VDH's Private Papers :: The U.N.? Who Needs it?

September 24, 2004

The U.N.? Who Needs It . . . ?

It is about time to think the unthinkable: the UN is not beneficial, neutral, but increasingly hostile to freedom.
by Victor Davis Hanson
Wall Street Journal

(A shorter version of this essay appeared in the Wall Street Journal, on September 23, 2004)

These are surreal times. Americans in Iraq are beheaded on videotape. Russian children are machine-gunned in their schools. The elderly in Israel continue to be blown apart on buses. No one—whether in Madrid, Istanbul, Riyadh, Bali, Tel Aviv, or New York—is safe from the Islamic fascist, whose real enemy is modernism and Western-inspired freedom of the individual.

Despite the seemingly disparate geography of these continued attacks, we are always familiar with the similar spooky signature: civilians dismembered by the suicide belt, car bomb, improvised explosive device, and executioner’s blade. Then follows the characteristically pathetic communiqué or loopy fatwa aired on al Jazeera, evoking everything from the injustice of the Reconquista to some mythical grievance about Crusaders in the holy shrines. Gender equity in the radical Islamic world is now defined by the expendable female suicide bomber’s slaughter of Westerners.

In response to such international lawlessness, our global watchdog, the United Nations, had been largely silent. It abdicates its responsibility of ostracizing those states that harbor such mass-murderers, much less organizes a multilateral posse to bring them to justice. And yet under this apparent state of siege, President Bush in his recent address to the UN offered not blood and iron—other than an obligatory “the proper response is not to retreat but to prevail”—but Wilsonian idealism, concrete help for the dispossessed, and candor about past sins. The President wished to convey a new multilateralist creed that would have made a John Kerry or Madeline Albright proud, without the Churchillian ‘victory at any cost rhetoric.’ Good luck.

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