The Golden Gate

…about ourselves.

As I have said before and has beeen well demonstrated by Thomas Barnett, foreign aid never really helps those intended. Creating the conditions necessary to attract direct foreign investment [DFI] does.

Investors Business Daily chimes in quite nicely.

Hat Tip: Logical Meme

Three good reads. First, A Solid Approach to U.N. Reform

One of the surest ways to induce better management in government is to reduce funding — or at a bare minimum, make credible threats to do so. This is the goal of Rep. Henry Hyde’s United Nations Reform Act, which is scheduled to be voted on today by the House.

    Unfortunately, critics are reacting as if Mr. Hyde has suggested dismantling the United Nations altogether. Quite the contrary, the bill proposes specific, results-oriented reforms that if implemented would make the United Nations a more functional institution. The usual suspects are complaining over a provision in the bill that would allow the United States to withhold up to 50 percent of its contribution to the United Nations unless the international body adopts at least 32 of the proposed 39 reforms. It’s the kind of tough-love legislation that only the United States, which contributes 22 percent of the U.N. budget, can provide.

Then two views on the Iranian election coming up. Facing the Iranian Election

While Iran continues to play an ongoing nuclear ping-pong match with the European Union, risking the nuclear stability of the Middle East and a possible showdown with the West, it is also eagerly preparing for its upcoming elections Friday. Carrying the flag of Islamic democracy, the “rule of law,” progress and change, Iran is attempting to compete in two worlds simultaneously as it hopes to emerge victorious in both.

And Iran’s Sham Election .

As Iranian voters get ready to go to the polls tomorrow in the first round of presidential elections, the avalanche of breathless media hype has already begun. We’ve been treated to plenty of pontificating over the supposed “liberals” (the enlightened ones who tell us what we want to hear about women’s rights and political freedom). To win, these liberals will need to fend off the evil “conservatives” — the most backward of the ayatollahs, men who won’t even give interviews to the New York Times pretending to be for democracy, transparency and women’s rights and opening up the economy.

They mince no words.

Amnesty International is calling for the arrest of top American Officials over “torture”:

“If the United States permits the architects of torture policy to get off scot-free, then other nations should step into the breach,” William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in a statement launching Amnesty’s annual report.

Bush is among a dozen former or current U.S. officials who should be probed by foreign governments because Washington has failed to conduct “a genuinely independent and comprehensive investigation” of torture allegations against U.S. troops, commanders, and their civilian overseers, Schulz said.

Others on the Amnesty list of potential targets for investigation and prosecution include Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief George Tenet.

“If the U.S. government continues to shirk its responsibility, Amnesty International calls on foreign governments to uphold their obligations under international law by investigating all senior U.S. officials involved in the torture scandal,” Schulz said.

“If those investigations support prosecution, the governments should arrest any official who enters their territory and begin legal proceedings against them,” he added. “The apparent high-level architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera because they may find themselves under arrest as Augusto Pinochet famously did in London in 1998.”

Pinochet was snatched up.

Never mind that there is widespread raping of women and children by UN peacekeepers. Never mind that there is a legitimately named Genocide occurring in Sudan. And let’s set aside the hysterical and grossly historically inaccurate equating of Gitmo’s camp x-ray with the Gulag.

Let’s set all that aside just for kicks.

What is Amnesty International up to other than destroying their own international credibility along side the corrupt and cancerous UN by making outrageous claims.

Anyone? Anyone?

While I am at it: who funds the UN? We do over 25% — with Japan and France we combine to donate more than most other countries combined. Where’s Dangerfield when we need his trademark line?

Let’s be honest here and drop the political agenda of AI. The US military has been more open and more accountable and more cautious than any other military in the history of the world. Especially at war time. And it is very good at learning from its mistakes as evidenced lately. And according to the recent survey, the US military is trusted into the 70th percentile while MSM and other institutions lag FAR behind. There is a reason for that.

We are at war people. Remember? Do not be lulled into thinking the warfare stops at the edge of the battlefield. This is asymmetric, 4th generation war.

Our local paper — the venerable San Francisco Chronicle has started to feature the work of the excellent Victor Davis Hanson. This is a big step forward, as the Chron’s lefty editorial page now gets a regular infusion — however infrequent — of the anti-Islamofascist perspective. Granted, that the Chron features the likes of like Molly Ivins and Robert Scheer — both “traditional leftists” — much more frequently. Nevertheless, I welcome the move towards more balance and inclusion.

You can count on Hanson — a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University — for thoughtful commentary on a wide range of matters.

One of his latest pieces, which ran in the Chron the other day, focuses on the new round of Bush nominations including John Bolton, whom Jason talked about a little bit previously.

John Bolton, the hawk on North Korea, was named ambassador to the U.N. This was not a gesture calculated to show that a contrite United States was now seeking accommodation with the U.N. hierarchy; Bolton is expected, rather, to deploy his tough talk and iron spine to shake up a corrupt institution reeling from scandals. Nor was Paul Wolfowitz relegated to the World Bank as punishment for his neo-Wilsonian stance in the Middle East: He was elevated to the institution’s presidency precisely to inject that same sort of democratic idealism into determining the extension or withdrawal of international loans.

Another recent piece makes the excellent point that the United States ought not to expect — nor strive — to be liked:

Last year the hysteria about the hostility toward the United States reached a fevered pitch. Everyone from Jimmy Carter to our Hollywood elite lamented that America had lost its old popularity. It was a constant promise of the Kerry campaign to restore our good name and “to work with our allies.” The more sensitive were going to undo the supposed damage of the last four years. Whole books have been devoted to this peculiar new anti-Americanism, but few have asked whether or not such suspicion of the United States is, in fact, a barometer of what we are doing right — and while not necessarily welcome, at least proof that we are on the correct track.

