On the UN and It's 'Place'

[Annie]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006310

The Asylum on the East River
Schoolchildren were once taught the U.N. mattered. Not anymore.

BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Friday, February 18, 2005 12:01 a.m.

Saris, Ashanti robes, agbadas, kaffiyehs, camouflage fatigues, djellabas, turbans, Nkrumah caps, Nehru jackets, Mao suits, Kaunda suits: For many years, and for much of the Western world, the United Nations provided a reliably benign--and occasionally exhilarating--theater. It was mankind as menagerie, a milling together with good intent, a Noah's ark for a new world order, where delegates plenipotentiary passed resolutions that declared the existence of a "common heritage" and spoke a neo-Utopian tongue.

After World War II, and the end of European colonialism, this was all rather pleasant stuff. Politics aside.

...

Ultimately, the U.S. and the U.N. were irreconcilable. This country's reigning philosophy is that men and societies ought to be (even if inconveniently) moral, and that there are always right answers to problems. The U.N., by contrast, reveres the amoral compromise, in which the consensual answer is always the convenient--and therefore the right--answer. In these unapologetically moral times, this makes for theater that is seldom benign, and almost never exhilarating. Not even in a sari.

Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal.