UN flip flop

The Bush administration sure are a fickle bunch.

After spending years and buckets of vitriol painting the United Nations as an ineffectual gaggle of dithering simps, which culminated in sending the mustachioed pestilence of John Bolton to the UN as US ambassador, suddenly the UN is being advertised by the new US ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, as a crucial mechanism in the recovery of Iraq.

One of the advantages of the U.N. is that it can reach out to many groups and some groups that do not want to talk to other external players are willing to talk to the U.N.. Ayatollah Sistani, one of the influential figures of Iraq did not speak to the U.S./UK reps but does engage with the U.N. envoy.

Huh.

Khalilzad's argument is stemming from a US desire for the UN to send in more staffers to help with community outreach efforts, since it is becoming more and more likely that US officials would be shot on sight. The UN Staff Council is none too keen, however, and have asked the new Secretary General Ban Ki-moon not to deploy any more UN staff to Baghdad, saying the security situation is "getting worse every day."

I'm guessing these shirkers haven't read O'Hanlon and Pollock, the Hannity and Colmes of the Brookings Institute. Otherwise, these UN ne'er-do-wells would know that things are getting better, not worse!

If the Bush administration is consistent in one thing it is in their displays of vituperative, bullying rhetoric and an unapologetic and unmitigated gall when trying to get what they want. To the Bush administration, the UN was a labyrinthine den of bureaucratic malaise, barely functional at any level and then, only to line their own corrupt pockets. Mostly this opinion was offered up in response to the Security Council's refusal to grant international imprimatur to Bush's unholy and illegal invasion of Iraq. But now, now the UN is vital to helping Iraq on the road to recovery.

What a difference a surge makes.