WELL, GOOD: WHO: Ebola outbreak that killed more than 2,000 in Congo is over.

PROGRESS: Ebola epidemic in Democratic Republic of the Congo to be declared over.

DON’T BE EVIL: Apple and Google Named In US Lawsuit Over Congolese Child Cobalt Mining Deaths.

THAT’S DIFFERENT, BECAUSE IT CAN’T BE USED AGAINST BOLSONARO AND TRUMP: More Fires Now Burning in Angola, Congo Than Amazon: Maps.

HEALTH: Ebola Epidemic in Congo Declared a Global Health Emergency. “World Health Organization says outbreak has infected more than 2,500 people and killed nearly 1,700 of them.”

BUT: Measles is killing more people in the DRC than Ebola — and faster. “‘Frankly, I am embarrassed to talk only about Ebola,’ WHO director-general says.”

WELL, GOOD: An Experimental Ebola Cure May Also Protect Against Nipah Virus.

An experimental drug has protected monkeys against infection with Nipah virus, a lethal disease and emerging pandemic threat for which there is no approved vaccine or cure, scientists reported on Wednesday.

The antiviral drug, remdesivir, is also being tested against the Ebola virus in the outbreak now underway in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The only current treatment for Nipah virus infection is a monoclonal antibody that is still experimental; it was tested during an outbreak in India last year.

In the new trial, eight African green monkeys were given lethal doses of Nipah virus. Half of them later got intravenous remdesivir. All four monkeys that got the drug survived; the four that did not died within eight days.

If the drug wins approval for use against Nipah, “it will give us an extra treatment that could be used relatively quickly,” said Emmie de Wit, a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the study’s lead authors. “The average person who reaches a hospital dies within two days, so it’s hard to protect them once they’re infected.”

Faster, please.

UGH: As Ebola Cases Rise in Congo, the W.H.O. Declines to Issue Emergency Declaration. “While expressing “deep concern” about the number of increasing cases in parts of Congo, and the potential risk of the disease spreading to neighboring countries, the W.H.O. said the epidemic did not meet the criteria for declaring an international public health emergency.”

THE STAKES IN CONGO – LIVES AND LIFESTYLES:

If you advocate electric vehicles and dote on cellphones whose manufacture depends on Congo’s minerals, then the Democratic Republic of Congo’s flawed Dec. 30 presidential election matters because it can affect your digital lifestyle.

Congo’s stability also matters if you value human life. In Congo’s last civil war (Great Congo War, 1996-2003) some three million to five million people died in anarchic combat and from starvation, disease and exposure exacerbated by war.

My latest Creators Syndicate column.

RELATED: Chapter Six, Cocktails from Hell: Anarchic Violence, Cyclic Intervention, and Mineral Wealth.

MY LATEST CREATORS SYNDICATE COLUMN: Congo’s December 23rd election and your lifestyle. (Bumped.)

RELATED: Cocktails from Hell, Chapter 6: Congo: Anarchic Violence, Cyclic Intervention, and Mineral Wealth

CONGO’S DECEMBER ELECTIONS AND YOUR LIFESTYLE: We live in interesting times.

RELATED: Cocktails from Hell, Chapter 6: Congo: Anarchic Violence, Cyclic Intervention, and Mineral Wealth

UGH: Ebola outbreak in east Congo now world’s second biggest.

HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE: War and Ebola in eastern Congo are a dangerous combination. My latest Creators Syndicate column.

GOOD: Ebola Attacked Congo Again. But Now Congo Seems to Be Winning.

AMERICA IS AWFUL, BUT THEY KEEP COMING: Statue of Liberty climber spews anti-American chant outside court.

The immigrant rights activist who ruined July 4 for tourists visiting the Statue of Liberty when she scaled the green lady and forced the icon’s evacuation, was in Manhattan federal on Friday pushing for a no-jail guarantee from a judge — and then promptly spewed an anti-American message outside court.

Therese “Patricia” Okoumou climbed onto Lady Liberty’s right foot, causing an emergency evacuation of the monument on one of the busiest days of the year. . . .

Outside court dozens of supporters cheered on the Republic of Congo born woman – who is a naturalized citizen — and she chanted to the crowd, “America you mother f–kers! You drug addicts! You KKK! You fascist USA.”

Maybe Trump can use her in an ad.

