THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

PLAYING IN THE LITTLE LEAGUE | 2003-03-01

The United Nations is different from the old League of Nations.

There were very few countries when the League of Nations existed, and almost all of them had deep roots.

So the League was almost entirely limited to professional major league diplomats.

Most of the so-called "nations" in the United Nations are leftover colonial subdivisions like Iraq and Zambia.

The United Nations is an affirmative action version of the League of Nations. Libya is now head of the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations and Iraq has taken over the committee handling weapons of mass destruction. Nobody questions any of this because membership on such committees has nothing to do with qualifications. It is entirely a matter of affirmative action, i.e., quotas and rotation.

The Secretary General of the United Nations holds that job because he is an African. It was their turn.

The so-called "nations" in the United Nations are places where no one lives unless he has to. Anybody with any talent in Africa has long since immigrated to Europe or America. But the United Nations delegates from a country have to be from there and return home regularly.

So they have to be picked from what's left after all the talent has moved out.

You are supposed to consider this affirmative action version of the old League of Nations to be some kind of authority.

Especially moral authority. Like Libya.

I think the United States government, which is run by respectable conservatives, is silly enough. They are going to get us into the business of suppressing Arabs for the sake of Israel.

The neoconservatives who run the United States Government are bad Americans, but most of them objected to going to the United Nations in the first place. They are a hell of a lot less idiotic than those who leave American troops sitting in the desert while they play footsy with the United Nations.