Regarding the response to the cataclysm in Asia…
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.”
It can be argued that the UN has the operations in place to best respond and provide humanitarian relief, but moral authority is something the UN totally lacks.
I might be more concerned about this too, if the UN hasn’t recently undermined the international image of the US with their “stingy” comments. Then again, I probably wouldn’t be. I think we can work with our friends (especially those in the region) to provide better relief than the UN can anyway. Do we really want a “tsunami food” scandal too?
I hear the UN has some workers freed up by the end of the need to administer the Iraqi oil-for-food program.
What “moral authority” did the Good Samaritan need to help his fellow man? Such silliness.
It is the only body that has the moral authority.
Perhaps she really means it needs to do the job to get some semblance of moral authority back.
This is likely a test run for a transition phase away from the UN and towards a post-UN international order. There are bits of the UN that work well. Heck, there are bits of the UN that predate the UN’s creation by a good 6 decades (I’m thinking about the ITU) and work extremely well.
The good working bits have to be salvaged and enhanced in any replacement of the UN operation, the bad stuff tossed out to die without funding, and whatever’s missing to be recreated in some new framework.
It’s going to be some interesting times as we go through that process.
Why are liberals, who supposedly love change, the only ones who argue against changing the U.N., as if it sprang fully-formed from the brow of God?