THIS IS HOW THE MOVIE STARTS, RIGHT? 2 Ebola patients escape from treatment in Congo, raising fears virus could spread.

THE CRITICAL MINERALS LIST: Compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey. “…a draft list of minerals considered critical to the economic and national security of the United States.”

RELATED: Congo and the corrupt cobalt crisis. (Scroll down to February 10 post.)

FORMER NPR CEO ON THE OTHER HALF OF AMERICA THAT THE LIBERAL MEDIA DOESN’T COVER.

Most reporters and editors are liberal — a now dated Pew Research Center poll found that liberals outnumber conservatives in the media by some 5 to 1, and that comports with my own anecdotal experience at National Public Radio. When you are liberal, and everyone else around you is as well, it is easy to fall into groupthink on what stories are important, what sources are legitimate and what the narrative of the day will be.

This may seem like an unusual admission from someone who once ran NPR, but it is borne of recent experience. Spurred by a fear that red and blue America were drifting irrevocably apart, I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and engage Republicans where they live, work and pray. For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show. I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike. . . .

At Urbana, I met dozens of people who were dedicating their lives to the mission, spreading the good news of Jesus, of course, but doing so through a life of charity and compassion for others: staffing remote hospitals, building homes for the homeless and, in one case, flying a “powered parachute” over miles of uninhabited jungle in the western Congo to bring a little bit of entertainment, education and relief to some of the remotest villages you could imagine. It was all inspiring — and a little foolhardy, if you ask me about the safety of a powered parachute — but it left me with a very different impression of a community that was previously known to me only through Jerry Falwell and the movie “Footloose.”

Well, good. But if journalism were more diverse, you wouldn’t need a Junior Year Abroad to experience this culture.

CONGO’S VICIOUS KASAI WAR: My latest Creators Syndicate column.

CONGO: New Ebola Outbreak to Cost $10 Million to Fight, WHO Says.

RACHEL DOLEZAL TELLS HER STORY:

Dolezal has penned a memoir in which she compares her travails to slavery and describes her harrowing childhood as a pale, blond girl growing up poor on the side of a Montana mountain.

As she toiled in the garden for her strict, Evangelical parents, she’d dream of freeing her inner blackness, Dolezal writes in “In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World.”

See, she’d read her grandmother’s National Geographic magazines. So she knew about blackness.

“I’d stir the water from the hose into the earth … and make thin, soupy mud, which I would then rub on my hands, arms, feet, and legs,” Dolezal writes.

“I would pretend to be a dark-skinned princess in the Sahara Desert or one of the Bantu women living in the Congo … imagining I was a different person living in a different place was one of the few ways … that I could escape the oppressive environment I was raised in.”

So, basically, she’s guilty of cultural appropriation.

REMEMBER THE PEACE DEAL IN CONGO?: I linked to the peace deal report late last week. That report struck me as overly optimistic. Well, now there appear to be problems in implementing it.

StrategyPage ran a report over the weekend that saw this coming. We Maybe Might Have A Peace Deal. The StrategyPage report has useful background.

Here’s AFP on January 1.

Congo and sub-Saharan Africa tend to be well off the mainstream media radar. (Re: off mainstream radar. I’ll link to StrategyPage’s “Wars Update” later today.) Congo, however, was a slaughterhouse. The last Congo civil war killed between three and five million people. The death toll estimates include exposure (due to displacement) as well as combat and just plain mass murder. Displacement often leads to malnutrition which increases the risk of disease. That’s why the higher death toll estimates may be correct.

VIACOM SPOKESMAN TREVOR NOAH ASKS IN NEW BOOK IF HITLER WAS AS BAD AS CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS OR ANDREW JACKSON:

“I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don’t have that Jewish people do have is documentation.”

* * * * * * * *

He concludes: “So in Europe and America yes, Hitler is the Greatest Madman in History. In Africa he’s just another strong man from the history books.”

We’re guessing that Noah will have some explaining to do regarding his historical musings when the book is out in November.

At the start of 2015, after a series of earlier anti-Semitic tweets from Noah emerged, including, “Almost bumped a Jewish kid crossing the road. He didn’t look b4 crossing but I still would hav felt so bad in my german car!” and “South Africans know how to recycle like israel knows how to be peaceful,” Comedy Central rushed to defend their new would-be star, the man they hired to succeed Jon Stewart’s clapter-based political “humor:”

Comedy Central appeared unmoved by criticism it branded as “unfair”, offering staunch support to Noah in a statement.

