Posted 6:42 PM by Floyd

It's easy to criticize people who believe that the UN can do no wrong. But if you dig deeper, you can find people who see the UN as possessing not just superior morals, but also superior capabilities. From today's Mercury News letters page:

Thomas Friedman's claims that our war in Iraq is ``the Big One'' (Aug. 26, Opinion) seem like a sad parody of the arguments advanced 30 years ago. Replace the militants with the Viet Cong and his harping about the spread of democracy with ``domino theory,'' and you have a pretty good approximation of a '60s era speech explaining why we had to continue to fight in Vietnam.

You can bet that the sons of Friedman's colleagues and neighbors aren't the soldiers who are fighting and dying in Iraq. Once again, the less privileged in our society are being sent on an ill-defined mission, in a corner of the world where we are not welcome. Once again there are calls for more troops, an urging of patience at home, and vague assurances that all is going well in the face of plain evidence that it is not.

Parody is amusing in the theater, but this is real life with our troops suffering real deaths. Now is the time to turn Iraq over to the United Nations, with the world community participating to restore Iraq to the Iraqi people. (emphasis mine - FM)

It's amazing to me that Rose can spend two paragraphs complaining about how the US is not welcome, its mission is ill-defined, and its soldiers are being killed -- and then turn around and tell us that the solution is for the UN to try to do the same thing! Why would the UN be any more welcome than America? Why would it be immune from Baathist and Islamist attackers?

And how obtuse do you have to be to write this stuff just days after the UN mission in Baghdad was bombed?