I’m a few days behind on this one, but the conservative blogs have been passing a very worrying piece around, and it’s worth a mention. In last Friday’s Daily Telegraph,** Stephen Pollard,** a senior fellow at the **Centre for the New Europe **wrote a lot of stuff, but I’m interested in only one paragraph:

Well-connected advisers tell me that if, as now seems likely, the UN refuses to back action against terror, Mr Bush will announce a “temporary” suspension of America’s membership, to be accompanied by an offer: if the UN gets its act together and carries out long-overdue reforms, America (and its money) will return. But if there is no reform, the temporary withdrawal
will, de facto, become permanent.</p> I’ll just let that one sink in.

This scenario — thankfully only attributed to unnamed “well-connected advisors” — certainly fits in with the anti-UN agenda that a segment of the American right espouses. Recent talk of the United Nations becoming “irrelevant” if it does not endorse U.S. policy also seems to fit this line of thought. This can’t really be a serious discussion anywhere near Washington. Can it?

Of course, back in the real world, the UN is doing very important work on preventing catastrophic terrorist attacks. Just yesterday, Mohamed ElBaradei, **the head of the **International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)— a UN agency — called for urgent additional measures to stop terrorists from obtaining a “dirty bomb.” ElBaradei said existing controls on radioactive sources, are inadequate, especially in the former Soviet republics.

Is this work something you want to withdraw funding from? Didn’t think so.