“Like many comedians, Trevor Noah pushes boundaries; he is provocative and spares no one, himself included,” the network said, according to AFP.

“To judge him or his comedy based on a handful of jokes is unfair. Trevor is a talented comedian with a bright future at Comedy Central,” it added.

Of course, that was before a year and a half of poor ratings, painfully unfunny shows, and now this latest firestorm. Does Viacom wish to continue employ someone who plays moral equivalence games with the Holocaust?

CLINTON FOUNDATION GOT $100 MILLION FROM “BLOOD MINERALS” FIRM: Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unaccountably delayed implementation in 2009 of a congressionally mandated certification process designed to bar human rights abuses by mining companies in Africa.

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock found a hundred million reasons for Clinton’s dallying. Two years before, the Clinton Foundation got a $100 million pledge from the Vancouver, Canada-based Lundin Group.

Lundin is one of the giants of the global mining industry, with huge operations in the Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia. Those operations were repeatedly condemned by human rights groups claiming native populations were being forced to flee their homelands and even being killed because they stood in the way of Lundin projects.

“’Blood minerals’ are related to ‘blood diamonds,’ which are allegedly mined in war zones or sold as commodities to help finance political insurgencies or despotic warlords,” according to Pollock. Lundin has a long history of “cutting deals with warlords, Marxist rebels, military strongmen and dictatorships” in war-torn Africa.

The least surprising aspect of this story? Spokesmen for the Clinton Foundation and Lundin refused to comment.

ASHE SCHOW: Why aren’t the Democrats discussing the campus sexual assault ‘epidemic’?

We’re told campus sexual assault is a massive problem across the country. We’re told that 1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted while they’re in college. And we’re told we need to enact draconian policies right now in order to stop the epidemic.

So why then, if our country is facing a rape epidemic on par with war-torn Congo, aren’t the presidential candidates being asked about how they would solve the problem?

The candidates are asked every single debate about the Islamic State and how the United States can best fight terrorism. They’re asked about gun control and mass shootings. They’re asked about illegal immigration. But the alleged mass rapes on college campuses? Crickets.

Could it be because every rational person has realized that campus sexual assault is not the epidemic being reported in the media and by politicians eager to prove they support women?

Well, also the notion that campuses — which are core Left institutions — are hotbeds of rape is problematic past a certain point. It’s fine to use as a slogan on campus, but if voters in general start really thinking about campuses as high-cost rape factories, the consequences are likely to be unpleasant.

THOUGHTS FROM 14 YEARS AGO:

WHEN WILL WE GET BACK TO NORMAL? A colleague asked me that today. “This is normal,” I replied. For most of human history, wondering when somebody from another tribe was going to try to kill you was the standard activity. In much of the world, it still is. Three million people have died in the Congo in the past couple of years. Before that, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Middle East, Cambodia, — you get the idea. It’s only in comparatively strong and wealthy Western nations that we can pretend that safety is normal. It really isn’t all that normal for us, either. In the past hundred years we’ve had two world wars and a bunch of others. In the 19th Century we had the Civil War, the War of 1812 (in which most of DC was burned), etc., etc.

“Normal” is what we call those brief periods when something normal isn’t happening.

Well, that’s held true, alas.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Congo’s Forgotten Curse: Epidemic of Female-on-Female Rape. “Rape in conflict zones has long been the subject of news reports and academic study and large amounts of donor funding is channeled to organizations that respond to it. But rape specifically perpetrated by women has received less attention. Recent studies suggest the problem is more widespread than many experts previously believed. In 2010, Harvard academic Lynn Lawry and a team of researchers conducted a survey of human-rights abuses in over 1,000 households in conflict-ridden eastern Congo. It was the same year that Margot Wallstrom, the U.N. special representative on sexual violence in conflict, dubbed Congo ‘the rape capital of the world.’ Lawry’s study asked victims of sexual violence to specify their assailant’s gender. It found that 40% of the women — and 10% of the men — who said they were subjected to sexual violence were assaulted by a woman.”

JOEL KOTKIN: California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude.

As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent census estimates, the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as the Dominican Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.

