The Most Ridiculous Items of the Day
June 18th, 2007A dear friend of mine once kidded me that I was sounding more and more like a Republican by the day with every complaint I made about bureaucratic nonsense in the federal government. I countered that there’s nothing partisan about insisting that government programs make sense and do good, and this does not fit the bill, but we’ve got to pay for it anyway.
The search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction appears close to an official conclusion, several years after their absence became a foregone one. The United States and Britain have circulated a new proposal to the members of the United Nations Security Council to “terminate immediately the mandates” of the weapons inspectors. Staff meetings on the latest proposal have already taken place, and officials say that the permanent Council members, each of whom has veto power, seem ready to let the inspection group — the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission — meet its end.
That’s absurd, and it isn’t even the silliest thing to come out of the international community. That honor belongs to this.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that the slaughter in Darfur was triggered by global climate change and that more such conflicts may be on the horizon, in an article published Saturday. “The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change,” Ban said in a Washington Post opinion column. UN statistics showed that rainfall declined some 40 percent over the past two decades, he said, as a rise in Indian Ocean temperatures disrupted monsoons. “This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming,” the South Korean diplomat wrote.
“It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought,” Ban said in the Washington daily. When Darfur’s land was rich, he said, black farmers welcomed Arab herders and shared their water, he said. With the drought, however, farmers fenced in their land to prevent overgrazing. “For the first time in memory, there was no longer enough food and water for all. Fighting broke out,” he said. A UN peacekeeping force may stop the fighting, he said, and more than two million people may return to rebuilt homes in safe villages. “But what to do about the essential dilemma: the fact that there’s no longer enough good land to go around?”
I will say this, first: it isn’t that bad an assertion to make if it’s qualified accurately. “A small part of the Darfur issue is, There’s not enough good land to go around and the drought hurts. But the truth is that the black Darfurs don’t like the blacker Darfurs; then you throw in a little God, and you’ve got yourself an explosive situation. But that’s not what he said, and what he did say — while mildly defensible — is ridiculous and inspires Americans to loathe the United Nations. Or mistrust it, at least.