Happy Warrior

COUPLE of years ago, I was asked a question about the United Nations and replied that it was a good basic axiom that if you took a quart of ice cream and mixed it with a quart of dog feces the result would taste more like the latter than the former. There was a useful example of that the other day from a leading Turtle Bay honcho.

Now, I confess I have a sneaking admiration for the more shameless transnational apparatchiks: Two years ago, you may recall, Sudan was reelected to the U.N. Human Rights Commission at a time when the government’s proxies were busy slaughtering and gang-raping their way round Darfur. The last thing one needs when one’s got a hectic schedule of mass murder on one’s plate is a lot of tedious paper-shuffling committee meetings in New York, but Sudan’s deputy ambassador, Omar Bashir Manis, gamely rose to the occasion by announcing, upon joining the commission, that he was very concerned about human-rights abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

COUPLE of years ago, I was asked a question about the United Nations and replied that it was a good basic axiom that if you took a quart of ice cream and mixed it with a quart of dog feces the result would taste more like the latter than the former. There was a useful example of that the other day from a leading Turtle Bay honcho.

Now, I confess I have a sneaking admiration for the more shameless transnational apparatchiks: Two years ago, you may recall, Sudan was reelected to the U.N. Human Rights Commission at a time when the government’s proxies were busy slaughtering and gang-raping their way round Darfur. The last thing one needs when one’s got a hectic schedule of mass murder on one’s plate is a lot of tedious paper-shuffling committee meetings in New York, but Sudan’s deputy ambassador, Omar Bashir Manis, gamely rose to the occasion by announcing, upon joining the commission, that he was very concerned about human-rights abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.