Save the Childen Abuse Report

Damn, according to this report by David Clarke, Save the Children UK just issued a report about widespread abuse by peacekeepers.

Two days ago, I tried to defend the United Nations Peacekeepers.

My post was saying that I reject the idea that the UN leadership is intentionally promoting rape as a tactic, just as I reject the indictment that the US leadership wanted for the stupidity of Abu Greib to happen.

The very fact that Save the Children underwent a multi-year survey and issued a scathing report criticizing misconduct under its watch indicates that the leadership of relief efforts don't want the abuse to happen.

The report talks of a concerted efforts to encourage people receiving aid to report abuse. They have training programs like 'Safeguarding Children Policy’ in place. The UN regularly spouts out with things like the 2004 Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse (pdf). Stop Violence Against Women lists some of the UN efforts to address abuse. I am a bit dense, but it seems to me that the Stop Rape Now by the United Nations is saying that the UN wants to stop rape and abhors groups that use rape as a tactic.

Even after reading the Save the Children report, It appears to me that the primary cause of abuse in disaster relief efforts isn't the moral defects of the peacekeepers. The primary cause of the abuse is the vulerability of people after disasters. People in dire situations are extremely vulnerable. Vulnerable people are prone to bad choices and abuse. Peacekeepers are responding to that vulnerability. The reports says: "Without parents, many children are forced to use transactional sex as a survival tactic."

As mentioned in my apologetics post for the UN, there is almost always a boom in births following a disaster. Abuse and bad decisions follow disasters. Such is the nature of disasters. The need needs to be addressed on multiple fronts.

Save The Children recommends including more child protective services efforts in disaster relief efforts. They want better procedures for reporting and prosecution of abuse. UNFPA wants to help address the problem with concerted family planning efforts (including distribution of contraception) in disaster relief. I believe that a multifront approach that included both the conservative and liberal efforts would help reduce the child abuse and population booms that follow disasters.

Applying the Right Answers at the Right Time

Michelle Malkin's site has people enflamed because (gasp) the UNFPA provides contraceptives in disaster relief efforts.

While I think the family planning ideology in the United States often goes overboard, I have to side with the United Nations Population Fund on this one.

There is almost always a population boom following a disaster. When a family that just lost everything has a child, you can pretty much guess that the child was unplanned. Irrational forces are at work when people have babies at times when their ability to care for the child is in doubt.

In many cases, the post disaster population boom magnifies the hardships of the crisis. For example a high birth rate in refuge camps will hamper efforts to feed and relocate the refuges. The message to the people in a refuge camp is to get strong and prepare for relocation. Now is not the time for having children. Here are ways to not have children ...

Population booms often feed cycles of war. Wars often follow a 20 year cycle where the children born during the last war ride off to avenge their fathers!

Intervening in a post disaster population boom makes sense. In times of turmoil, people make irrational decisions involving children. A very strong message for family planning (by promoting abstinence, contraception or both) is in order. The message is that people should recover from the disaster before adding new family members.

Disaster relief is not not the time for a culture war. The goal is to get people back on stable track after which they will make their life choices. The right and left need to work together to find ways to encourage people not to have children until they are in a stable environment.

Both the arguments and technology employed during a time of crisis should be different from times of stability. While I would be morally outraged about a group distributing contraceptions to American high school students, I would not be troubled by the same efforts to people who are in a state of turmoil after a disaster or war.

Several of the comments on Michelle Malkin's blog claimed the reason the UN was giving out contraception was so the peacekeeping forces could rape the women.

Such comments are an example of completely unfounded, unprincipled speculation.

The allegation that UN Peacekeepers engage in mass rape is similar to unfounded allegations made against US soldiers. Both the US Army and UN Peacekeeping forces have law enforcement elements that aggressively punish soldiers for misconduct.

I know this allegation is false because there are better explanations for UNFPA's efforts: The better explanation is that, during past disaster relief programs, people have identified a need for handling family planning questions during the relief effort.

