and, for what it's worth, I'm with that Jim Rockford feller on the Cooper thread (apart from the bit about Bono being a "great man"):
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"Bolton is probably what the UN desperately needs ... a huge wakeup call to get it's act together. Kirkpatrick and the Dem Senator from New York (sorry brain spazz) together spiked a lot of nonsense that would have made the UN even less relevant.
Fact is, the UN is in crisis. They cannot run refugee camps without seuxal predators running into the refugee effort. This is not just Congo, it's Cambodia and the Balkans as well. They function as the money-washer of choice for every brutal dicatator from Hugo Chavez, Pinochet, Saddam, and Assad. They preside over anti-American and anti-Israeli fests like the Durban Racismm conference, failing to tackle the real issues of racism in Darfur or elsewhere. The UN consistently has no answer for misrule of failed states that lead to genocide, terrorism, and horrible lives for people all over the globe that threaten to errupt into peaceful, modern societies threatening everyone.
The UN can and should have a role, but Mr. Nice Guy isn't going to get it done. Bolton needs to bust heads and threaten to get the UN lifetime job beurocrats to take action to clean up the institution. It's essentially the Stygian stables.
The World Bank? Who was the LAT pushing? BONO? A truly great musician and a good man, but I couldn't think of anyone more unsuited. They also pushed a failed Mexican President. Well, I guess he'd be worse (Echevarria I think).
Ask yourself what is the problem with the World Bank? It pushes massive development projects that just don't work, but provide enourmous opportunities for graft by both local kleptocrats and foreign businesses, makes middle class and poor people in rich countries bear the risk of bailing out these investments when they (ALWAYS) go sour, and imposes another round of "fiscal sanity" that ends up hurting the poor and middle class in these countries and leads inevitably to the next gigantic boondoggle that screws up the country even more.
Status quo and Mr. Nice Guy won't get it done there either. Wolfie is probably better than most because the chief problem of the World bank is not finance but political.
We already know that the political choices of relatively clean government and investment in education, clean drinking water, health care, public health, in short the PEOPLE not gigantic "things" yields enourmous dividends. It is the only proven way to develop out of poverty. The World Bank needs a political leader who is not afraid to tear down the temple in order to make a political decision to promote this investment.
Mr. Hewson is a good man, but fundamentally he does not understand that simply throwing money at Africa will change nothing, only make the Kleptocrats richer. Instead of building Alcoa a subsidized Aluminum smelter in say, Accra, it's far better to make modest investments that are closely supervised in clean drinking water for the Ghanese people. THAT ALONE would so massively improve the lives of Ghanaian citizens that you'd see a huge outburst of economic improvement. The same goes with roads, schools, and basic health care such as childhood immunizations. In other words, the public goods that ONLY a government can make, and that the current governments who are strapped for resources cannot fund.
It is also in America's enlightened self interest to do this. Imagine a whole Africa, largely free of conflict and with spare cash to actually BUY things. An Africa no longer chained in poverty. Or South America. America and the World need economic growth and to help people in the third world to lift themselves out of this.
The World Bank can play a part of this, but only if it's blown up in current form and refocused on financing lots of small, focused, public goods in (relatively) clean governments. Let the big rich private investors bear their own risk if things go south.
So yeah, Wolfowitz is not a bad choice at all. Regardless of how many people he pisses off..."