It’s nice to have a voice like Hanson’s in our local “paper of record.” Check him out, regularly.

You gotta love Mark Steyn. Well, you don’t have to, but I do. Not sure if you’ve been following the Bolton Senate hearings in re his nomination to the UN Ambassadorship. Here is Steyn on it:

Britain’s Daily Telegraph had an intriguing headline the other day: “U.S. police force to recruit capuchin monkey for ‘intelligence’ work.” Maybe when the Mesa, Ariz., SWAT team is through with the monkey in question, we could get him made chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He’d have his work cut out doing a worse job than Dick Lugar, the Republican senator who spent the last week getting walloped by a freak show alliance comprising (a) an opposition party whose foreign policy the electorate decided it was unable to take seriously and (b) jelly-spined GOP “moderates” who insist on taking it seriously. And so it was that John Bolton’s nomination to the U.N. was derailed by this guy Voinovich.

As Shakespeare didn’t quite say, who is Voinovich? What is he? Well, he’s a fellow called George, and he’s apparently a senator from Ohio who’s on this Foreign Relations Committee. He was, alas, unable to interrupt his hectic schedule to attend either of the committee’s hearings for John Bolton’s U.N. nomination, but nevertheless decided last week he could not bring himself to support Bolton’s nomination. “My conscience got me,” he said. Maybe one day his conscience will get him to attend the hearings he’s paid to attend, but, for the moment, his conscience is more troubled by the story brought up by the senior Democratic obstructionist Joe Biden. As Sen. Biden put it, “The USAID worker in Kyrgyzstan alleges that she was harassed — not sexually harassed — harassed by Mr. Bolton.”

This was a decade ago, in some hotel. John Bolton allegedly chased this woman down a corridor in a non-sexual manner. It’s not clear from Biden whether he would have approved had she been chased down the corridor in a sexual manner, as the 42nd president was wont to do. But the non-sexual harassment was instead about policy matters relating to Kyrgyzstan. Maybe Bolton was in a foul mood or maybe he was in a vowel mood and, this being Kyrgyzstan, they didn’t have any. But this is what the pitiful constitutional travesty of the Senate’s “advise and consent” role has now dwindled down to: a sex scandal with no sex. All talk and no action. Only in America, folks. Or, to be more precise, only in the U.S. Senate.

First off, I will say that this woman is ardently anti-Bush. A member of mother’s against Bush or some such organization. But putting that aside–let’s say she is telling the truth irrespective of the fact that there are no witnesses. This was ten years ago. Maybe–just maybe–they guy is mildly better inter-personally.

But that is really not the issue. We have the UN–and organization rotten from the inside out–and frankly, we need an ass-kicker in there. Someone who is clear, unapologetic, who will make that house of cards tumble if the corruption and cronyism continues. Bolton is that guy. Oh yes–and someone on the side of –*gasp*– the US, the Country he is representing in the World Body.

If you have been living in a cave, you may not be aware that all of the Security Council members who were against the war in Iraq were doing shady deals with Saddam via the Oil for Food program–a program sold as intended to feed and bring pharmaceuticals to children in Iraq hurt by the sanctions. Well, it appears everyone was in on it who was a major player except the US and Britain. Now it appears even the US lead investigator, Paul Volcker, was in bed with the Annans. It is time for a thorough house-cleaning at the UN. The blogger that has this focus is Roger L Simon , a screen writer, mystery novel writer, and blogger from LA. Another 9/12 Democrat. Check him out. he is reasoned, clear, and darn likable.

UPDATE: here is his latest as of this writing.

A brilliant piece by the always stimulating Mark Steyn appears in this weekend’s edition of the Spectator (UK).

(Note: the Spectator site requires registration, which you can avoid by going here.)

Steyn accurately diagnoses the dysfunction and snobbery inherent in large, centrally-planned beuracruacies like those that plague the EU and UN. It’s a long-ish piece, but well worth the read.

Here’s a taste:

One of the curious trends of the modern world is that even as the UN, EU and other transnational elites demand that our politics become ever more centralised and homogenised and one-size-fits-all, successful business operations are decentralising: they’re practising corporate federalism. If you order a laptop custom-built to your precise specifications with the features you want, Dell will assemble it with components made by US, British, Irish, German, Japanese, Israeli, South Korean, Taiwanese, Thai and Chinese companies at factories located in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, China, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico and Costa Rica; it will be assembled in Penang on a Monday and arrive in Nashville by Thursday.

For the purposes of comparison, the UN has far more cash swilling about, and its global network predates Dell’s by half a century; yet, when the tsunami hit, it took not four days but four weeks for its staff to establish a presence at Banda Aceh. Dell’s ‘coalition’ is pretty eclectic — capitalist, Eurostatist, Chinese Communist, Chinese Nationalist, Latin, Anglophone, Jewish, Muslim — yet it functions harmoniously. Meanwhile, all that that pompous Norwegian who heads up the UN humanitarian bureaucracy could do was give press conferences in New York hectoring the developed world for its ‘stinginess’, so every Western government promptly dipped into its taxpayers’ pockets and threw more money at the pompous Norwegian than he can ever usefully spend, and the only result will be that, when the next tsunami hits, it’ll take ’em even longer to get to the scene, but the pompous Norwegian will be able to give even more hectoring press conferences, perhaps with lavish visual aids.

Read the whole thing.