The other reason I don't think the contraceptive are given so UN Peacekeepers can rape the disaster victims is that the contraceptions were given by UNFPA and not by the Peacekeeper army. If the army was planning on mass rape, the army would be doing the preparations.

Instead of this blanket criticism of the United Nations Population Fund, the right would do better to participate in the effort to help promote moral methods of family planning.

People can have their culture war battles in the planning stage for disaster relief. The arguments made in the planning stage should be driven by past experience of the needs of people involved in the disaster and supported by fact.


Label: United Nations.

UN Green

The United Nation's Building renovation will cost $1.9 billion. The result will be a building that is pretty much the same as the current one. A big reason for the run up in in cost is an effort to make the building green. The renovation will improve the efficiency of the building by 30%.

The article does not say how much energy the building consumes; however, I find it safe to guess that the $1.9 billion dollar renovation effort will consume far more energy than the efficiency gains.

Sadly, I fear that the UN renovation is symbolic of the international left's effort to stop global warming through government funding. Resources consumed by the left's stab at controlling nature is likely to be equal if not greater than the resource savings. The economic costs will dwarf the economic benefits. Finally, the primary beneficiaries of all the hot air blown by the efforts will be the elite core. As with the majority of efforts dreamed up by the left, the elitist will reap the rewards from the effort and the people will languish.

I like the UN. I wish that we had opted for the lower cost effort that would have involved building a new UN building. Moving the Bureaucrats, then renovating the old UN building. The smart path would have given us a second building for the massive investment. The UN may not be popular, but it is worth the effort to keep as much of it in the US as is possible.

Back to alternative energy: It seems to me that Natural Capitalism by the Rocky Mountain Institute is a better approach to the energy problem. Natural Capitalism wishes to make resource consumption a bigger part of the cost equation. With the cost of resources taken into account properly, the market will find ways to adjust to the new equation.

PSA: Eat Away at Landmines

This is just a quick public service announcement. The 2007 Salt Lake Night of 1000 Dinners will take place March 27 at the Calvary Babtist Church (details). This event raises funds for landmine removal.

If you can't make it to the Salt Lake event, you can host your own dinner. Go to 1000Dinners.com. If you sign up a group, you will get a kit with stuff about landmines.

You can also just dine out with friends; Talk about how lousy war is and how much damage landmines do to civilians; Collect some money and send it to Adopt a Minefield.

Peacekeeping Missions

The United Nations reports that there is a short of peacekeepers for all of the peacekeeping missions on their plate.

Both Iraq and Afghanistan have high unemployment rates at the moment. Many of these disenfranchised youth are drawn into militias.

I have wondered if it would be advantageous to draw recruits from these nations to be trained as international peacekeepers. UN.org lists peacekeeping forces by nation. There is a strong correlation between unemployment in the nation and the number of peacekeepers. The CS Monitor has an article on refuges from Iraq. While we struggle with the security issue in Iraq, it would be worthwhile to find productive things for the refuges to do.


Hmm, maybe we could give them computers and teach them to blog ... no, that's not constructive.

Responsibility to Protect

One of the primary reasons that I was opposed to the Iraq War in 2003 was that by invading Iraq, Bush tied the international community's hands on stopping the genocide in Sudan. Although I think we have to continue our dubious ventures in Iraq, I hope that Bush's reputation remains forever tarnished for his actions.

That said, I've come across a few good resources on better ways to address atrocities. One notable option is an idea called "The Responsibility to Protect." This concept states affirmatively that nations have a responsibility to protect their citizens. In cases where nations are engaged in mass atrocities, the international community has a responsibility to intervene.

This policy overturns the Westphalian view of International Relations which pretty much gave nations sovereignty over its citizens, allowing them to kill with impunity.

