Minor Thoughts from me to you

It amazes me that American liberals trust the U.N. to do a good job managing international crisises and other countries, but distrust the United States when it tries to do the same. It amazes me because the U.N. is an incredibly incompetent organization. Liberals are horrified by the perceived incompetency of the Bush administration. Yet the Bush administration is far, far more competent, capable and law-abiding than the vast majority of the U.N.

Take, just for example, the performance of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo. Michael Totten recently reported on the situation.

There is no love for the United Nations in Kosovo.

Kosovo is the fourth country I've visited where the UN has or has had a key role, and in only one of them - Lebanon - is the UN not despised by just about everyone. In Lebanon the UN has so little power to make a difference one way or the other that any anger at the institution would largely be pointless. In Bosnia, though, UN "peacekeepers" stood by impotently while genocide and ethnic-cleansing campaigns were carried out right in front of them. The UN's Oil for Food program was thoroughly corrupted by Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq at the expense of just about everybody who lives there. Kosovo, meanwhile, declared independence from Serbia on February 17, 2008, but the elected government is still subordinate to the almost universally despised UN bureaucrats who are the real power. Many Kosovars insist the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) is actually a dictatorship.

UNMIK is the United Nations Mission in Kosovo. It has been the de-facto government of Kosovo since the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade lost control at the end of the 1999 war. Kosovo has its own nominal government, but it has little power.

"So you have UN rule," Kurti continued, "which is not leaving, and you have the ICO and EU-elects about to come. They are doubling the bureaucracy here. And we are stuck because we depend on their consensus. That means we depend on their lowest common denominator. What they care about is stability, never development or progress. For them, a crisis is only an explosion of crisis. If there is huge unemployment, poverty, they don't care."

"So if the EU is administering Kosovo's government," I said, "what does that mean for Kosovo's government? Will they be subordinate to the EU or operating in parallel?"

"They will be subordinate," he said, "because Peter Feith will have the right to sack our ministers and change our laws. So he is going to supervise the government. Peter Feith hopes he will not be challenged to use his powers where he can simply dismantle the parliament, call new elections, change a certain minister, or say this law is not good after it has been passed in our assembly. They are hoping for self-censorship from our government in order not to be challenged and not to use those powers which would unmask them as the dictatorship they really are. It is a dictatorship, but they do not want to be seen as one, so they say we are here only to supervise. They talk a lot with our prime minister and ministers, do this, do that, in order not to be seen in the background as a sort of monarchy."

"What is their reason for wanting to do this?" I said.

"They mediate between Prishtina and Belgrade after overthrowing Milosevic," he said, "and they simply don't use any more sticks, only carrots. Serbia is very aggressive, and in order to make sure that Serbia is not going to be indignant, they say Yes, Kosovo is independent, but don't worry, it is us there. That is one reason I think they are here.

"Second," he continued, "every bureaucracy seeks self perpetuation. A lot of people here have very high salaries, and they are like big fishes in a small pond. And they are more or less all of them into this process of privatization. Because we cannot touch them legally, they have free hands to do whatever they want. Many of them got very rich. 80 percent of the money from the international community that was poured onto Kosovo in these nine years went for technical assistance, seminars, conferences, and so on. A lot of money is in their hands this way. They direct it. It's an authoritarian law. So I think this is another reason why they're here."

"What kinds of things have the EU and the UN done here that are bad, specifically?" I said. "I get your general point, but what are the practical results of all this?"

"No economic development at all," he said. "Zero. No factories. No industry. Nothing. The fiscal policy is terrible. They promised us a market economy, and we ended up in a market without an economy. Then there is the internal division of Kosovo. The North is divided from the rest. The red is Serb areas, and here are new municipalities about to be created by Ahtisaari's plan where the soft partition is strengthening itself."

Now the vast majority of people think very poorly of UNMIK. If you talk to a person from Kosovo about UNMIK they might say it is not that bad, but if you drink a beer with that person they will tell you what he really thinks."

I didn't have to drink beer with Kosovars to hear uniformly and relentlessly negative opinions of the United Nations. I didn't meet a single person who approves of the performance of the UN. Anti-UN and anti-EU graffiti is common, and it sharply contrasts with the pro-American graffiti that is almost as common.

All the graffiti I saw about the UN and the EU was negative. All the graffiti I saw about the US was positive, without exceptions.

Not only that, many of the U.N. officials and employees are flat out incompetent.

"I was going to go to Macedonia," he told me, "and a UN guy from Ghana on the border asks for papers. I gave him random papers that weren't documents, just to joke with him, and he said Thank you sir, good day, you can go. I said give me your supervisor. So a guy from Germany comes up and says can I see your papers. I said those are my papers in your hand. He said These papers are nothing! I said I know, and this guy was going to let me go through with just a 'good day!' The German guy went crazy. When you send a mission to a troubled country, you have to send people who are educated, who will create the rule of law. But to send idiots - I swear to God, I was so mad. They came from Africa and got their drivers licenses in Kosovo. There were several kids who were killed by these guys crashing into them. Nobody cares. The UN is mad."

The Kosovars were stunned to hear about how well the Americans have treated the Iraqis.

"The government of Iraq has more sovereignty than you do," I said.

That shocked them. Iraq is in vastly worse shape overall than Kosovo. And yet Iraq regained much more of its sovereignty in a shorter amount of time, even while fending off a ferocious insurgency and civil war.

Right now, the Kosovars would love to have been occupied by the United States. If they had, they'd have more control over their own country, they'd have a functioning economy, and the Americans would have sent trained and competent administrators. Not only that, the American administrators would have been eager to pass their expertise and knowledge along to the Kosovars.

Why does the American left hate American interventions but love United Nations interventions?