AS DEMS FIGHT TO RETREAT, THE UN VOLUNTEERS TO DO MORE... FINALLY!

BBC:

UN vows to broaden role on Iraq The UN has had a reduced presence in Iraq since a 2003 bombing.

The UN is ready to broaden its activity in support of Iraq, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said. Mr Ban said at a key meeting in New York the time for determined action on Iraq had come, but that a greater UN presence would need better security.

The UN withdrew most of its staff in 2003 after a bomb killed its top envoy and 21 others but Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki says he can now guarantee UN security.

Iraq, its neighbours and major donor nations are attending the meeting.

• IT'S ABOUT FREAKIN' TIME!
• NO IS NOT THE TIME FOR THE USA TO BE BUGGIN' PUT - OR EVEN TO BE SENDING THAT KIND OF SIGNAL.
• IT'S TIME FOR THE DEFEATIST DEMS TO STFU - UNLESS THE DEMS WANNA BE SEEN AS EVEN MORE WIMPY THAN THE UN!

DISMANTLE THE UN'S SO-CALLED "HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL"

Congress may be taking a positive step for starters to that effect:

NEW YORK — Congress is poised to eliminate the 25 percent U.S. funding for the U.N. Human Rights Council, saying that the forum is dominated by human rights abusers and has become a forum to bash Israel.

The move against the council is part of a number of proposed cuts in U.S. funding for the world body now working their way through Capitol Hill. [...]

The Senate on Friday agreed to cut $3 million from its payment to the U.N. regular budget, the share that would normally be earmarked for the Geneva-based Human Rights Council. The House passed a similar measure this spring. [...]

Lawmakers this year have already sought to cut $20 million from the U.N. Development Program. That effort is led by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida Republican, and Sen. Norm Coleman, Minnesota Republican, both of whom are upset at U.N. persecution of an employee who exposed the agency's payments of hard currency to North Korea.

The less money the UN gets from any country with common sense, the better. Their so-called council, if it includes Saudi Arabia and Egypt, really doesn't have any reason to exist. Like the UN itself, it's not worth continuing with it. There's been some discussion in the past few years about why the US should leave the UN. I'd say the time has come to discuss it again.

BOSTON GLOBE NOTICES UN IS NOT ENTIRELY FAIR TO ISRAEL

The Boston Globe (whaaa?) has a piece that is somewhat unsympathetic to the formal and binding decision by the UN Human Rights Commission to exclusively single out Israel for demonization. It's by Irwin Cotler, a Canadian member of Parliament and a former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, and he is not pleased:

This discriminatory treatment is not only prejudicial to Israel, but it is a breach of the United Nations Charter's foundational principle of "equality for all nations, large and small," and it concluded a week - and year - of unprecedented discriminatory conduct. The week began with Archbishop Desmond Tutu reporting to the UN Human Rights Council on the fact-finding mission to investigate the Israeli "willful killing of Palestinian civilians" in Beit Hanoun, Gaza, in November 2006. He received a standing ovation, an extraordinary reaction by a body that frowns even upon applause. I suspect the appreciation was as much for the man as anything else. For the mandate that authorized the mission was a sham. It made a mockery of the council's own founding principles and procedures.

We're not sure if this is Anglo understatement or genuine confusion, but our hunch is that the applause were for to the man and his mandate. We originally wrote about the UN's decision to send Tutu to Israel here. The title of the post was "UN Sends Committed Anti-Semite Anti-Zionist To Conduct Unbiased Investigation Of Zionists". Even by our admittedly jaded standards, it probably rose to the level of a rant - the rank bias was just that transparent. Cotler has significantly more on how how the bias has become even more shameless. Of course, among the anti-Israel resolutions that get debated are recurring condemnations of Israel's defensive actions against Hezbollah. Syria never seems to come up. Here's what a Lebanese Muslim leader thinks about that.

[Read an extended version of this post at Mere Rhetoric]

UNIFIL: WE SUCK. WE TOTALLY, TOTALLY SUCK

When UNIFIL members are condescendingly deigning to address the Israeli public, they're full of patronizing bluster:

Here's the UNIFIL field commander talking about how well UNIFIL is doing its job... "In my area of operations there is no open hostile activity and we also do not see a rearmament happening," he said. "We are physically patrolling every corner of southern Lebanon.

But when they can't even stop what seems to be a fly by night group of thugs from bombing Israeli cities - well, they're... still full of patronizing bluster, but this time it's in the service of explaining how hard their job is:

Khaled Aref, a senior official with the mainstream Palestinian Fatah movement in the southern Lebanon refugee camp of Ein el-Hilweh, said he had no knowledge of the group. He said Palestinians had agreed not to use south Lebanon to attack Israel because "we don't want to put more pressure on Lebanon."... The UNIFIL officer rejected criticism by the IDF that the peacekeeping force should have prevented the attack, claiming that even "100,000 peacekeepers were not capable of preventing a couple of people from firing a crude rocket."

No? What happened to physically patrolling every corner of south Lebanon? They sure sounded awful confident a couple weeks ago. And for that matter - if they can't stop people from bombing Israel, then what exactly are they doing? Potential answers: (1) providing tens of thousands of human shields for Hezbollah (2) carelessly letting slip the occassional UN license plate, which Hezbollah then uses to lure in and kidnap Israeli soldiers.

[Cross-posted to Mere Rhetoric]