Is the UN reaping what it sowed?

Politics International Politics
21

This from today’s NY Post (generally conservative I believe):

But I think that it makes for some interesting points:

I have cut some excerpts that highlight the key point.

In the weeks before the truck-bomb attack, the UN’s veteran security officer on site struggled, argued and begged for better protection. He knew the Canal Hotel was a vulnerable and likely target - but the UN chain of command refused to acknowledge the dimensions of the threat.

The U.S. military did offer protection - repeatedly. But UN bureaucrats turned it down. They didn’t want to be associated with those wicked, imperialist, ill-mannered Americans. After all, everybody loves the United Nations, don’t they?

Repeatedly stymied by prejudice and inertia, the UN security chief - a retired U.S. Army Special Forces officer with a wealth of prior experience - nonetheless managed to cajole his superiors into letting him build a wall around the hotel.

That wall was made of reinforced concrete, almost 17 feet high and a foot thick. But UN officials refused to let the security officer push the wall very far out from the hotel. They didn’t want to annoy anyone by limiting access to a public alley. Still, the security officer inched the wall as far out as he could.

The truck-bomber could not get inside the compound - the security measures in place at least prevented that. But the truck was able to speed toward the wall’s exterior, using the alley that “had” to be kept open.

The driver knew exactly where he was going. He aimed his truck-bomb precisely to decapitate the UN’s in-country staff.

We all know what happened: Two dozen dead, including one of the UN’s most capable senior diplomats. Almost 150 wounded. A tragic day, indeed.

But without that wall and the security measures for which one American veteran fought, the hotel would have been leveled, with a death toll in the hundreds. The wall absorbed the initial force of three separate bombs packed into the truck.

so there we have it. Without this man, there would have been no wall at all and massive carnage AND those that survived do so because of US not UN medivacs.

freddy

22

townhall.com/columnists/mona … 1031.shtml

Democrats like John Kerry insist that the president has done everything wrong since Congress voted to authorize war (Kerry’s vote in the affirmative has dogged his campaign for the nomination of a dovish party). All of the Democratic candidates insist that Bush should not have taken the nation to war without the full participation of the United Nations.

What they never address is this: President Bush sought the support and participation of the United Nations, returning again and again to that body virtually begging it to uphold its own resolutions. France, Germany and sometimes Russia – nations that were only too happy to trade with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – declined to agree. Without France’s OK, the U.N. Security Council could not pass a final resolution endorsing the use of force. If Kerry or Dean or Sharpton had been president at the time, would they have permitted France to dictate U.S. foreign policy?

The answer may be yes, if the Clinton administration is any guide. As Rich Lowry reminds us in “Legacy,” the Clinton administration sought European support for a strong stand against Serbia in 1993. The Europeans balked. Clinton backed down. The resulting massacres took the lives of tens of thousands.

Have the enthusiasts for United Nations action noticed that the U.N. has pulled out of Baghdad at the first sign of trouble?

23

I’m sure the Baathists have noticed, Fred.

This is one of the best editorials I have read in, oh, my lifetime:

opinionjournal.com/editorial … =110004242

The link requires registration (free, and the WSJ won’t even email you if you don’t want them to, so why not go ahead and do it?) at the moment, but will be visible to anyone without registration after 4pm Saturday (Taipei time).

A taste of it:

So we wrote March 18 [2003] in describing the “largest risk” of war with Iraq. Seven months later, this question remains the largest imponderable in calculating the odds of American victory. Just as the going gets rough in Iraq, some of our elites are losing their nerve.

This of course is precisely the goal of the terrorists in Iraq who this week began their Ramadan offensive.

[…The] Baathist die-hards know that they do not have to win in Iraq; they merely have to prevail in Washington. So like the Tet offensive of 1968 and the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut in 1983, their terror campaign is intended to shake American resolve.[/quote]