Americans, concerned about their image as a human rights violator, last November elected Barack Obama to lead us back to righteousness. One of the first things the new President did in order to fulfill his mandate to restore moral purity to American foreign policy was to order the closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba because it's important to avoid the very appearance of evil.
Very well, but the case is even stronger for dissociating ourselves not just from the figment of evil, but from the real thing. In this instance the real thing resides at the United Nations.
Here, courtesy of Ed Lasky, are four reasons why the United States should pull out of the U.N.
In elections last Wednesday:
- Libya was elected President of the U.N. General Assembly. The Libyan minister for African affairs has been designated for the post.
- Sudan has been elected vice president of the General Assembly.
- Algeria has been elected chair of the Assembly's Legal Committee, known in the U.N.'s streamlined bureaucracy as the Sixth Committee.
- Iran has been elected vice-chair of the Sixth Committee.
Closing Gitmo is a precipitous and foolish idea. The detainees held there were treated better than we treat convicts in many of our prisons in the United States and certainly better than they would be treated were they imprisoned in the countries in which they were captured. The only reason for closing it is symbolic, and it's not even clear what the symbol is.
Pulling out of the U.N., on the other hand, would be an act of genuine moral substance since it has become a haven for thugs and tyrants who are handsomely recompensed for blustering and threatening the free people of the world and accomplishing next to nothing on behalf of those who suffer.
RLC