The first resource I wanted to point out is the University Channel podcast titled The United Nations and the Prevention of Atrocities dated 2007-01-30 which features a conference call with Lee Feinstein. This podcast explores the application of The Responsibility to Protect in Darfur.

You can also read the 2001 report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS).

The Responsibility to Protect makes a very profound change in the way that we view international law. The traditional approach was pretty much like criminal law. You would wait for the crime to happen, then punish then try and punish the criminal for their action. This is pretty much the model of the ICC. If a genocide occurred, we would slap the dictator's hand and give them a villa in France while sternly saying "bad dictator." The responsibility to protect moves the international community away from this vague notion of post genocide justice to a proactive stance of protecting people.

Lee Feinsteion states, and I agree here, that the principle to protect really did not apply in Iraq. Saddam Hussein's atrocities had occurred prior to the US invasion. It appeared to me in 2003 that Hussein had had his fill of genocide for the time being and was content to luxuriate in his palaces, while his sons killed a small number of people for sport. Trying Hussein for past atrocities is something that would fit in the ICC model of trying people for international crimes.

This ICISS model and ideals like the responsibility to protect shows the type of thinking that I wish was going on in Washington in lieue of the neocon and progressive nonsense that dominates modern discourse.

UN Peacekeeping Missions

Jane Holl Lute, U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, gives a presentation on the challenges of peacekeeping. The United Nations is getting pulled in to more and more peacekeeping efforts each year, which is sad because things have been getting better economically. Unfortunately, we are in a situation where politicians are ripping at the heart of the world's community as never before.

Ms. Holl Lute had a very good observation that the primary problem in the United Nations is that UN has lost the consensus that existed when the charter was first signed. The podcast is 89 minutes, but worth the listen.

The Fourth Option

Last night I crashed the United Nations Association of Utah featuring guest speaker Jeff Laurenti on the important question of the continuing relevancy of the United Nations. Now that the neoconservative stab at unilateral pre-emptive action seems to have bogged down, there is great hope for a renewed United Nations. In my opinion, We need the UN now more than ever!!!! (UN Links).

Unfortunately, Mr. Laurenti's speaking style shows that, while the United Nations is a worthy effort deserving our support, we should also fear it.

How to put this?

If the United Nations sticks to the classical liberal ideals that served as the base of its charters, it can help provide peace. If, however, it continues to be controlled by clowns steeped in new think, then it will end up undermining Democracy, and will rip this world apart.

The United Nations is neither a necessarily good thing, nor is it a necessarily bad thing. The UN will end up being what the people active in the UN make it to be.

I know Mr. Laurenti from only one presentation. The online information I've found on the speaker shows that he has a great deal of influence through organizations like Ted Turner's UN Foundation, The Century Foundation and other extremely powerful organizations.

Mr. Laurenti presentation showed an absolute wealth of knowledge, but at every chance he could get he would pull underhanded dialectical slights of hand to move the argument to the left. I tried counting logical fallacies and tricks he pulled in his talk, but soon ran out of fingers and toes. Instead I will just concentrate on the trick that he pulled during the audience participation part of the speech.

In the audience participation gig, he took a poll. He told us that there were three ways that people can think about the war:

• You could believe that the Iraq War was right , and we will somehow win.
• You can believe that the war was right, but we did something wrong that is making it hard to win.
• or you can believe that the decision to invade Iraq was wrong.

Notice the nasty trick? Anyone who has had elementary math knows that there is actually a fourth option. In standard math 2 squared is 4. It is not 3. By intentionally omitting the fourth option, Laurenti skillfully cut out the views held by a large number of classical liberals.

The fourth view is that invading Iraq was wrong, but that we can still win. By openly violating fundamental logic, Laurenti managed to cut out the classical liberals who probably have the best chance of dealing with Bush's mistake. BTW, Laurenti is guilty of exactly the same type of failed logic that led Bush to make the mistake of invading Iraq. Like Bush, Laurenti wraps his ideology in flawed logic in ways that I doubt even he can see through.

