"Appointment Gratification"

Mark Steyn sums up my attitude completely regarding the appointment of John Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations, and Paul Wolfowitz to the World Bank. I was going to write a post on this anyway, but after reading his column yesterday I gave up. Steyn is a wordsmith and says it better than I could.

Even if Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton weren't two of the more farsighted thinkers in the Bush administration, appointing them respectively to the World Bank and the United Nations would be worthwhile just for the pleasure of watching the Europeans, Democrats and media stew over it.

The assumption seems that, with things going his way in Iraq and Lebanon and Egypt and Saudi Arabia, President Bush needs to reach out by stiffing counselors who called it right and appointing more emollient types who got everything wrong.

There are many who will quibble with this last remark of his. "Isn't Wolfowitz the one who told us that the the Iraqis would all greet us as heroes, and that invasion would be paid for with Iraqi oil?" Yes, he didn't get all of the details right. This, however, is the nature of war. As I have written ad nauseum on this blog and mine, success in war goes to the side that makes the least amount of mistakes, to the side that screws up the least. Failure to recognize this leads one to magnify every mistake we make in our current war, and to forget about those of the past. There is a tendency, I think, to see past wars such as the Revolution, Civil War (at least from the perspective of the North), and World War II as glorious crusades in which we set aside our differences, linked arms, and marched off to defeat the enemy. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

But being a war protester means never having to say you're sorry for your own bad predictions. Those who claim that the war has been too costly are the same ones who predicted not hundreds, but thousands of American deaths, and that from initial invasion. Surely this time, the Iraqi army would fight us tooth and nail. Surely there would be a "battle of Baghdad" that would bog down American troops for months. Not having learned their lesson from the 1991 Gulf War, the same people who then predicted thousands of American casualties did so again in 2003.

Back to Steyn

But, as I see it, the question isn't why Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Bolton should hold these jobs, but why Kofi Annan, Jacques Chirac, John Kerry and assorted others still hold their jobs.

Great question. But now that Kofi Annan has presented a plan for reform I'm sure everything will be fine.

Still, if you're to play the oldest established permanent floating transnational crap game for laughs, might as well pick an act with plenty of material. What I love about John Bolton, America's new ambassador to the U.N., is the sheer volume of "damaging" material. Usually, the Democrats and media must rifle through decades of dreary platitudes to come up with one potentially exploitable infelicitous sound bite. But with Mr. Bolton, the damaging quotes hang off the trees and drop straight into your bucket. Five minutes' casual mooching through the back catalog and your cup runneth over:

The U.N.? "There is no such thing as the United Nations."

Reform of the Security Council? "If I were redoing the Security Council, I'd have one permanent member... the United States."

International law? "It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law."
Offering incentives to rogue states? "I don't do carrots."

But he does do shtick. I happen to agree with all the above statements, but I can see why the international community might be throw its hands up and shriek, "Quel horreur."

It's not just the rest of the world. Most of the American media are equally stunned.

The New York Times wondered what Mr. Bush's next appointment would be: "Donald Rumsfeld to negotiate a new set of Geneva Conventions? Martha Stewart to run the Securities and Exchange Commission?"

OK, I get the hang of this game. Sending John Bolton to be ambassador to the U.N. is like ... putting Sudan and Zimbabwe on the Human Rights Commission. Or letting Saddam's Iraq chair the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Or sending a bunch of child-sex fiends to man U.N. operations in the Congo. And the Central African Republic. And Sierra Leone, and Burundi, Liberia, Haiti, Kosovo, and pretty much everywhere else.

All of the above happened without the U.N. fetishists running around shrieking hysterically. Why should America be the only country not to enjoy an uproarious joke at the U.N.'s expense?

And he's right; the UN is a joke. Here we have an organization that is virulently anti-Semitic, puts totalitarian nations on human rights commissions, whose peacekeepers cannot or will not stop mass murder and stands by while they sexually abuse the locals, doesn't enforce it's own resolutions, can't even perform humanitarian missions right, and has become a haven for third-world kleptocrats who like to hang out in Paris and New York...did I miss anything?

What they need at the UN is a good swift kick in the butt. Bolton is the one who is going to administer that kick. The days of 'go-along-get-along' are hopefully over.

When George Bush the elder went through the U.N. to assemble his Stanley Gibbons coalition for the first Gulf War, it may have been a "diplomatic triumph" but it was also the biggest single contributing factor to the received wisdom in the decade and a half since that only the U.N. has the international legitimacy to sanction war. That in turn amplifies the U.N. claim to sole global legitimacy in a thousand other areas, big and small -- the environment, guns, smoking, taxation.

At the time I worried that Bush #41 was establishing the wrong precident. I didn't worry about it too terribly much, but do very much remember feeling uncomfortable with his insistence on dotting his i's and crossing his t's. I supported the war, and so put my fears aside and hoped they were misplaced. How wrong I was.

Here's a thought; the resolution authorizing force in the Gulf War was Security Council Resolutions #677 and #678, passed in 1990. The final one we got condemning Saddam was #1441, passed in 2002 In those twelve years 963 resolutions were passed, or 80 per year. In the first 56 years of the UN there were 677 Security Council resolutions, or 12 per year. Are we any better off for all the new resolutions?

Then there's the World Bank. It's stated mission is "to fight poverty and improve the living standards of people in the developing world. it is a development Bank which provides loans, policy advice, technical assistance and knowledge sharing services to low and middle income countries to reduce poverty."

It is the part about "policy advice" that so concerns Democrats and other statists. They're concerned that Wolfowitz will demand real change. I'm not as familiar with the World Bank as I am the UN, but my general observation of the situation leads me to conclude that the cause of underdeveloped countries are not a lack of money.

Both appointments reflect George W Bush's vision of the world, and it is a an active vision, one that requires action. Action threatens the status quo, which is a good thing, as change is badly needed. Let's wish Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton success.