they have. At the UN, top management has been sitting for more than two months now on a confidential report from the UN’s own anti-corruption task force alleging ”gross negligence” and diverted funds within — I’m not kidding — the UN’s own good governance office. Does Ban Ki-Moon care? Or is he too busy jetting around the world opining that we should let the UN serve as world’s chief rationer of energy? More on UN lessons on how to indulge in bad governance and get away with it, in my article in today’s New York Post.
For connoiseurs of UN scandal, it seems the UN official currently busy burying these latest signs of institutional rot in his “In” tray is Under-Secretary-General Sha Zukang, a member of the UN Management Group which Ban Ki-Moon chairs.
Who is Sha Zukang?
He’s one of China’s men at Turtle Bay. Based in New York, Sha runs the UN’s sprawling Department of Economic and Social Affairs — an influential position with broad reach, spending lots of money (including lots of U.S. tax dollars) around the globe on all sorts of nebulous projects — including the dissemination of principles of governance.
That bears thinking about, because in a previous incarnation, Sha was based in Geneva as an envoy of the People’s Republic of China, busy shaping the disastrously warped dictator-friendly UN Human Rights Council (which replaced the grotesquely twisted Human Rights Commission). Among Sha’s functions, from 2004-2007, as described in his UN bio, was “Coordinator of the Like-Minded Group of the Commission on Human Rights and the Human Rights Council.”
What was this “Like-Minded Group” that Sha Zukang coordinated, and on behalf of which he gave speeches urging the UN to avoid the practice of ”naming and shaming” the world’s worst human rights violators? It was a group of about 20 countries consisting largely of some of the world’s worst violators — including Sha’s own China, Belarus, Cuba, Iran, Burma, Sudan, Syria, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.
As if today’s swap of the bodies of kidnapped and murdered Israeli soldiers for live Lebanese terrorists were not sickening enough, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon weighs in to hail the deal. Saying he hopes “this will be the beginning of many to come,” Ban applauded this triumph for terrorism as a victory for “the leadership and initiative” of the UN’s mystery “facilitator” — an unnamed German official appointed back in 2006 by Kofi Annan (assuming it has been the same “facilitator” since then, and that this is not just a handy UN label for anyone and everyone who on the UN’s behalf happens to be glad-handing Hezbollah and its Iranian terror masters).
Maybe the better term for the activity of this acclaimed anonymous UN facilitator would be fauxcilitation. This is UN “diplomacy” on a par with the fauxtography that came pouring out of the Hezbollah camp in the 2006 war.
In lauding the “prisoner exchange,” as the UN calls this swap of coffins for terrorists, Ban totally ignores the terms of the UN’s own Resolution 1701, (if the UN’s user-unfriendly document system blocks you out, here’s another link to the text of Res. 1701) adopted by the Security Council on August 11, 2006. This was supposed to end the war that Hezbollah launched in July 2006 by kidnapping from inside Israel the two soldiers — Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev — whose bodies have now been redeemed by Israel at staggering cost — with terrible implications for the future security not only of Israel, but of such places as New York (where Ban Ki-Moon, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, currently resides). Resolution 1701 stated clearly the UN’s aim was “the unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers.”
Has Ban Ki-Moon even bothered to read that clause? Or do UN resolutions mean as little to the UN Secretary-General as they do to Tehran and Hezbollah?
On the matter of Lebanese authorities preparing a hero’s welcome for the terrorists sprung by this UN-facilitated deal — dealt out to the Israelis as anything but “unconditional” — Ban has so far remained silent. Perhaps he is too busy with UN efforts to ladle hundreds of millions of dollars worth of aid into Lebanon, where a UN lacking a definition of “terrorist” is busy, in effect, helping to construct the launching pads for the next war.
