There’s the usual outpouring of posthumous accolades now that former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has died at age 80. I know we’re supposed to be all de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, but in truth the best I can say about him is that, like the organization he served, he wasn’t completely useless. Annan never stopped a war, never prevented a rogue nation from obtaining nuclear weapons, and could never prevent UN peacekeepers from raping the locals. If you had a treaty whose outlines were 90% complete, he could get you the last 10% of the way, and if you wanted a dignified member of the bureaucratic chattering classes to make ritual condemnations of evils they had no intention of doing anything to end, he was your guy. These days the UN exists mostly to keep transnational diplomatic elites in caviar and denounce Israel. He was not the worst UN Secretary General, and was not the worst man to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Posts Tagged ‘UN’
Kofi Annan, RIP
Saturday, August 18th, 2018UN: Hey, Let’s Inspect This Entirely Peaceful Site Hit By Missiles. Syria: Die In A Fire
Tuesday, April 17th, 2018Syria has sworn up and down that missiles from the United States, the UK and France only hit peaceful sites of toys for crippled orphans a baby milk factory a cancer research center (no really, that’s their story this time) rather than a chemical weapons facility.
So naturally, they would have no problem with UN inspector’s visiting the site, right?
We all know exactly how that movie turned out:
The international chemical weapons watchdog that sent a fact-finding team to Syria said Monday that Syrian and Russian officials blocked efforts to reach the site where rebels claim government forces unleashed chemical weapons against civilians.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said the team arrived in Damascus on Saturday and met with government officials to work out a plan for deployment to Douma.
The Syrian and the Russian officials informed the team that “pending security issues” needed to be worked out before the group went to Douma, the organization’s director general, Ahmet Üzümcü, told an emergency meeting of the group’s executive council in The Hague, Netherlands.
Of.
Course.
Some other Syria strike news:
Israel has hit a wide range of sites, including convoys of Hezbollah or Iranian fighters near the Golan, trucks ferrying missiles and rockets destined for Hezbollah en route to Lebanon, bases for Iranian drones, and an Iranian command-and-control center.
“We are facing now a determined decision by Iran to take advantage of the vacuum in Syria, the coming victory of Assad, and the defeat of ISIS to extend Hezbollah’s stand in Lebanon at the expense of Syrian territory, especially in the Golan Heights,” Amos Gilead, a retired Israeli major general who now heads the Institute for Policy and Strategy in Herzliya, told me. “This is a strategic threat. It’s an intolerable plan. We are trying to preëmpt them and protect Israel.”
Brexit Update for July 5, 2016
Tuesday, July 5th, 2016While the reverberations from the Brexit vote are still being heard, here are a few interesting pieces you might have missed:
As several commentators, from Megan McArdle in The Atlantic to Rupert Darwall in National Review, have noticed, many liberal journalists, representing elites throughout the advanced world, have reacted with indignation to the fact that 52 percent of U.K. voters (many without degrees) have rejected the EU system of supranational government of which the elites approve. Naturally, these journalistic spokesmen argue, the common people could not possibly have good reasons for such an act of multinational vandalism. So they must be inspired by, er, racism, xenophobia, fear of globalization, and related other thought-crimes.
That account doubtless condenses and oversimplifies the elites’ response to the Brexit shock, which is just one small skirmish in a new class war in advanced societies between geographically mobile, liberal, skilled, high-earning professionals and more rooted, communitarian, particularist, and patriotic citizens (or what British journalist David Goodhart calls “nowhere” people and “somewhere” people). “Nowhere” people simply didn’t grasp the outlook of “somewhere people” in the referendum, not seeing that many decent people who voted for Brexit had such respectable anxieties as loss of community or, one step up, the transformation of their country as motives for casting their votes. So the elites thought the worst. They were still making the same mistake in their television and columnar explanations of the result on Friday morning. But what was remarkable was the Darwall-McArdle thesis that in other countries the elites reacted to the Brexit shock as if personally or spiritually affronted in their own lives. Alarmed, they asked: Why weren’t we told that they might vote for Brexit?
It’s a hard question to answer.
One aspect of it, however, is ideologically fascinating. Among the central arguments of those favoring Brexit was that the Brussels system was dangerously undemocratic and that British voters and MPs had lost the power to propose, amend, or repeal failed or oppressive laws. This was a passionate concern among English people who had grown up in a self-governing democracy, who may have fought for it in wars, and who simply couldn’t understand why the loss of their democratic rights didn’t worry their opponents. Yet again and again liberal journalists treated this passionate belief as either abstract or a cover for more primitive emotions and bigotries. Democracy as such was rarely given weight in Remain or liberal debates on the cost/benefit analysis of Brexit. They treat multinational political institutions as such unalloyed goods that it would be impolite to raise questions about such defects as a democratic deficit. Has the knowledge class/meritocracy/cognitive elite/nowhere people/etc., etc. developed not only an intellectual snobbery towards the rest of society, but even an impatient, dismissive contempt for democracy that cannot be openly avowed but that does influence its other political attitudes?
