Res Publica 2005

Mark Steyn has some choice words on the UN scandals:

It's a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice cream and a quart of dog poop and mix 'em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That's the problem with the UN. If you make the free nations and the thug states members of the same club, the danger isn't that they'll meet each other halfway but that the free world winds up going three-quarters, seven-eighths of the way. Thus the Oil-for-Fraud scandal: In the end, Saddam Hussein had a much shrewder understanding of the way the UN works than Bush and Blair did.

But another week, another scandal; corrupt organizations rarely stop at just one kind of corruption. If you don't want to bulk up your pension by skimming the Oil-for-Food program, don't worry, whatever's your bag the UN can find somewhere that suits – in West Africa, it's Sex-for-Food, with aid workers demanding sexual services from locals as young as four; in Cambodia, it's drug dealing; in Kenya, it's the refugee extortion racket; in the Balkans, sex slaves.

But you get the general picture: On a UN peace mission, everyone gets his piece. Didier Bourguet, a UN staffer in Congo and the Central African Republic, enjoyed the pleasures of 12-year-old girls, and as a result is currently on trial in France. His lawyer has said he was part of a UN pedophile network that transcends individual missions and national boundaries.

Now how about this? The Third Infantry Division is raping nine-year-olds in Ramadi. Ready, set, go! That thundering sound outside your window is the great herd of BBC/CNN/New York Times/Le Monde/Moose Jaw Times Herald reporters stampeding to the Sunni Triangle. Whoa, hold up, lads, it's only hypothetical.

But think about it: The merest glimpse of a freaky West Virginia tramp leading an Abu Ghraib inmate around with frilly panties on his head was enough to prompt calls for Rumsfeld's resignation, and for Ted Kennedy to charge that Saddam's torture chambers were now open "under new management," and for veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk to be driven into an almost orgasmic frenzy: "Just look at the way US army reservist Lynndie England holds the leash of the naked, bearded Iraqi," wrote Fisk. "No sadistic movie could outdo the damage of this image. In September 2001, the planes smashed into the buildings; today, Lynndie smashes to pieces our entire morality with just one tug on the leash."

Who's straining at the leash here? But, if Lynndie's smashed to pieces our entire morality with just one tug, what would be left for Bush's Zionist neocons running a pedophile network of Congolese kindergartners?

Fisk would be calling for US expulsion from the UN – no, wait, from planet Earth: slice it off from Maine to Hawaii and use one of those new Euro-Airbuses to drag it out round the back of Uranus.

But systemic UN child sex in at least 50% of their missions? The transnational morality set can barely stifle their yawns. If you're going to rape prepubescent girls, make sure you're wearing a blue helmet.

And at least the Pentagon put a stop to Abu Ghraib. As a UN official in Congo put it: "The crux of the problem is that if the UN gets bolshie with these governments then they stop providing the UN with troops and staff."

And the problem with that is...?

IN CONGO, the UN has now forbidden all contact between its forces and the natives. The rest of the world should be so lucky.

I take it from his use of "bolshie" that the quoted UN wallah is British. If so, that's the system in a nutshell: when a British bigwig is with British forces, he'll enforce British standards; when a British official is holed up with an impeccably "multilateral" force of Uruguayans, Tunisians, etc., he's more circumspect. When in Rome, do as the Visigoths do.

He has a good point. We so something wrong, we kick our own people, clean house, and the press acts like we're the huns running rampant. Where is the outrage over what the UN does to vunerable people all over the world? Could it be that the UN's press payola scandal has bought them the good coverage and silence they need?