ANGELS IN BLUE:

UN fetish (Mark Steyn, Jerusalem Post, May 18th, 2004)

But let's go to the next stage. What do the "Bush's boast rings hollow" crowd want for Iraq? Usually, they want the UN to take over.

Is the UN perfect? No.

Is the UN good? Well, I'm not sure I'd even say that. But if you object to what's going on in those Abu Ghraib pictures – the sexual humiliation of prisoners and their conscription as a vast army of extras in their guards' porno fantasies – then you might want to think twice about handing over Iraq to the UN.

In Eritrea, the government recently accused the UN mission of, among other offences, pedophilia. In Cambodia, UN troops fueled an explosion of child prostitutes and AIDS. Amnesty International reports that the UN mission in Kosovo has presided over a massive expansion of the sex trade, with girls as young as 11 being lured from Moldova and Bulgaria to service international peacekeepers.

In Bosnia, where the sex-slave trade barely existed before the UN showed up in 1995, there are now hundreds of brothels with underage girls living as captives. The 2002 Save the Children report on the UN's cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa provides grim details of peacekeepers' demanding sexual favors from children as young as four in exchange for biscuits and cake powder. "What is particularly shocking and appalling is that those people who ought to be there protecting the local population have actually become perpetrators," said Steve Crawshaw, the director of Human Rights Watch.

By now you're maybe thinking, "Hmm. I must have been on holiday the week the papers ran all those stories about 'The Shaming of the UN.'"

In the last few days, The Daily Mirror has had to concede that their pictures of members of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment committing atrocities are all fakes. The Boston Globe has admitted that their pictures of US troops sexually abusing Iraqi women are also phony. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has apologized for claiming that Israel was implicated in the events at Abu Ghraib.

Why would these big-media fact-checked-to-death news operations get suckered so easily? Because, to the great herd of independent minds, these stories conform to their general view that all the ills of the world can be laid at the door of Bush, Blair, and Sharon.

Canada, Holland, Italy and several other countries have all had domestic scandals over their participation in UN missions. These range from mistreatment of prisoners and even civilians, paying protection money to the enemy and just plain cowardice. Yet it seems no atrocity and no scandal will penetrate the teflon coating of the UN, or cause the left to call for anything other than more of the same.