At the same time, the Golden State now suffers the highest level of poverty in the country—23.5 percent compared to 16 percent nationally—worse than long-term hard luck cases like Mississippi. It is also now home to roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients, almost three times its proportion of the nation’s population.

Like medieval serfs, increasing numbers of Californians are downwardly mobile, and doing worse than their parents: native born Latinos actually have shorter lifespans than their parents, according to one recent report. Nor are things expected to get better any time soon. According to a recent Hoover Institution survey, most Californians expect their incomes to stagnate in the coming six months, a sense widely shared among the young, whites, Latinos, females, and the less educated.

This is an inevitable outcome of the Blue Model, and yet. . . .

FOREIGN POLICY: Rwandan Ghosts: Benghazi isn’t the biggest blight on Susan Rice’s record. “Her role in shaping U.S. policy toward Central Africa should feature high on this list. Between 1993 and 2001, she helped form U.S. responses to the Rwandan genocide, events in post-genocide Rwanda, mass violence in Burundi, and two ruinous wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” The important thing is that the war and genocide didn’t politically damage her boss.

CONGO: Another whiff for the international human rights community.

The brilliant historian Yaacov Lozowick points to a book that looks very interesting indeed: Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns.

I don’t know much about the ongoing war in the Congo other than the fact that it makes the Middle East look like Canada by comparison. Millions of people have suffered and died there in silence. Few go there to report on it, and even fewer agitate to do anything about it.

Why Darfur captures the attention and passion of so many while the Congo does not is a mystery, though I think it’s partly because hardly anyone is even aware that the Congo is a war zone at all, let alone the worst one in the world. Maybe this book will help a bit. Maybe. Anyway, I ordered a copy.

AFRICA’S FOREVER WARS:

What we are seeing is the decline of the classic African liberation movement and the proliferation of something else — something wilder, messier, more violent, and harder to wrap our heads around. If you’d like to call this war, fine. But what is spreading across Africa like a viral pandemic is actually just opportunistic, heavily armed banditry. My job as the New York Times’ East Africa bureau chief is to cover news and feature stories in 12 countries. But most of my time is spent immersed in these un-wars.

I’ve witnessed up close — often way too close — how combat has morphed from soldier vs. soldier (now a rarity in Africa) to soldier vs. civilian. Most of today’s African fighters are not rebels with a cause; they’re predators. That’s why we see stunning atrocities like eastern Congo’s rape epidemic, where armed groups in recent years have sexually assaulted hundreds of thousands of women, often so sadistically that the victims are left incontinent for life. What is the military or political objective of ramming an assault rifle inside a woman and pulling the trigger? Terror has become an end, not just a means.

Though presented as a departure, this is in fact the norm — the way people act in the absence of civilizational restraints. It’s the state of nature. During the cold war, there was some structure left over from colonialism — and, more significantly, pressure from sponsor powers to avoid too much bad PR. That’s all gone now.

STRATEGYPAGE:

While the mass media continues to feature wars and terrorism, the overall trend continues away from such unpleasantness. Such stories are anathema to the mass media, because they do not attract eyeballs, and revenue. That’s the way people are, and the result is a distorted view of trends in global violence.

Worldwide, violence continues to decline, as it has for the last few years. Violence has also greatly diminished, or disappeared completely, in places like Iraq, Nepal, Chechnya, Congo, Indonesia and Burundi. Even Afghanistan, touted as the new war zone, is seeing less violence this year than last.

All this continues a trend that began when the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union no longer subsidized terrorist and rebel groups everywhere.

Now if we can just get the Saudis and Iranians to stop. Read the whole thing.

I’D BE SHOCKED, but by now this really isn’t shocking:

The UN has covered up claims that its troops in Democratic Republic of Congo gave arms to militias and smuggled gold and ivory, the BBC has learned. . . . These are not the only allegations to have been brought against peacekeepers in DR Congo.

In December 2006, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said Moroccan troops had been involved in widespread sexual abuse.

“There have been crimes such as rape, paedophilia and human trafficking,” he said, shortly before leaving office.

But since there’s no anti-American angle, it won’t be much of a story.

PEACE ON EARTH? “While the headlines concentrate on peace breaking out in Iraq, that’s but part of a worldwide trend for the last few years. Violence has also diminished, or disappeared completely, in places like Nepal, Chechnya. Congo, Indonesia and Burundi.”