The fourth view is a little complex. The view holds that the conditions at the time an argument is made affects how one should approach the argument. For example, we were right to go to war with Germany in 1945, but we are not right to go to war with Germany today because conditions are different.

I think the US congress was correct when they approved the invasion of Iraq. In 2003, Congress was approving the use of the threat of war in diplomatic effort. They did not mandate war. The decision to invade happened primarily within the executive. Since the diplomatic effort was succeding, Bush's decision to invade was wrong. This decision stands at the top of the worst executive decisions made in the history of the United States.

After Bush made his historic blunder, the state of the world changed. After the invasion, we are in a world where we have to deal with Bush's mistake. The best way to deal with this mistake is to do everything in our power to help the new Iraqi government succeed. The best method for continuing is with open acknowledgement of the mistake, but with a continued commitment to democracy and freedom in Iraq.

Laurenti ignored the fourth option because he has the false premise that since a decision was a bad decision, it must fail. This really is not true. Quite frankly, even if Bush had been successful in squelching the sectarian violence in Baghdad, the decision he made to go to war was wrong. War was too great of a gamble.

History is a long sequence of people trying to recover from the bad decisions of their leaders. My faith has never been with the leaders, it is with the people of good character who muddle through the bad consequences of their leaders' idiocies.

Bush's bad decision has adversely affected the United States is a variety of ways. It's dramatically diminished American influence. It threw South America under the control of Hugo Chavez and what's left of Castro. Tens of thousands of people have been killed by jihadist thugs.

Yes, this is all fallout from one extraordinarily bonehead decision made in a back room by Rumsfeld, Bush and a cadre of neocons. We are now in a deep dark hole.

However, in this deep dark hole, we are finally in a position where we can start rediscovering the ideals that made Americans great. Our challenge is to keep those entities (neocon and progressive) that are still trying to stifle and manipulate the debate from achieving their ends.

The wanks from the right messed up. Flipping the world in the hands of the wanks on the left won't solve the problem because the two extremes of technocrats are the same thing. We need to relearn the process of discourse.

In a previous post, I put forward that the the proposal of a troop surge was a brilliant move on Bush's part (his presenting it as a done deal was a blunder). The proposal temporarily shifted debate from one of how the US should retreat to one about how we can help the Middle East move beyond the violent ideologies that are tearing it apart.

The proposal of a troop surge was a great strategy. I doubt that surging the troops would really do much.

The real challenge for the United States at this moment is getting the debate process back on track. The actual actions we take (short of retreat) is secondary.

Watching both Laurenti and Bush in action, I feel that the parties involved are destroying our ability to engage in discourse. We need fewer slick speakers involved in the process and more people who are good at muddling through in the shadows of bad decisions.

SIDE NOTE ONE: The UN Watch seems to share my opinions of Laurenti's speaking style.

END NOTE: I mentioned at the beginning of this post that there is an organization called the United Nations Association. A UNA is a non-government organization interested in the United Nations. There are UNA groups throughout the world. It is a great organization for people who are interested in world affairs. I have a list of UN and UNA resources on my links site.

This HotAir piece shows people engaged in the process of muddling through.

Misbehaving Peacekeepers

Wow! This is exactly the same complaint that the International Community had with Abu Ghraib. The United Nations seems to lack a good structure for punishing U.N. Peacekeepers gone bad.

I think the world of both the United States Military and the United Nations Peacekeeping forces. The problem is that when you have hundreds of thousands of young testosterone loaded soldiers in intense situations; You will have some problems. The disgrace of Abu Greib was not simply that out of control soldiers made Muslims put underwear on their head. The disgrace was that we had inadequate training on what the prison guards could and could not do. Above all, it was disgraceful that, during an invasion that was supposed to help the Iraqis re-establish the rule of law, we did not have a sufficient legal structure in place to try the inevitable crimes committed by the 300,000 armed forces in the area.

