It’s official…New York Mayor Bloomberg, while he apparently can’t make the United Nations honchos fix their building, can make them look bad by disallowing schoolchildren to tour the world headquarters. The reason: it’s a firetrap. In a recent letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, the mayor said only about 20% of 866 violations discovered by the Fire Department in January have been fixed. Senator Schumer lodged complaints well over a year ago.
Or…take the latest humongous snafu by UN operatives, namely the overestimating of the number of AIDS cases in the world by 21%. Instead of some 40 million throughout the world, as the UN has claimed, it now admits to some 33 million as an accurate estimate. This reinforces the notion that the UN-sponsored IPCC report claiming that people are warming the earth to death is so much rubbish, and many highly respected scientists are onto that fraud. The fact that this country is said by the UN to be the villain in global warming is so incredible as to defy all reason.
The apparent unwillingness or inability to carry out what should be a simple task – like installing smoke detectors – is just too much for the world’s deliberative body to handle. The fact that a city mayor could exert the needed pressure to force something to be done is indicative of the relationship that exists between this country and the United Nations, namely, that the U.S. must be or is the guarantor (or enforcer) of anything the U.N. undertakes. Now, somehow the UN expects this country to guarantee world-cooling. Egad!
Flash back to the Korean Conflict of 1950-53, fought only three years after the UN came into existence and only five years after the end of World War II, when the whole world was trying to get back on its collective feet. Though 16 nations joined the battle to save South Korea under the auspices of the United Nations (only 12 0f them as combatants), 90% of all the military personnel and materiel was furnished by the U.S. Some 37,000 U.S. GIs died in the war, while thousands more went missing in action or were taken prisoner. None of the other UN members in the fight suffered anything like the number of those casualties, except, of course, the South Koreans.
Since the end of that conflict, South Korea, Ban Ki-Moon’s nation, has existed primarily because U.S. troops – not UN troops – have remained in that country to patrol the 38th parallel, with more than 30,000 still there and the end of that circumstance not in sight. Left to the UN to do the job, South Korea would have been inundated by both the North Koreans and the Chinese and would have long since disappeared. The U.S., not the UN, is the guarantor of freedom for South Korea to not only be free but to prosper, and it’s worth noting that a permanent member of the Security Council, China, was the aggressor in 1950, the murderer of thousands of Americans in its invasion of Korea.
In the Dayton Accords meeting concerning Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1995, NATO was given the authority by the UN to carry out the agreement. What a laugh! The agreement was not signed at the UN headquarters, but in Dayton, Ohio, a way of indicating that the U.S., the main player in NATO, would guarantee the peace, such as it was.
Later, in 1999, when the Serbs tried a bit of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, nearly half the planes used to bomb Yugoslavia were furnished by the U.S., though this was supposedly also a NATO action. Even though the entire Yugoslavian mess was in the backyard of the European Union and far removed from the U.S., Milosevic and his thugs in both actions in the 90s would have run roughshod over the territory if the U.S. had not been the guarantor of the peace and the return of thousands of Kosovars to their habitat. The U.S. president during this time was Bill Clinton.
Perhaps the best recent example of UN-inability to guarantee anything was in the actions of President George H.W. Bush in 1990-91. Bush said in August 1990 that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait “would not stand,” but it was not until November that the UN finally came up with “authorization” for doing what Bush was already preparing, throwing Saddam out of Kuwait.
The U.S. had more than 500,000 troops in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, while the non-U.S. coalition forces equaled roughly 160,000, or 24 percent, of all forces. In other words, the U.S. was and still is the guarantor of the existence of all the countries on the Arabian Peninsula, principally Saudi Arabia. If the UN, instead of Bush, had made the play, Saddam would have been sitting comfortably in Riyadh today, setting the price of oil on a daily basis. The Saudi princes would have been pushing up daisies.
And this is where the rubber hits the road. If the UN had made an effort – particularly in the Security Council, of which France, England, China, Russia and the U.S. are permanent members – to shut down Saddam in 2003, the U.S., Brits, and the handful of other nations interested in stopping Saddam, the greatest threat to world stability, would not have had to nearly wreck their militaries (the U.S. and England, anyway) in the effort to neutralize that butcher. As it is, this nation stands virtually alone in its insistence that terrorism “will not stand,” and backs up its own stand with trillions in treasure and some 3,875 lives (93% of Coalition deaths) in Iraq, not to mention the wounded.
There are those who wail about the U.S. attempting to be the world’s policeman, but they’re so dumb that they don’t recognize that this country – not the innocuous United Nations – is the guarantor of whatever is good and decent in this world. Maybe…just maybe…Ban Ki-Moon and his gaggle of freeloading apparatchiks in New York will at least fix their building, which should have been built on the islands called St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks, in the first place, located at the Equator and halfway between South America and Africa. In that warm latitude, it would have been vacant most of the time, and the world would have been better off.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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