THOUGHTS ON THE CULT OF CHE:

The author neglects to point out that, as far as I can tell, there is no memorial, no place of pilgrimage for the countless lives extinguished by Guevara; those accused of being “counterrevolutionary traitors,” for instance. Take this diary entry from 1957, in which Che explains how he dealt with someone suspected of being a spy in the rebel’s Sierra Maestra camp: “I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain…. His belongings were now mine.”

In 2002, Cynthia Grenier read through Che’s Congo diaries and found that “the beloved revolutionary icon sounds pretty much like an old-fashioned racist…”

But he photographed well.

ACE WONDERS WHY NOBODY’S TALKING ABOUT the NASA climate data revision.

UPDATE: Well, here’s a bit of notice.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here: “Will the mainstream media report the corrected story with as much gusto as they initially reported the claim that 1998 was the warmest on record? Doubtful. But they should. Good public policy can not be made on bad data.”

MORE: This comment at Ecotality distinguishes hottest years in America from hottest years globally, but I always understood this to be about American, not global, records. And I think I was right. As I noted in my earlier post, it indicates problems with the data sets. More here:

The GISS today makes it clear that these adjustments only affect US data and do not change any of their conclusions about worldwide data. But consider this: For all of its faults, the US has the most robust historical climate network in the world. If we have these problems, what would we find in the data from, say, China? And the US and parts of Europe are the only major parts of the world that actually have 100 years of data at rural locations. No one was measuring temperature reliably in rural China or Paraguay or the Congo in 1900. That means much of the world is relying on urban temperature measurement points that have substantial biases from urban heat.

Much more information at the link.

Plus, reports of Denial-of-Service attacks.

HMM. CONGO URANIUM RING SMASHED:

Authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo say they have dismantled an international network set up to illegally use uranium mined there.

Scientific Research Minister Sylvanus Mushi said DR Congo’s top nuclear official and a colleague were being questioned in connection with the case.

The official, Fortunat Lumu, and the colleague were arrested on Tuesday.

The move comes amid reports that a large quantity of uranium has gone missing in recent years in DR Congo.

State prosecutor Tshimanga Mukeba earlier told the BBC that an “important quantity” of uranium was taken from the atomic energy centre in the capital, Kinshasa, without revealing any figures.

Hmm. I wonder where it went? Here’s some speculation: “Patricia Feeney, director of a campaigning organisation called Rights and Accountability in Development says action is overdue. The worry is, who is buying in this nuclear black market. There are rumours it could be Iran or North Korea.” Gee, do you think?

HAPPY NEW YEAR: “You’d never know it from the headlines, but, overall, things quieted down in the past year. Fighting has died down considerably, or disappeared completely, in places like Nepal, Chechnya. Congo, Indonesia and Burundi. This continues a trend that began when the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union no longer subsidized terrorist and rebel groups everywhere.” Read the whole thing, together with Bill Roggio’s similar roundup below.

LONDON’S SUNDAY TIMES looks at Kofi Annan:

Srebrenica is rarely mentioned nowadays in Annan’s offices on the 38th floor of the UN secretariat building in New York. He steps down in December after a decade as secretary-general. His retirement will be marked by plaudits. But behind the honorifics and the accolades lies a darker story: of incompetence, mismanagement and worse. Annan was the head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) between March 1993 and December 1996. The Srebrenica massacre of up to 8,000 men and boys and the slaughter of 800,000 people in Rwanda happened on his watch. In Bosnia and Rwanda, UN officials directed peacekeepers to stand back from the killing, their concern apparently to guard the UN’s status as a neutral observer. This was a shock to those who believed the UN was there to help them.

Annan’s term has also been marked by scandal: from the sexual abuse of women and children in the Congo by UN peacekeepers to the greatest financial scam in history, the UN-administered oil-for-food programme. Arguably, a trial of the UN would be more apt than a leaving party.

Read the whole thing.

MERCENARIES FOR DARFUR: Max Boot floats an idea that’s been seen here at InstaPundit before:

If you listen to the bloviators at Turtle Bay, salvation will come from the deployment of a larger corps of blue helmets. If only. What is there in the history of United Nations peacekeepers that gives anyone any confidence that they can stop a determined adversary?

