November 7, 2007
Hail Multilateralism!
I'm ready to join the Black Helicopter crowd. First Larry Kudlow brings us the story of the World Bank's $900,000,000 loan to Iran. As America successfully gets business and some pensions to divest of Iranian holdings and start to apply financial pressure, the mostly-US-funded World Bank dives into the breach. A commenter says "It's good to know dictators in need have someone to turn to."
The World Bank will float them, and the UN will protect them. The Wall Street Journal Ed Page today criticizes the International Atomic Energy Agency (paid link):
For the past year, [IAEA head Mohammed] ElBaradei has been running an independent foreign policy from his IAEA perch. People tell him he is "doing God's work" -- or so he tells the New York Times. In August, he announced a nuclear agreement he had reached with Iran's mullahs, without consulting his political superiors at the agency. Even the Europeans protested that one.The agreement made no reference to the U.N. Security Council's demand that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment program, a demand Mr. ElBaradei himself dismisses as moot. The agreement also allowed the Iranians to dribble out information on the dozen outstanding questions the IAEA has yet to resolve.
Mr. ElBaradei has coasted on the IAEA's reputation as the authoritative source of information on the world's nuclear secrets. Yet this is the same agency that was taken by surprise by nuclear projects in Libya, North Korea and Iraq in the 1980s. And now in Syria, which in September was voted co-chair of the IAEA's General Conference.
We're funding these outfits and spending millions to host them and staff our portion. I've said a hundred times that the UN could have stopped the Iraq war if not for Oil for Food. Now they are setting themselves up to ensure that no peaceful resolution or restrictions on Iran can be affected.
Where is the blogswarm that scuttled the Dubai ports deal? A legitimate, profitable, and honorable business deal is immolated by populist fury, but I don't hear anybody complaining that International Agencies we finance are financing war against us.