The Wisdom of George Soros’s Tenant 

Mark Steyn
June 22, 2006
National Review
Original Source: http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=ZjgxMTBlZDY0ZmIyMDY1ZDkxOGE2NTE3MGUyNzBkZWU=


A couple of years ago, I was asked a question about the United Nations and replied that it was a good basic axiom that if you took a quart of ice cream and mixed it with a quart of dog feces the result would taste more like the latter than the former. There was a useful example of that the other day from a leading Turtle Bay honcho. 

Now, I confess I have a sneaking admiration for the more shameless transnational apparatchiks: Two years ago, you may recall, Sudan was reelected to the U.N. Human Rights Commission at a time when the government’s proxies were busy slaughtering and gang-raping their way round Darfur. The last thing one needs when one’s got a hectic schedule of mass murder on one’s plate is a lot of tedious paper-shuffling committee meetings in New York, but Sudan’s deputy ambassador, Omar Bashir Manis, gamely rose to the occasion by announcing, upon joining the commission, that he was very concerned about human-rights abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. 

I gotta hand it to the guy. For the emissary of a blood-soaked genocidal psycho state, that’s pretty funny. But the danger, when you enroll the free nations and the thug states in the same club, isn’t that they meet each other halfway but that the Free World winds up going two-thirds, three-quarters, seven-eighths of the way. Consider the speech the other day by Kofi Annan’s deputy. 

Who’s he? Some bespoke apologist for some banana republic or Islamist basketcase? Not at all. He’s called Mark Malloch Brown and he’s one of those smooth-talking Brits. The bit in the speech that got everyone’s attention was when he argued that the reason the U.N. was so unpopular in America was that the moronic hayseeds in flyover country had fallen for the right-wing blowhards — or, as he put it, “much of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.” He didn’t, in fact, say “Limbaugh” but “Lim-bow,” as in “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-Wow.” A chap as important as Mr. Malloch Brown can’t be expected to tune in a radio and actually listen to Rush in order to get his name correct: After all, he’s a lot busier than those dimwit yokels in the “heartland.” 
Blaming their woes on talk radio isn’t all the U.N.’s learned from the Democrats. The deputy secretary general’s fellow speakers at this meeting included George Soros, who happens to be Mr. Malloch Brown’s next-door neighbor and landlord. Mr. Malloch Brown earns $125,000 a year, $120,000 of which he gives to Mr. Soros as rent for his home, next to the gazillionaire’s own in Westchester County. When they entered into this relationship, Mr. Malloch Brown was head of the U.N. Development Program, which works with Mr. Soros on many multimillion-dollar projects. The deputy secretary general insists there’s nothing “improper” in his mixing of his professional and personal lives, and, indeed, by the ethical standards of the U.N. — which is to say, the Oil-for-Fraud program, the Child-Sex-for-Food program, etc. — there isn’t. 

Mr. Malloch Brown is an international civil servant. Were he merely a national civil servant at Britain’s Department of Health or Transport, it would have been unthinkable for him to have rented a home for 96 percent of his salary from the chairman of GlaxoSmithKline or Virgin Atlantic Airways. But at the U.N. it’s not just thinkable but doable: When in Turtle Bay, do as the Ghanaians do. And Mr. Malloch Brown is widely regarded as the agent of reform. Or, at any rate, “reform.” 

The deputy secretary general’s speech was an artful one, arguing that, in a world where “new national-security challenges basically thumb their noses at old notions of national sovereignty,” the U.S. needs the U.N. On closer inspection, what he means is that the U.N. needs the U.S. — to supply money, troops, money, equipment, money, technology, and money. In a complicated world, the U.S. isn’t big enough to go it alone, but it is big enough to give everything it’s got to the U.N., and in return the U.N. will hold meetings explaining why the U.S. can’t go it alone or with anyone else. In a nicely Sudanese touch, Mr. Malloch Brown announced that “my kids were on the Mall in Washington, demanding President Bush to do more to end the genocide in Darfur” but that the president couldn’t do more in Darfur without the U.N. 

Er, hang on. On Darfur, Bush has been impeccably transnational. He agreed to go the U.N. route and, as always happens, everybody’s dead. 

Forget Darfur, and Iraq, and Iran. We’re all men of the world here, we can all understand why certain powers might feel it was in their interest to be pro-Saddam or pro-genocide or pro–nuking Israel. Instead, take an issue on which the permanent members of the Security Council were in perfect harmony: the tsunami. Even the French aren’t pro-tsunami. And yet Malloch Brown’s permanent 24/7 lavishly funded humanitarian bureaucracy was useless. The only actual relief effort — you know, saving lives, restoring the water supply, providing shelter — was done by the U.S., Australia, and a handful of others. 

The United Nations is a September 10th organization. Five years on, to leave Iran or even Darfur in its hands is as ludicrous as Churchill and Roosevelt’s fretting over whether they had the League of Nations’ approval to launch D-Day. The urbane cynicism of Malloch Brown is very revealing: The problem with transnationalism is not what it does to the Sudanese and Ghanaians; it’s what it does to us.