The odds are much greater that U.N. representatives will instead be taken as hostages by bloodthirsty thugs, as happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995 and in Sierra Leone five years later. Or that, rather than protecting the people, the peacekeepers will prey on them — as allegedly has happened in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Congo, all places where blue helmets have been accused of a horrifying litany of sexual abuses, including pedophilia, rape and prostitution.

Even if these worst-case scenarios don’t come to pass, the U.N. is likely to prove ineffectual in the face of determined opposition. Look at what is happening in East Timor, where, after seven years of U.N. stewardship, the capital has been paralyzed by fighting among armed gangs. The situation is even worse in Haiti, where a Brazilian-led U.N. force has done little to stem growing chaos. It is worse still in Somalia — the most lawless country on Earth — where a U.N. deployment failed in the early 1990s. . . .

But perhaps there is a way to stop the killing even without sending an American or European army. Send a private army. A number of commercial security firms such as Blackwater USA are willing, for the right price, to send their own forces, made up in large part of veterans of Western militaries, to stop the genocide.

We know from experience that such private units would be far more effective than any U.N. peacekeepers. In the 1990s, the South African firm Executive Outcomes and the British firm Sandline made quick work of rebel movements in Angola and Sierra Leone. Critics complain that these mercenaries offered only a temporary respite from the violence, but that was all they were hired to do. Presumably longer-term contracts could create longer-term security, and at a fraction of the cost of a U.N. mission.

Yet this solution is deemed unacceptable by the moral giants who run the United Nations. They claim that it is objectionable to employ — sniff — mercenaries. More objectionable, it seems, than passing empty resolutions, sending ineffectual peacekeeping forces and letting genocide continue.

More likely they fear that if it proves effective, they’ll lose out on a line of business that has proved profitable so far.

“HOW MANY MORE MUST DIE, BEFORE KOFI QUITS?”

Here, too, is Annan’s faxed response – ordering Dallaire to defend only the UN’s image of impartiality, forbidding him to protect desperate civilians waiting to die. Next, it details the withdrawal of UN troops, even while blood flowed and the assassins reigned, leaving 800,000 Rwandans to their fate.

The museum’s silent juxtaposition of personal courage versus Annan’s passive capitulation to evil is an effective reminder of what is at stake in the debate over Annan’s future: when the UN fails, innocent people die. Under Annan, the UN has failed and people have died.

His own legions have raped and pillaged. In two present scandals, over the oil-for-food programme in Iraq, and sex-for-food in Congo, Annan was personally aware of malfeasance among his staff, but again responded with passivity.

Having worked as a UN human rights observer in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and Liberia, there are two savage paradoxes for me here. The first is that, while the media and conservative politicians and pundits have suddenly discovered that the UN has been catastrophically incompetent, this is very old news to anyone with the mud (or blood) of a UN peacekeeping mission on his boots. . . .

The second searing irony for me is that the American neoconservative right has occupied the moral high ground in critique of Annan, outflanking the left, which sits on indefensible territory in his support. But if prevention of genocide and protection of the vulnerable are not core priorities on the left, then what is? If anyone’s values have been betrayed, it is those of us on the left who believe most deeply in the organisation’s ideals.

And yet, the UN keeps being held up as a symbol of civilization and lawfulness by those who should know better.

GOP OVERREACH ALERT: In their book The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge explain how the Republican coalition could go wrong: “Too Southern, too greedy, and too contradictory.”

David Brooks thinks they’ve hit the “too greedy” part already:

Back in 1995, when Republicans took over Congress, a new cadre of daring and original thinkers arose. These bold innovators had a key insight: that you no longer had to choose between being an activist and a lobbyist. You could be both. You could harness the power of K Street to promote the goals of Goldwater, Reagan and Gingrich. And best of all, you could get rich while doing it!

Before long, ringleader Grover Norquist and his buddies were signing lobbying deals with the Seychelles and the Northern Mariana Islands and talking up their interests at weekly conservative strategy sessions – what could be more vital to the future of freedom than the commercial interests of these two fine locales?

Before long, folks like Norquist and Abramoff were talking up the virtues of international sons of liberty like Angola’s Jonas Savimbi and Congo’s dictator Mobutu Sese Seko – all while receiving compensation from these upstanding gentlemen, according to The Legal Times. Only a reactionary could have been so discomfited by Savimbi’s little cannibalism problem as to think this was not a daring contribution to the cause of Reaganism.

