Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Kofi Annan’s report

In Larger Freedom has been published. This is Kofi Annan’s proposal to reform the United Nations. The Belmont Club outlines the fat thing, and says this:

In my own opinion Kofi Annan’s proposals are a recipe for disaster for two reasons. His entire security model is philosophically founded on a kind of blackmail which recognizes that the only thing dysfunctional states have to export is trouble. He then sets up the United Nations as a gendarmarie with ’a human face’ delivering payoffs to quell disturbances. This is the "bargain whereby rich countries help the poor to develop, by promoting the Millennium Development Goals, while poor countries help alleviate rich countries’ security concerns." Second, his model flies in the face of the recent experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and the entire democratizing upheaval in the Middle East. It is by making countries functional that terrorism is quelled and not by any regime of international aid, inspections, nonproliferation treaties, declarations, protocols, conferences; nor by appointing special rapptorteurs, plenipotentiary envoys; nor constituting councils, consultative bodies or anything else in Annan’s threadbare cupboard.

I like Wretchard’s concluding paragraph:

It was a dictum in Field Marshal Zhukov’s Army that a good commander never reinforced failure only success. It is a maxim of the United Nations that progress is achieved by doing everything that never worked all over again. Probably nowhere is the bankruptcy of Annan’s vision (and I use that word consciously) more evident than in Paragraph 29, where he lays out the UN vision for a better world. It is a laundry list of all the special interest ’development’ goals the UN has acquired over the years where problems of different orders of magnitude and positions in the chain of causality are jumbled together; a bureaucrat’s dream and a human being’s nightmare.

Discussions - 2 Comments

Newsflash people.

We don’t want the UN to function, and the last thing we desire is an efficient United Nations. That is all September 10th thinking. It is a new world, and the UN is an impediment to our security and that of our friends

Throughout its long history, the only thing that has made the UN tolerable has been its utter incompetence. Our policy should be the marginalization of the UN, not its empowerment. The UN neither serves our interests nor enhances our power. As for its "humanitarian" activities, we could form coalitions of the willing and able, and perform whatever is necessary faster, cheaper and better. And doing it on our own, instead of moving through the UN might redress the PR problems we’ve been having.

My friend Mary had a great comment on this.

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