Questions That Nag At The Geek

Let's see if I've got this right.

North Korea has a nuclear reactor that made plutonium. We are very, very upset about that. We along with South Korea, Japan, Russia and China just had to do something about this obnoxious development.

At the same time North Korea has been assembling a centrifuge cascade which can manufacture highly enriched uranium. We and the other members of the Grand Coalition Against North Korean Nukes seem completely unconcerned about this activity.

Iran has a centrifuge cascade spinning away enriching uranium. By some reckonings the Iranians have over six hundred kilos of low enrichment stuff. That's enough to commence making weapon grade material which is the easier portion of the task.

We are very, very disturbed by the Iranian machines. We and the other members of the P5+1 have been working overtime for years now trying to do something about this horrid, scary development.

At the same time the Iranians have been building a heavy water moderated "research" reactor which would have the capacity to crank out plutonium. We and the rest of the Permanent Opposition to Iranian Nukes seem totally unconcerned about this construction work in progress.

Just what is the Geek missing here?

There has to be something going on here that the Geek has missed as well.

Somali Islamist pirates have been seizing ships. It is a profitable enterprise. In the past twelve months the pirates have received some 150 million bucks in ransom payments.

The pirates have kept some of the money. That's obvious from the plush new houses being built in Puntland and some other sections of the Somali geographic expression.

Much money has flowed on to assorted international Islamist/jihadist groups. How much cannot be said since darn few CPA's have audited the accounts.

Some of the ships taken by the Happy Buccaneers of the Somali Coast prior to this past week have been owned and operated by Iran. Iran, that is the Islamic Republic of Iran, is an Islamic country.

So is Saudi Arabia. The Saudi owned VLCC Sirius Star with a cargo valued at 100 megabucks more or less was hijacked by the pirates last week. A 25 megabuck ransom has been demanded.

Comes now an armed convoy of al-Shabab Islamist fighters to the port nearest the captive tanker. The jihadists vow to retake the ship because it is sinful or something for ships owned by Islamic countries to be taken.

Considering that al-Shabab goons were totally unconcerned when their coreligionists and ethnic brethren hoisted the Jolly Roger over ships owned or operated by Iran or other Islamic states such as Pakistan, why the sudden rush to the service of law and order?

Is it possible that the Fearless Upholders Of Islamic Law are motivated more by the prospect of sharing (or taking all) a thwacking big ransom? Oh! Tell the Geek it ain't so. Tell the Geek he is missing something and the armed inheritors of the Islamic Courts Union really, really is motivated only by the dictates of Quran and sharia.

Or, is the Geek missing something?

The Geek must be missing something about the importance of the United Nations as well.

With the dubious exception of those few times when the UN has provided a convenient and useful baby-blue fig leaf as a cover for American policy genitalia, it is an institution that has long outlived whatever utility its High Minded sponsors saw for it sixty some years ago.

Leaving aside some of the specialized agencies operating under the UN umbrella, the organization has long been a forum for bashing the United States. That is annoying but far from the major difficulty with the body.

Far more important is the UN's sheer inefficiency, it's blundering ineptitude in discharging its major reason for existence--keeping the peace. There is a reason for this--the Geek thinks.

The UN in both the General Assembly and the Security Council have ignored the difference between keeping the international peace and trying to impose internal peace upon societies and polities experiencing internal violence. There is a vast gap between the UN operating appropriately to maintain international peace (as illustrated by the Security Council's actions authorizing member states to repel aggression in the Korean Conflict or following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait) and attempting to compel order in collapsing states (such as Sudan, Somalia, or the Democratic Republic of Congo).

Similarly, there is a vast, unbridgeable gulf between authorising the use of force in Korea or against Iraq in 1990-91 and complying with the mendacious demands of the W. Bush administration for regime change in Iraq nearly seven years ago.

The badly misnomered "peace keeping" operations whether in Darfur or the DRC show the UN is gripless regarding the realities in states that lack the organic coherence to function. Rather, these misadventures and their well deserved lack of apparent success demonstrate that the world body is intellectually corrupt, clinging to the hopeless notion that a state once called into existence by whatsoever means has a writ to last in perpetuity regardless of any realities extant within the so-called state.

This intellectual corruption far surpasses in evil effect the mundane economic and financial turpitude demonstrated so well in the "Oil For Food" program applied to Iraq during the Nineties. The fundamental intellectual gangrene of the UN's addiction to keeping states without a reason for continued existence alive on the machinery of humanitarian relief and peace keeping is far more destructive of long term stability both local and global than its well documented sins of administrative inefficiency, centripetal interests, and bureaucratic self-seeking.

More recently another form of pestilence has infected the UN. The vector of infection is the largest single bloc in the body--the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The OIC is backed by the wealth of Saudi Arabia, a notoriously reactionary regime linked hip and shoulder with the most backward looking version of Islam, Wahhibism.

The pathogen carried by the OIC and the Saudis is the most direct threat against free speech ever contemplated, surpassing even earlier efforts brought to the Hudson River Follies by authoritarian states such as international restrictions upon journalism and communications. This time the pathogen wears a coat of religious tolerance and multi-cultural harmony which, its backers hope, will defeat the political immune systems of countries in the West. The protective garment is one of preventing defamation of religions.

In principle, that would mean all religions but, in practice, it means only the prevention of any sort of criticism or questioning directed at Islam. Certainly, the recent actions of the OIC and member states including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia make that clear.

The bizarre redefinition of criticism or questioning of Islam as "racism" constitutes a new low in the denaturing and distortion of words. Considering that Islam fancies itself a global religion and has adherents of every color and ethnicity imaginable, the claim that criticism of the faith or any of its manifestations such as suicide bombing, stoning women, beheading journalists, killing daughters and wives for "honor" is racism boggles the mind of any person well oriented as to time and place.

That the proposal of an international convention placing the "moral" weight of the UN behind the stifling of free expression should be received by the UN with any reaction other than gales of derisive laughter is equally mind boggling. Yet the OIC/Saudi idea of "tolerance" and "anti-defamation" has been accepted not only with equanimity at the General Assembly but with the support of the current General Assembly's president d'Escoto-Brockman of Nicaragua.

So, let's see if the Geek has it right. The UN is intellectually, financially, and morally corrupt. It has no grip on its major function of keeping the international peace. It bashes around blindly and ineffectively trying to keep collapsing states intact. It is a forum for Yankee-bashing without equal. Its operations cost the American taxpayer a fair amount of money (22 percent of its general budget and 25 percent of its "peace keeping" one.)

Comes now a passel of "foreign policy experts" headed by a set of monuments to failed US foreign policy, Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright (guaranteed to hit any diplomatic historian's list of Worst SecStates of the 20th Century), and accompanied by an assortment of equally failed practitioners of the dismal arts of diplomacy with an ad calling for an increased US involvement in and cooperation with the UN. Admittedly none of these individuals has a distinguished record of success in formulating and implementing foreign policy, but many of them will be influential with the in-coming administration.

In short, they will have the ear of President Obama and his Secretary of State. They will be positioned to play their Love-the-UN music loud and long in ears already primed to hear the tune and dance to it.

Either the Geek is right with his dystopian view of the UN or they are correct with their New UN Day Is Dawning perspective.

Surrendering to overwhelming numbers and aggregate years of putative experience, the Geek can only wonder: What is he missing?