As Mark mentioned, not everyone got into the spirit of UN Day yesterday. Niles Gardiner, from the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, published this:
As overpaid and under worked United Nations bureaucrats quaff champagne and feast on canapés and shrimp in Turtle Bay to celebrate U.N. Day, it is important for the world to remember those who have been failed by the organization, or have suffered at its hands.He goes on to blame the UN for the Rwanda genocide, the Darfur genocide, and the suffering of "millions of Iraqis...under the brutal boot of the Baathist regime while Saddam Hussein plundered the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food Program," among a list of other things. The most disappointing part of Gardiner's post is its single-minded view of world events. Nobody who is serious about foreign policy actually believes in reductions like his. Obviously there are other factors that, one would hope, should speak to his hypotheses. UN troops are "peacekeepers" and are not intended to be an invasionary force or successfully operate in areas where there is no peace to keep. Rwanda and Darfur were (and are being) failed by all of humanity, not specifically the UN. Those "millions of Iraqis" he mentions, 80 percent of the population, were actually supplied critical medical supplies and food through the Oil-for-Food program, not to mention the fact that Saddam Hussein was unable to develop a WMD program during that time. These were the stated goals of the program. The majority of the resources that flowed to Hussein during this period were due to "sanctions violations outside the Programme's framework," oil smuggling to the tune of $11 billion as compared to the estimated $1.8 billion in revenues from OFF manipulation.