Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Good news from Iraq: I never thought I'd be agreeing with Geraldo, but he has a point here in explaining that the Iraqis are better off now that the United States has liberated Iraq. Sure it will take time and money to give the country some semblance of security and a workable infrastructure. But considering Iraq never had any of that to begin with, and a murderous dictator has now been ousted, I think they are much better off. Granted, I've never been there, but I could live with a few terrorists and suicide bombers better than a dictator who systematically tortured and killed his citizenry to keep them paralyzed in a state of fear.

Now it looks like we're going back to the United Nations to ask for help with Iraq. I'm all for spreading the cost of building Iraq to other nations considering the entire world benefits from the regime change. But I'm tired of having to go through an inept organization like the U.N.

Not only does the organization put Syria, Libya, and other countries that torture their own people on the Commission on Human Rights, but the U.N. is undermining the United States every chance it gets. United Nations inspectors knew that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein gassed Kurds, our troops contracted illnesses from the chemical weapons after the first Gulf War, and even President Clinton said in 1998 that Iraq was harboring chemical weapons. And Iraq had clear ties to terrorists -- whether it aided Al Qaeda specifically is still being investigated, but Iraq was helping international terrorists who hated the United States and its allies. Yet France, Germany, and Russia suddenly had amnesia and assumed that Saddam Hussein unilaterally disarmed without telling anyone -- even hiding the evidence that he disarmed.

The United Nations snubbed its nose at us when we needed help. France and Germany are giving us a hard time once more. I'm reluctant to trust countries in that organization again.

People say that going back to the United Nations is an admission that we made a mistake, miscalculated, screwed up, and now we're in over our heads. I disagree. We asked the United Nations to join us. We put off going to war with Iraq for many months while we negotiated with the organization to get help from other countries. Now that we've ousted Saddam Hussein on our own, we're going back to see if the U.N. is willing to oversee the international role it was supposed to have in the first place.

I know this idea would never take hold, but a conservative columnist named Evan Coyne Maloney wrote an interesting piece explaining a better alternative to the failed United Nations. Instead of finding common ground with dictators and terrorist countries, we should form an alliance of democratic nations. The purpose would be to spread democracy, freedom, and human rights across the globe. Sounds nice, but for some reason I'd imagine that France would veto such an idea.

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