Mark Steyn is his usual magnificent self today. Do read all of it:

If Paul Volcker’s preliminary report on Oil-for-Food
dealt with the organisation’s unofficial interests, the UN’s other
report of the week accurately captured their blithe insouciance to
their official one. As you may have noticed, the good people of Darfur
have been fortunate enough not to attract the attention of the arrogant
cowboy unilateralist Bush and have instead fallen under the care of the
Polly Toynbee-Clare Short-approved multilateral compassion set. So,
after months of expressing deep concern, grave concern, deep concern
over the graves and deep grave concern over whether the graves were
deep enough, Kofi Annan managed to persuade the UN to set up a
committee to look into what’s going on in Darfur. They’ve just reported
back that it’s not genocide.

That’s great news,
isn’t it? For as yet another Annan-appointed UN committee boldly
declared in December: "Genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of
all and should never be tolerated." So thank goodness this isn’t
genocide. Instead, it’s just 70,000 corpses who all happen to be from
the same ethnic group – which means the UN can go on tolerating it
until everyone’s dead, and Polly and Clare don’t have to worry their
pretty little heads about it.

That’s the
transnational establishment’s alternative to Bush and Howard: appoint a
committee that agrees on the need to do nothing. Thus, a few days ago,
the UN Human Rights Commission announced the working group that will
decide which complaints will be heard at their annual meeting in Geneva
this spring: the five-nation panel comprises the Netherlands, Hungary,
Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe. I wouldn’t bet on them finding room on
their crowded agenda for the question of human rights in Cuba, Saudi
Arabia and Zimbabwe, would you? One of the mystifying aspects of UN
worship is the assumption that this embryo world government is a
"progressive" concept. It’s not. Its squalid geographic voting blocs,
which use regional solidarity to inflate the status of nickel’n’dime
dictators, are merely a Third World gloss on the Congress of Vienna – a
relic of an age when contact between states was confined to their
governing elites. In an era of jet travel, internet and debit cards
that work in any bank machine from Vancouver to Vilnius to Vanuatu,
there are millions of global relationships far better for the long-term
health of the planet than using American money to set up Eurowimp
talking shops manned by African thugs – which is what the UN Human
Rights Commission boils down to.