There have been some misstatements recently about the membership of the new UN Human Rights Council by members of Congress who wish to starve it of US funding. Let's correct the record.
Senator Norm Coleman issued a statement condemning the Council because its members "include many of the worst human rights violators who had made a mockery of the previous commission -- Cuba, Iran and Syria." But Syria and Iran are not on the new Council. In fact, Iran stood for membership, but was not approved by a vote of the General Assembly.
The New York Times' Monday editorial page leads with an item dismissive of the Security Council's role in resolving the North Korea missile crisis. The editorial board, however, may have spoken too soon.
For all the flack that critics hurl at the United Nations, the crisis sparked by North Korea's missile tests shows just how indispensable the United Nations can be during times of global emergency. As David E Sanger of the New York Times reports, there are few good policy options available to President Bush as he approaches North Korea's nuclear saber-rattling. However, at the Security Council, Ambassador Bolton told reporters that Pyongyang was isolated, and that there is "broad and deep support" for a Japanese resolution to sanction North Korea over the tests.
Over at National Review Online, Claudia Rosett offers running commentary on the trial of Tongsun Park, a shadowy influence peddler who is accused of being an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein during the Oil for Food program's formative years.
Warren Buffett is a generous man. His gift of over $30 billion in stock to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will nearly double the size of the country's largest charitable organization. As media coverage of the gift has noted, $60 billion is roughly five times the annual budget of the United Nations and its agencies. And as Slate points out, the Foundation's future $1.7 billion annual disbursement requirement is roughly equivalent to UNICEF's annual budget.
It appears that a potentially catastrophic United Nations shutdown has been averted, and all Benny Avni of the New York Sun can do is lament. Indeed, he seems to be parroting Ambassador Bolton, who told reporters yesterday, "While the expenditure cap is going to come off this week one way or another, it would not be right to conclude from that that we made substantial progress or any progress at all on management reform."
To believe conspiracy theorists like National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre, the United Nations Small Arms Review Conference is one step on the slippery slope toward global mind control. But back here on planet earth, the conference will address best practices for combating the illicit trafficking of small arms by transnational criminal organizations.
At WorldNetDaily, Henry Lamb fumes about the United Nations' encroachment on American sovereignty. Predictably for diatribes of this nature, Lamb targets Kyoto and the Law of the Seas -- two international treaties, incidentally, to which the United States has yet to accede. But until now, never have I seen the anti-UN crowd take offense to the United States Department of Agriculture's National Animal Identification System for American livestock and poultry.
In the midst of a long-winded diatribe against Secretary General Kofi Annan, Claudia Rosett manages to assert that no reforms have followed in the wake of the oil-for-food scandal. "Last year, the general hope, and Annan's promise, was that the exposure of Oil-for-Food corruption, and a host of other U.N. scandals ... would lead to genuine U.N. reform," writes Rosett in the National Review Online. "The scandals are still with us. But there has been no major reform." No reform? Please.