Mark Steyn: Why I nearly resigned

The Spectator (U.K.) ^ | 04/26/03 | Mark Steyn

[Howlin]

She was assisinated. :-)

[Rummyfan]

Regards Mark Steyn, in the words of some band from the eighties (Depeche Mode?):

I just can't get enough!

[lepton]

"Assisinated"? Is that like being completely assimilated by siblings?

[wooden nickel]

Your description of the UN ranks right up there with Steyn's analysis!

[Aeronaut]

But if you want to turn a long shot into a surefire failure, there’s no better way than handing postwar Iraq from the Americans to the UN

Says nearly everything that needs to be said about post-war Iraq.

[Pukka Puck]

Size matters. Bigger is better.

[Pukka Puck]

I am guessing that Galloway must have written a piece for the Spectator.

[MeekOneGOP]

Now another Middle Eastern war has come and gone, and the bien-pensants are anxious that once again an obsolescent institution be glued back together and propped in position. This time it’s the UN. The Spectator has it exactly backwards: it’s not the irritating ‘do-gooders’ among its ranks, but the do-badders. The ‘oil-for-palaces’ programme (as Tommy Franks calls it) is a classic UN boondoggle: it was good for bureaucrats, good for Saddam’s European bankers, good for George Galloway (allegedly), but bad for the Iraqi people. A humanitarian operation meant to help a dictator’s beleaguered subjects has instead enriched the UN by more than $1 billion (officially) in ‘administrative’ costs. There’s no oversight, no auditing, nothing most businesses would recognise as a legitimate invoice, and, although non-essential items can be approved only by the secretary-general himself, Kofi Annan has personally signed off on practically anything Saddam requested, including ‘boats’, from France. The UN, France, Germany and Russia are desperate to keep the oil-for-palaces programme going, and they figure they can bully the Americans into going along.

To Kofi Annan with love,

Bart

[George W. Bush]

Steyn, as adept as ever, several excellent and memorable phrases here, nice use of historical argument without risking boring the reader. Nice mix. Being an essayist is almost a lost art.

He should write more books. Or essays in the form of books. Stuff longer than columns but not book length. Err... I guess you call them essays.

One of the better things about Steyn, from a FReeper standpoint, is that his writing seems to have entirely killed off FR enthusiasm for that other Brit writer, the notorious bug-chasing crypto-conservative Andrew Sullivan.