Don’t Look Now, But Russia Is Invading Ukraine
Thursday, August 28th, 2014Russian forces in two armored columns captured a key southeastern coastal town near the Russian border Thursday after Ukrainian forces retreated in the face of superior firepower, a Ukrainian military spokesman said.
The two Russian columns, including tanks and armored fighting vehicles, entered the town of Novoazovsk on the Sea of Azov after a battle in which Ukrainian army positions came under fire from Grad rockets launched from Russian territory, according to the spokesman, Col. Andriy Lysenko.
Well, thank God for Hillary Clinton’s reset button, and Obama’s “flexibility” and smart diplomacy. Who knows what sort of mess that bungler Bush would have made of the situation.
And the UN Security Council is meeting. Since Russia still has a Security Council veto, don’t expect even the usual strongly worded letter.
Israel/Gaza LinkSwarm for August 4, 2014
Monday, August 4th, 2014Another roundup of news on Operation Protective Edge:
The UN Arms Treaty: It’s Baaaaack!
Wednesday, September 25th, 2013Because those bitter rednecks clinging to their guns and religion (also known as “voters”), Obama hasn’t been able to disarm law-abiding Americans the way he would like. What to do, what to do?
Hey, how about using that UN Arms Treaty to disarm Americans?
You know, the one Secretary of State John Kerry just signed?
John Lott notes that
The Arms Trade Treaty will regulate individual gun ownership all across the world. Each country will be obligated to “maintain a national control list that shall include [rifles and handguns]” and “to regulate brokering taking place under its jurisdiction for conventional arms.” In fact, the new background check rules approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee include just those rules — a registration system and a record of all transfers of guns.
Will Obama even submit it to the Senate for approval, knowing he doesn’t have even 50 votes in the Senate for it, much less the 67 votes required to ratify it?
Fig Leaf Syrian Strike Cancelled Thanks To Fig Leaf Deal
Tuesday, September 10th, 2013Who knew stopping a war could be so easy?
Not the Syrian war itself, of course; that grinds on unabated. But Obama’s ill-advised attempt to directly involve the U.S. in it seems to have been derailed.
Now, instead of the fig leaf of an unbelievably small attack on Syria to assuage Obama’s wounded ego over Assad waltzing all over his red line with a chemical weapons attack, now he gets to climb down thanks to the fig leaf of what will be a laughable, easily circumvented UN supervision of whatever chemical stockpiles Assad wants to turn over to them. We’ve seen how ridiculously ineffective UN oversight was in Iraq even with US force to back it up; there’s no reason to assume it will be any more effective in Syria.
But make no mistake: This is a better outcome than an attack that would be various parts ill-advised and laughable, depending on the size. Now Obama gets to accomplish exactly as much as he would before (namely nothing) without the risk of going to war.
It’s a win-win solution.
France Pushing Intervention in Syria?
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011Alain Juppe, France’s foreign minister, has raised the possibility that western powers could intervene directly intervene [sic – LP] to protect civilians in Syria from the Assad regime.
He suggested that “humanitarian corridors or humanitarian zones” could be established to protect those under attack.
As the Assad regime presses ahead with its attacks on Syrian rebels, Mr Juppé has become the first senior western figure to raise the possibility of such an intervention. He said the issue would be discussed by European Union foreign ministers at a meeting next month.
Of course he goes on to say that “full scale military intervention by the west in Syria was not being considered.” But I remember hearing much the same thing about the intervention in Libya, and we all know how that turned out.
France’s sudden belligerence may seem out-of-character, but they’ve been pissed at Assad ever since he had Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri assassinated in 2005. France has a long history of ties with Lebanon, and the Hariri assassination was just the most overt act in Syria’s semi-successful attempt to turn Lebanon into a puppet state. I have no doubt that France would be happy to knock off Assad if they were sure they had NATO (or at least American and UK) backing and could be sure the job was done right.
In other news, UNSECO’s executive board unanimously elected Syria to a committee dealing with human rights—even though the U.S. has a representative on the committee. Must be more of that Obama Administration “smart diplomacy” we keep hearing about…
This Week in Jihad for March 10, 2011
Thursday, March 10th, 2011Another week of Jihad news from the usual sources: