QandO

July 20, 2004

Sudan: The UN Leaps Into Inaction
Posted by Dale Franks

Mark Steyn writes that the situation in Sudan shows how horribly broken the UN is.

The UN system is broken beyond repair. In May, even as its proxies were getting stuck into their ethnic cleansing in Darfur, Sudan was elected to a three-year term on the UN Human Rights Commission. This isn't an aberration: Zimbabwe is also a member. The very structure of the organisation, under which countries vote in regional blocs, encourages such affronts to decency.

The Sudanese representative, by the way, immediately professed himself concerned by human rights abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

The UN, as the Canadian columnist George Jonas put it, enables dictators to punch above their weight. All that Elfatih Mohammed Ahmed Erwa, the Sudanese government's man in New York, has to do is string things out long enough to bog down the US call for sanctions in the Gauloise-filled rooms. "Let's not be hasty," Erwa told the Los Angeles Times. And, fortunately, not being hasty is something the UN is happy to do in its own leisurely way until everyone is in the mass grave and the point is moot.

The peculiar fantasy of the UN is that each member state is equally legitimate. The "ambassadors" sent to the UN by murderous thugocracies judiciously shake their heads--more in sorrow than anger, of course--and counsel their fellow ambassadors not to be too hasty. Because these situations are always so "complex", and the "cycle of violence" is so easily started. The complexities must be "studied" before any "hasty action" is taken.

And the other UN ambassadors pretend that these are the legitimate arguments of a legitimate government, and nothing is done. Until, of course, the minority Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, Hutus, Tutsis, Christians, Animists, Buddhists, Muslims, or whatever the case may be, have all been shot and interred in shallow mass graves. At which point, there's no need for UN action at all, since the trouble-causing minorities have departed.

No need to be "hasty". These problems solve themselves, really.

"Aid agencies have found it difficult to get visas." That sentence encapsulates everything that is wrong with the transnational approach. The UN confers on its most dysfunctional members a surreal, post-modern sovereignty: a state that claims it can't do anything about groups committing genocide across huge tracts of its territory nevertheless expects the world to respect its immigration paperwork as inviolable.

Why should the West's ability to help Darfur be dependent on the visa section of the Sudanese embassy? The world would be a better place if the UN, or the democratic members thereof, declared that thug states forfeit the automatic deference to sovereignty. Since that won't happen, it would be preferable if free nations had a forum of their own in which decisions could be reached before every peasant has been hacked to death. The Coalition of the Willing has a nice ring to it.

One day, historians will wonder why the most militarily advanced nations could do nothing to halt men with machetes and a few rusting rifles.

Because the second we did do something, the piteous moans of impotent rage would begin on the Left. It would be all "western racism" and "no war for oil" and "Bush lied" every time we intervened somewhere. We'd get tedious "history lessons" about the price of US arrogance every Sunday ojn Russert from humorless Dashle/Kennedy/Pelosi types. R.W. Apple would be doing regular body counts as part of his continuing "quagmire" op/ed pieces.

It's hardly worth the trouble. Better to let Charlie Rangel get himself arrested in front of the Sudanese embassy a few times. After all, it makes him feel good, like he's doing something important, and the DC cops certainly aren't gonna let him experience any real discomfort.

Better to take some gentle goading from the Left for doing nothing, than to do something, and have to sit idly by while Michael Moore makes tens of millions of dollars with a new documentary that details your family's close connections with the family of the late Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, which explains how intervention in Sudan is really only a cover operation for sending a secret Delta Force team into Ethiopia to recover the Lost Ark of the Covenant, so you can bring it to Washington and smite African-Americans with deadly sicknesses through the use of this ancient and diabolical Jewish artifact, because your land-developing political contributors need the land currently occupied by minorities to build grotesque capitalist shopping malls with secret underground chambers where small children are sacrified and eaten in satanic rituals.

No, it's, better to pretend that the Sudanese government is legitimate, send them a few sharply worded notes, and maybe slap some economic sanctions on them. Then you can shake your head in sorrow at the inability to get the UN to move, and express deep regret that, since American security isn't really at stake, you can't justify acting alone.

That would be unilateral.

And who knows, maybe it would force the Left to start making the case for intervention, rather than carping about letting American boys be killed in a "nation far away, about which we know little".

But probably, not.

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