Posted on 01/04/2005 4:43:21 AM PST by Timeout
DIPLOMAD describes its blog thusly:
***A Blog by career US Foreign Service officers. They are Republican (most of the time) in an institution (State Department) in which being a Republican can be bad for your career -- even with a Republican President! Join the State Department Republican Underground.***
I.e., these are current and retired career foreign service personnel working in the State Department, the United Nations and embassies around the world.
Most recent posts are by actual diplomats on the ground in the tsunami disaster region. These people are actually attending the U.N.'s endless "coordination" meetings and conferences. I'll include a sample of their posts below.
I continue to be amazed at the real time information blogs are able to deliver. A whole new world.
http://diplomadic.blogspot.com/
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The UN continues to send its best product, bureaucrats. Just today the city's Embassies got a letter from the local UN representative requesting a meeting for "Ms. Margareeta Wahlstrom, United Nations Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator and the Secretary-General's Special Coordinator for Humanitarian Assistance in Tsunami-afected countries." Wow! Put that on a business card! And she must be really, really special because she has the word "coordinator" twice in her title!
The letter, in typically modest UN style, goes on to explain that "Ms. Wahlstrom's main task will be to provide leadership and support to the international relief effort. She will undertake high-level consultations with the concerned governments in order to facilitate the delivery of international assistance." Oh, and she'll be visiting from January 4-5.
Once, again, a hearty Diplomadic "WOW!" She's going to do all that in two days! The Australians and we have been feeding and otherwise helping tens-of-thousands of people stay alive for the past ten days, and still have a long, long way to go, but she's going to wrap the whole thing up in a couple of days of meetings. Thank goodness she's here to provide the poor lost Aussies and Yanks with leadership. The Diplomad bows in awe to such power and wisdom. The letter is signed, by the way, by the same UN official who suggested a couple of days back that the Australian and US air traffic controllers in Aceh should don UN blue (see our post of January 2.)
There's no link to the blog.
Link to your post?
never mind, found it at the bottom.
Good stuff from a great blog.
http://diplomadic.blogspot.com/
The Diplomad
Ramblings from the Far Abroad
Voted Right Wing News' "Best Up & Coming Blog" for 2004
Check out "Winds of Change", too.
We've been posting the Diplomad blog over on bloggers side of FR. It's the best!! Here's the link: http://diplomadic.blogspot.com/
Well, not that new. Diplomad posts have been on FR for at least the last 2 months.
My bold: Tomorrow, we will have to set up a camp for relief workers – 90 of them – which is fully self-contained, with kitchen, food, lodging, everything, because they have nowhere to stay and we don't want them to be an additional burden on the people there.
I provided this to some USAID colleagues working in Indonesia and their heads nearly exploded. The first paragraph is quite simply a lie. The UN is taking credit for things that hard-working, street savvy USAID folks have done. It was USAID working with their amazing network of local contacts who scrounged up trucks, drivers, and fuel; organized the convoy and sent it off to deliver critical supplies. A UN “air-freight handling centre” in Aceh? Bull! It's the Aussies and the Yanks who are running the air ops into Aceh. We have people working and sleeping on the tarmac in Aceh, surrounded by bugs, mud, stench and death, who every day bring in the US and Aussie C-130s and the US choppers; unload, load, send them off. We have no fancy aid workers' retreat -- notice the priorities of the UN? People are dying and what's the first thing the UN wants to do? Set up "a camp for relief workers" one that would be "fully self-contained, with kitchen, food, lodging, everything."
The UN is a sham."
ME: The UN has to comment like it's a noteworthy event to set up a camp for 90 people? The Boy Scouts do it all the time and don't even break a sweat.
You're right of course. TWO months is an eternity in the blogosphere. But there may just be a few Freepers who didn't discover it awhile back like we did.
ELK:
What's the bloggers corner???
Absolutely. What a great blog it is.
Good one, too!
Any blog that has the inside skinny on the UN and proceeds to bash them is a must read, imo.
You got that right.
What's up with the warning in the headline of this thread?
facilitate
I loathe that word.
In education we no longer teach, we facilitate.
But they are so busy "planning" that they have yet to help a single tsunami victim?
What's the bloggers corner on FR?
When I tried to post this thread with the DIPLOMAD url in the header, the server told me it had to be posted in the bloggers corner. I had no idea what it was talking about.
Sarcasm, I think.
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