Introducing the Pot & the Kettle (with a Smack in the Face from the Frying Pan)
James Morrow is wrong. The UN is troubled, but in Morrow’s editorial, he puts a lot of the blame elsewhere than where it belongs. He does this because he has an agenda: the dissolution of the United Nations.

First, Morrow refers to UN peacekeepers as being under the direction of the Secretary General. That’s not accurate. UN peacekeepers are troops supplied by member nations. If those troops act criminally, that isn’t the fault of the UN’s oversight, but of the countries supplying troops without a command structure in place to regulate their behavior. They go in and join in. When Australian troops went to Timor, did any of them commit crimes? No, yet they were there under the auspices of the UN.

The oil-for-food scandal does present a problem for Kofi Annan, but the UN’s examination of the actions of his son have cleared the Secretary General of any wrongdoing. Morrow ignores this, although the argument he’d make is obvious.

So what’s Morrow’s real problem with the UN? It’s the report from the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Once again, as in 2000, the UN has come to the conclusion that Australia has a problem in how it treats ethnic minorities, including its indigenous population. Typically of his kind of anti-intellectual, Morrow concludes that there is nothing to learn from the UN’s report, that it is unwarranted interference in Australia’s governance, and that the UN has been deluded by lobbyists or is simply acting out against Australia because of its participation in Gulf War II.

In his final paragraph, however, Morrow proceeds to make the UN’s point for it:

"These days, the UN has got a lot more than a bloody nose - it is also facing a crisis of legitimacy that has been coming for years. From the start, its biggest problem has been that, to paraphrase the old joke about the Holy Roman Empire, it is neither united nor comprised of nations. Far too many of the member-states did not earn their nationhood in any sort of real way (by, say, populating and cultivating territory or fighting a war of independence) but because someone a long time ago drew some lines on a map. And as modern history has proven, the resulting governments treat their citizens with about as much respect. For the UN to call Australia out for racism and human rights violations would be a joke if it weren't so serious."

What he fails to note is that the “someone[s]” who “drew some lines on a map” were largely the members of the Security Council: Britain, France, the U.S., et al., but he treats these nations as if they were squabbling children who’d scribbled out their boundaries themselves, and are undeserving of nationhood. In fact, many of those nations did indeed fight for their independence, countries like Kenya, India, Iraq, Iran . . . and they fought against the imperialism Morrow apparently misses in the world today.

The UN’s report is indeed serious, and Australia wouldn’t go wrong in a sober assessment of its contents. Having another round of Alexander Downer spitting the dummy shows just how ingrained intolerance is, as is Morrow’s tantrum.