What Makes the UN so Smart, “mit’n d’rinnin”?

“Mit’n d’rinnin” is sort of Yiddish for “from out of left field” or “contrary to what has previously been known,” as in our fathers asking when we thought we knew better than he, “What makes YOU so smart, mit’n d’rinnin?” It may have been politics or economics, or whether you were old enough to dye your hair or take a road trip across six states with your best friend and $50. You get the point.

“Mit’n d’rinnin” is sort of Yiddish for “from out of left field” or “contrary to what has previously been known,” as in our fathers asking when we thought we knew better than he, “What makes YOU so smart, mit’n d’rinnin?” It may have been politics or economics, or whether you were old enough to dye your hair or take a road trip across six states with your best friend and $50. You get the point.

The United Nations has established itself in the past 30 years as obsessed with Israel and Israeli housing developments on the east side of the 1949 armistice line. It failed in the meantime to take constructive action in Cambodia, the Iran-Iraq war, Congo, Rwanda, Chechnya, Afghanistan under the Russians or the Taliban, Northern Ireland, the Sudan and Somalia. It failed to protect the Kurds from chemical weapons used by Iraq, and failed to protect the Lebanese from Syria, or Syrians from Syria in Hama. It failed to protect Bosnian Moslems and Kosovo Albanians. Tiananmen Square? The rest of China? Castro’s Cuba? Vietnam’s “re-education camps” in the 1970s? Nothing.

These are not small failures – they amount to millions and millions of people dead, maimed, starved, gassed, shot, tortured, raped and otherwise ruined. The list of UN failures dwarfs the list of UN successes.

So why are some American political leaders and their supporters (mainly in Hollywood and academia) demanding that the U.S. take no action to force the disarmament of Iraq as per its own commitments and UN demands unless the UN gives permission? What makes the UN so smart, mit’n d’rinnin?

What is it that the UN knows better than the President of the United States and his Cabinet? What intelligence information (or intelligence) does the UN have that American intelligence services do not? What makes the UN better able to analyze that information than American analysts, even if they have it – which they do not? What makes the judgment of the UN, which considers democratic Israel a criminal state and has yet to denounce the deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians by Palestinians as “terrorism” better than the judgment of the President of the United States?

Libya chairs the Human Rights Commission and Iraq is about to chair the Disarmament Commission and Iran will come next in the rotation. Syria sits on the Security Council. The United States should be embarrassed to sit on those bodies, let alone take their dictates as mandates for action or inaction.

The United States, clearly, does not always do the right thing in international affairs and a serious discussion of the ramifications of war in the Middle East is entirely appropriate. But when Secretary Powell goes to the UN next week to put additional information before the Security Council, we expect he will tell members what he wants them to know, and not ask permission for the United States to protect its citizens, its allies and its interests.