Captain’s Quarters pointed me to this statement from British Minister Clare Short
United States President George Bush was tonight accused of trying to undermine the United Nations by setting up a rival coalition to coordinate relief following the Asian tsunami disaster.
The president has announced that the US, Japan, India and Australia would coordinate the world?s response.
But former International Development Secretary Clare Short said that role should be left to the UN.
?I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to coordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN when it is the best system we have got and the one that needs building up,? she said.
?Only really the UN can do that job,? she told BBC Radio Four?s PM programme.
?It is the only body that has the moral authority. But it can only do it well if it is backed up by the authority of the great powers.?
Ms Short said the coalition countries did not have good records on responding to international disasters.
She said the US was ?very bad at coordinating with anyone? and India had its own problems to deal with.
?I don?t know what that is about but it sounds very much, I am afraid, like the US trying to have a separate operation and not work with the rest of the world through the UN system,? she added.
As Captain Ed pointed out, the simple fact this jackass suggests the UN has “moral authority” is just plain moronic. This from the same organization that spawned the biggest fraud and scandal in recent memory.
Short’s anti-American bias shines through in this ludicrous and blatantly stupid assertion. The notion that the UN has any moral authority, let alone be the sole sanctuary of it, should have been universally dismissed in the Oil-For-Food corruption that Kofi Annan has tried to cover up all year. As I recall, that also started as a massive relief fund for victims of the UN’s unwillingness to give Saddam the boot instead of starving the Iraqi people to death. The Sole Bastion Of Moral Authority managed to put billions of dollars into Saddam’s pockets while enriching the member-states that made sure no one unseated Saddam.
Or how about the freakin fact that the UN was prostituting in the Congo
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 15 — U.N. peacekeepers threatened U.N. investigators investigating allegations of sexual misconduct in Congo and sought to bribe witnesses to change incriminating testimony, a confidential U.N. draft report says.
The 34-page report, which was obtained by The Washington Post, accuses U.N. peacekeepers from Morocco, Pakistan and Nepal of seeking to obstruct U.N. efforts to investigate a sexual abuse scandal that has damaged the United Nations’ standing in Congo.
The report documents 68 cases of alleged rape, prostitution and pedophilia by U.N. peacekeepers from Pakistan, Uruguay, Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa and Nepal. U.N. officials say they have uncovered more than 150 allegations of sexual misconduct throughout the country as part of a widening investigation into sexual abuse by U.N. personnel that has plagued the United Nations’ largest peacekeeping mission, U.N. officials said.
Late word today has Colin Powell speaking with Kofi and agreeing to include them into our coalition
Powell conferred by video hookup with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and the United Nations was added to the core group planning relief efforts. The others are the United States, Japan, India and Australia, which raised its pledge to $27 million, just $8 million below the U.S. pledge.
Powell will meet with Annan at the United Nations on Friday.
Im surmising that this was President Bushs way of telling the UN that we don’t trust them and we will be leading the way…as it should be.
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