After Abu Greib, US politicians and conservative pundits fell into damage control mode. Political damage control only makes matters worse when the damage is caused by a fundamental flaw. The United States was able to able to fix the fundamental flaws that delayed bringing the perpetrators of prisoner abuse to justice. We have a strong military court system in place. Without a working ICC, the United Nations is in a much tougher situation.

Micro Loans v. PayDay Loans

My last post pointed out how Progressives want us to hate PayDay Lenders. What is funny is that change minded individuals have started to embrace and idea called micro-loans. In the 1990s, the United Nations finally came to grips with the fact that the big loans made to third world governments and to big businesses wanting to exploit resources in the third world made things worse for the people living in the third world. The United Nations and World Bank had made gigantic loans to governments on projects that effectively displaced the people they claimed to be helping. The big loans ended up feeding corruption, increasing the gap between the rich and poor. Even worse, the big loans saddled future generations with onerous debts.

Conversely, entrepreneurs and well meaning NGOs found out that making small loans to small community minded businesses end up having a very profound positive effect. Best yet, a lower percentage of the microloans go into default than the big loans from big banks with big government consent and security.

The United Nations is now ringing the bells of MicroCredit. They even declare 2005 as the Year of Microcredit. Much of the worldwide economic boom of the last 6 years is a direct result of the explosion of microcredit.

As with all things, MicroCredit is likely to be overdone. The first microcredit loans by Grameen Bank came from a good lender to good borrowers. This universal declaration of the goodness of Microloans is likely to attract sharks wanting to lend at absurd rates to subprime borrowers.

It is interesting that local progressives are systematically slamming all the doors that provide credit to the poor in our local communities in the United States, while progressives on the international scene have figured out that George Bailey (It's A Wonderful Life reference) style banks working within a community to help it thrive lead to true, sustainable progress.

P-C News Update

Arch conservative John Bolton is using his last days as U.N. Ambassador to counter growing demands for genocide of Israelis from radical Islam.

Meanwhile progressives are inching closer to the proclamation that genocide is good. An Aussie scientist wants to start involuntary sterilization programs and hints at the need to let middle aged and elderly people die in a timely manner.

The Political Process of UN Nominations

While I wait for customer support, I thought I should expand my post on the Bolton shafting.

I don't think that Bolton is some type of saviour who has a magical formula to turn the United Nations back to the classical liberal roots that it abandonned. He is just a gruff outsider who is both patriotic and has been vocal in pointing U.N. abuses. The months he spent as a presidential appointee shows that he garners the respect the US needs if it is to support reform.

The divisive games that democrats make by shafting nominees in commission seriously undermines the credibility of the United States. The problem is not that Bolton was the best man, but the political games played by the Democrats almost always results in a situation where either a lesser candidate wins the nomination, or that the process ends up undermining the effectiveness of the nominee.

Bolton's months of service have shown that he was not the loose cannon we initially feared. He was showing that he was the extremely forthright and upstanding ambassador that Bolton's supporters claimed that he was. The Democrats who undermined Bolton's nomination in committee undermined the ability of our nation to affect UN reform.

The result is that the United Nations might become an extraordinarily strong force against the United States and the few remaining democracies in the world.

Sad to See Bolton Shafted

While I am more than happy to dance on Rumsfeld's tomb, I am sad to see Bolton getting the shaft (Yahoo). The Yahoo article and other sources I've found seem to indicate that people at the UN like working with Bolton and see him as someone who is capable of reforming the United Nations.

Bolton's main fault is that he is an outsider who hates seeing the abuse of the United Nation's by powerful insiders. Bolton's gruff personality along with his ability to see through BS laid on by the insiders is precisely what this world needs; if we wish to affect reform of the United Nations. Denying the nomination shuts down the possibility of reform for the foreseeable future.

Which, I guess is what the corrupt political machine of the far left wants.

IMHO we need to listen more to the gruff like Bolton and avoid the lure of slick insiders like Rumsfeld.

