Hugo Chavez Taking Over the United Nations or Taking It Down?
From Cecil Maranville, WNP Senior Writer
It's hard to know whether it would be polite to ignore the tirade of such an obviously unstable person or whether one ought to reel in horror at the reality of someone like that being the leader of a nation. Moreover, a nation that produces about a million barrels of oil for America's consumption every day.
President Chavez was campaigning for his nation to take a Security Council Seat. Yet, his buffoonery blatantly demonstrated the inability of the United Nations to solve the world's problems. "The Intelligencer & Wheeling News-Register" summarizes the conundrum.
President Bush is "a devil," Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez yelped from the podium at the United Nations General Assembly last week - to applause. Sadly Chavez and the support he gets from the assembled Third World kleptocrats at the United Nations must be taken seriously, because he is seeking to grab the Latin American seat on the U.N. Security Council, the once august body's global enforcer.
The world body's myriad problems - its moral and political corruption, fecklessness and inability to foster real peace - were put on lurid display last week as an assortment of world leaders delivered their addresses at U.N. headquarters in New York. With the likes of the dictator of Iran, who threatens to incinerate Israel with the nuclear weapons his regime seeks, and Chavez, who seeks to be a Castro for a new generation, taking to the podium, it's a little difficult to believe the United Nations can be effective at any effort to bring peace to troubled lands. Indeed, its record demonstrates that it cannot.
So, should the world give up on the United Nations? The sad truth is that the worlds sees no alternative - even though there is virtually no hope for the organization to ever accomplish worldwide harmony and peace. The article continues.
But no one should mistake any of what took place in the past week for an ability of the United Nations to truly enforce peace. It can't. Increasingly, only the United States and Great Britain, with modest but symbolically important assistance from allies, are capable of keeping the world's rogue states and dangerous forces in check.
Congress might better divert some of the billions that now go down the U.N. rat hole instead to defense and U.S. public diplomacy efforts abroad. It makes no sense to keep handing virtually blank checks to a body that regularly kicks sand in America's face. American taxpayers are entitled to wonder why the U.S. government continues to underwrite a huge chunk of the United Nations' budget. Is it really worth billions of dollars a year to support a diplomatic forum where name-calling passes for diplomacy? Probably not.
The international body does a few things well, however. Its health and food relief programs are worthy and often successful endeavors. And it may in fact be useful to maintain a forum where rogue nations can at least legally be held to account. It may even be useful to continue the increasingly ridiculous General Assembly, because the messages delivered by almost any U.S. president or European leader contrast so starkly and positively against the likes of a Chavez ("Reconsider Funding For United Nations,").
Few realize that the message Jesus Christ preached was central to the issues with which today's world struggles. It was a message of world government, world harmony and world peace. Within it is the admission that humanity does not have the wherewithal to accomplish these goals necessary for its survival. At the heart of the message is the good news that Jesus will step into human affairs at the right time to save it from destroying itself.
Did you realize that was the true gospel? You can read it here in "The Gospel of the Kingdom."
