U. N. Employee, N. Y. Times: U. N. Incompetent, Evil

A resigning United Nations assistant secretary general, writing in the opinion pages of the liberal New York Times, confirms what conservative critics have said for years:  The United Nations is exactly what you would expect if Christianity and conservatism are true and man is fallen; the United Nations is like the federal government, but worse.

In “I Love the U.N., but It Is Failing”, Anthony Banbury first reports some of the colossal but comparatively tame failings of the enormous, molasses-like bureaucracy:

Six years ago, I became an assistant secretary general, posted to the headquarters in New York. I was no stranger to red tape, but I was unprepared for the blur of Orwellian admonitions and Carrollian logic that govern the place. If you locked a team of evil geniuses in a laboratory, they could not design a bureaucracy so maddeningly complex, requiring so much effort but in the end incapable of delivering the intended result. The system is a black hole into which disappear countless tax dollars and human aspirations, never to be seen again.

. . .

Too often, the only way to speed things up is to break the rules. That’s what I did in Accra when I hired an anthropologist as an independent contractor. She turned out to be worth her weight in gold. . . .

One result of this dysfunction is minimal accountability. There is today a chief of staff in a large peacekeeping mission who is manifestly incompetent. Many have tried to get rid of him, but short of a serious crime, it is virtually impossible to fire someone in the United Nations. In the past six years, I am not aware of a single international field staff member’s being fired, or even sanctioned, for poor performance.

. . .

Peacekeeping forces often lumber along for years without clear goals or exit plans, crowding out governments, diverting attention from deeper socioeconomic problems and costing billions of dollars.

More disturbing—but again, not news to longtime conservative critics of the U. N. (John Derbyshire memorably called the organization “a limb of Satan”)—is what he confirms next:  In some places, U. N. “peacekeeping” troops have literally been the ones raping children, repeatedly and in a “persistent pattern”, for years.

Read the whole thing.