IED = Landmines

The reaction to recent Rumsfeld memo leaks is quite interesting. These memos show that there actually were efforts underway to change course in Iraq. Interestingly, the talking points published by the NY Times center on the idea that changing the course simply leads to more dysfunction. Conservative bloggers try to point out that the NY Times show the two-faced nature of the left. The Bush administration could not talk publicly about ways to change the course because open discourse gets attacked by the Left. The administration's silence on the issue before the election gets attacked by the press. I doubt, however, that Rumsfeld will get much vindication from these leaks.

Despite the qualities that Rumsfeld brought to the table, he failed the US in two big aspects: First, He made it appear that the conservative movement in America advocates the use of torture (most do not). He also blundered by coming out in support of the use of landmines.

On this thought, I was just watching a TV news report of the latest bombings in Baghdad. The TV cameras quickly surveyed the carnage, some talking heads spoke about the IEDs used in the attacks, then the show switched to a commericial.

I switched off the commercial. The term IED bounced around in my brain, then struck the memory of Rumsfeld's idiotic support for the development of smart landmines. These IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) that are wreaking so much havoc in Iraq are essentially the same smart landmines that Rumsfeld endorses.

Properly speaking, a landmine is an IED that a terrorist plants in the ground hoping to kill whoever walks by (soldiers, children, etc.). Killing with landmines is a slow tedious process.

The IEDs of the Jihadist is a smart landmine. They are bombs that Jihadists place in cars and park in a public places. They get exploded with smart devices like cell phones or timers. The most dispicable IEDs are bombs that Jihadists strap to idealistic thirteeen-year-olds. The Jihadist puppet masters direct the thirteen-year-old to a crowd, then cowers under a veil of hatred as the young child goes boom.

Rumsfeld's idiotic support for the development of smart IEDs blurs the moral clarity of the war on terror without giving us a strategic advantage. Likewise, Rumsfeld's blundering on the torture blurred the moral clarity of the war. It fragmented his base. In return it gave us only questionable gains.

The only way for the West to win in this struggle is for the Mideast to realize that the ideals of classical liberalism lead to widespread prosperity. It is impossible to win when we have leaders like Rumsfeld who routinely blur the moral clarity that sits at the foundation of the classical liberal ideals. Had the US renewed its stand against landmines, then we would be in a better position to denounce the use of IEDs (smart landmines) as a terrorist weapon. Instead we watch have to watch the carnage in Iraq without even the ability to denounce the tactics since the technocratic leader of our war came out in open support for the use of "smart landmines."

The left may be two-faced, but Rumsfeld is the primary that we are losing the peace.

International Justice

This sounds like a bonehead decision. A French Court decided that it wanted to try Rwanda's President Paul Kagame for the 1994 assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana. This assassination was used by Hutu radicals to spark the genocide which killed 800,000 Rwandans (Yahoo News).

It would have been great a dozen years ago if international forces were willing to try Kagame for the assassination. If the international community, during Clinton's administration, was willing to do more than take bribes for Saddam Hussein, we might have been able to stop both the genocides in Rwanda and the genocides in Iraq.

The assassination of Habyarimana was a horrible thing. However, the world owes Kagame a debt for not reciprocating the Hutu genocide of Tutsis with a Tutsi genocide of Hutu. Rwanda is a country where everyone one (including the international community) has blood on its hands. As much as Kagame's acts demand justice, we really are left in a spot where administering the justice will destabilize the region.

This is the same bad thinking that led Bush to invade Iraq. There were plenty of reasons to invade Iraq in the Clinton administration. Bush's effort to administer justice to Saddam Hussein for the genocide that occurred during Clinton's watch has so far only led to instability.

