Condi joins Foggy Bottom, another lost soul

The UN Budget and UN Reform: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Secretary-General Kofi Annan has made a formal request for the spending cap to be lifted and most observers assume that he has done so with the blessing of Secretary Rice who has assured him that the United States will not vote against a resolution to this effect. At a recent news conference Annan said "The cap on the budget will be lifted. There will be no crisis."

No reform
No accountablility

We throw in the towel and open our wallet.

Anal porn.

Why?

To put the current situation into perspective, therefore, the whole dynamic has changed 180 degrees since the UN September Summit where world leaders committed themselves to UN reform. Ten months later the crisis became the spending cap, not the failure to reform. The crisis was not the inability of an international organization dedicated to protecting threats to international peace and security, to declare Iranian nuclear ambitions a threat and to sanction its government. The crisis was not a human rights Commission which had some of the world's worst human rights abusers deciding what counted as a human rights violation, replaced by a Council with the likes of Cuba, China and Saudi Arabia right back on. The crisis wasn't the Oil-for-Food scandal in which billions was stolen from people in need and used to maintain despotism at its worst. The crisis wasn't the sight of UN peacekeepers that raped their wards. The crisis wasn't the failure to stop genocide in Sudan by an institution founded on "never again." The crisis wasn't a UN renovation plan hundreds of millions of dollars more than independent developers thought was necessary to do the job. The crisis wasn't 9,000 different mandates created by the UN haphazardly over decades which had never been reviewed, consolidated, or rationalized.

No, the crisis, said the G-77 UN majority, the Secretary-General and his Deputy Mark Malloch Brown, was the so-called "artificial leverage" of linking the obligation to pay for the corruption and mismanagement to the corruption and mismanagement itself.

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