In international affairs the timing of efforts to enforce justice is far more important than the administration of justice. Had the ICC been place to try Kagame before the genocide, we may have prevented the genocide. The post genocidal world is one where everyone's hands are bloody and courts seeking justice tend to hinder efforts at rebuilding. Kagame did not reciprocate the genocide. Yes, the EU may be embarrassed that they cut and run in Rwanda and hundreds of thousands of people died as a result. The problem is that there is never any clear way for humans to administer justice decades after an event. Efforts to do so generally leads to Balkanization where each faction remembers centuries of wrongs committed against them, but fails to see the atrocities committed on their behalf.

Is Bolton Next?

I think that Axing Rumsfeld was a good idea.

I think the new Democratic majority would do very well at this point to approve the nomination of John Bolton as the Ambassador to the United Nation.

The UN is in dire need of reform. Having a gruff UN critic as our UN ambassador could help the United States achieve that goal. The majority of Bolton's complaints are dead on. The standard dried in the wool internationalist who usually serves as UN ambassador would be less effective in inducing positive change.

Remeber, the UN stood by to watch genocides in Sudan, Rwanda and even in Iraq. IMHO, the corruption of the UN by the oil for food program was one of the contributing factors to the current mess.

There is value to having a harsh critic or two. Bolton is one of those harsh critics who can induce change. Rumsfeld, on the other hand, is the typical insider technocrat who has the magic ability to turn victories into defeat.

Night of 1000 Dinners

Last night, I attended the Salt Lake Night of A Thousand Dinners. This event raises funds for Adopt*A*Minefield ... a project by the UNA and UN to remove landmines from war torn regions of the world.

At the moment, Adopt-A-Minefield is one of the stellar lights in the UN's portfolio. The various efforts to remove landmines and to provide prosthetics for people who've been injured by mines is one of the most visible and notable efforts of the international community.

Bolted On

Ha, ha. I think it is a hoot that John Bolton's rise to the position of US Amabassador to the UN will happen through non-democratic means (through a recess appointment by George Bush.)

There is a chance that Bolton's abrasive style is exactly what we need to start to help get the UN back onto its classical liberal track. There have been cases where critics have turned to be good administrators.

One thing is certain. For the upcoming year, the United Nations will be interesting.

United Nations Day

The United Nation's Day sponsored by the United Nations Association of Utah was interesting. This year, the UN is emphasizing woman's rights. The meeting featured Dr. Nancy Haanstad of Weber State University who spoke on progress being made in women's education and the positive effect women's education has in lower birth rates and stabilizing countries. Having spent the day going through political web sites for the Utah candidates, it was extremely refreshing to hear a speaker with a more enlightened understanding of world events.

Utah's Lieutenant Governor Gayle F. McKeachnie attended the event. I am pleased to see the Governor of the state participating in the UNAU after Utah's silly attempt to withdraw from the United Nation's last year.

The night's entertainment included a Native American Flutist with home made flutes, traditional Native American singing and Hoop Dancing. The following page shows images of Hoop Dancing. Hoop Dancing is an interesting art.

Do It With the ICC

Next time, America, let's do it with the ICC.

The French method of drawing out the confrontation with Iraq until it is a Vietnam style war is no better than the cowboy diplomacy of Bush. If Saddam knew he had three months for the show down, he could substantially increase the damage he causes.

This is something not something even a skillful diplomat like Chamberlain could avoid.

Blundering Bush, however, has let his enemies characterize the current events as shooting from the hip.

International laws need to be defined, then enforced.

The unfortunate truth, though, is that a heavily politicized ICC would be a thousand times worse then none. The problem with courts that simply respond to popular politics is that they will force out the good in the world, and replace it with the bad.

Saddam Hussein could twist Jacques Chirac into any contortionist pose he desired. An ICC with 11 Chiracs as judges would guarantee the rise and perpetual preservation of dictators in all third world nations.

The solution isn't for a joke of an ICC, but for a clearly defined international law interpretted and enforced by a court, a court that values the rule of law first and foremost.

Next time, America, do it with the ICC.