Ouch. Makes those neocons look good, though, doesn’t it?

UPDATE: A reader sends this link to a story about Jack Kemp sucking up to Hugo Chavez. I’ve mentioned that before, but it bears mentioning again. Pathetic.

ABC NEWS REPORTS ON U.N. SEX CRIMES IN THE CONGO:

Widespread allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse of Congolese women, boys and girls have been made against U.N. personnel who were sent to help and protect them — despite a so-called zero tolerance policy touted by the United Nations toward such behavior.

The range of sexual abuse includes reported rapes of young Congolese girls by U.N. troops; an Internet pedophile ring run from Congo by Didier Bourguet, a senior U.N. official from France; a colonel from South Africa accused of molesting his teenage male translators; and estimates of hundreds of underage girls having babies fathered by U.N. soldiers who have been able to simply leave their children and their crimes behind.

Ravaged by decades of civil war, and one of the poorest countries in the world, Congo has relied on the United Nations for both military protection and humanitarian aid.

There will be a story on 20/20 tonight.

UNSCAM UPDATE:

Kofi Annan survived the disasters of UN peacekeeping in Srebrenica and Rwanda, the bitter Security Council divisions over the Iraq war and the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad.

But the man described by some as the “secular Pope” is now more vulnerable than ever, because of growing scandal over his organisation’s mismanagement of sanctions and humanitarian aid to Iraq.

Calls for Mr Annan’s resignation were once restricted to ideologically driven hardline US conservatives. Now diplomats in New York are openly asking whether the secretary-general can remain in office until the end of his term in December 2006.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Well stories like this certainly won’t help:

Peacekeeping troops guarding refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo sexually abused girls as young as 13, giving out scraps of food or money in return for favours, the United Nations admitted yesterday. . . .

Many were orphans from a war that has claimed more lives than any since 1945.

Soldiers continued abusing children even after the onset of an internal UN inquiry.

Read the whole thing. And remind yourself of how much more attention this would get — even from Kofi — if American troops were involved.

MORE PROBLEMS with the U.N.’s Congo operation:

The expert was a Frenchman who worked at Goma airport as part of the UN’s $700 million-a-year effort to rebuild the war-shattered country. When police raided his home they discovered that he had turned his bedroom into a studio for videotaping and photographing sex sessions with young girls.

The bed was surrounded by large mirrors on three sides, according to a senior Congolese police officer. On the fourth side was a camera that he could operate from the bed with a remote control.

When the police arrived the man was allegedly about to rape a 12-year-old girl sent to him in a sting operation. Three home-made porn videos and more than 50 photographs were found.

The case has highlighted the apparently rampant sexual exploitation of Congolese girls and women by the UN’s 11,000 peacekeepers and 1,000 civilians at a time when the UN is facing many problems, including the Iraqi “oil-for-food” scandal and accusations of sexual harassment by senior UN staff in Geneva and New York.

Kofi’s “annus horribilis” continues.

UPDATE: Richard Aubrey emails: “Do you think we’d be seeing more play made of this if Bush were Secretary General?”

Possibly.

JOANNE MARINER OF HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH writes on “How the Abusive Protect the Repressive at the U.N.” It’s not just UNScam:

Sudan, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Russia: one thing these countries have in common is that their governments violate human rights flagrantly and systematically. But another thing they share, astonishingly enough, is membership on the U.N. body meant to monitor and prevent human rights violations.

Pakistan, China, Egypt, Congo–the list goes on. When it comes to rights-abusing countries, the 53-member U.N. Commission on Human Rights has plenty of depth. . . .

Groups such as Human Rights Watch have been complaining about the U.N. commission’s membership problem for years. The focus of the abusive governments on the commission, Human Rights Watch warns, is on “minimizing the exposure of their own human rights record rather than on stigmatizing the worst human rights violations in the world and devising methods to bring about effective responses to these abuses.”

The recently-released report on the future of the United Nations deserves credit for acknowledging this issue, except that the problem is clearly too glaring to ignore. Eight months ago, at its last annual session, the commission’s trend toward rejecting censure of its most abusive members was unmistakable.

The U.N.’s claim to moral legitimacy seems rather shaky.

IT’S NOT JUST UNSCAM — The U.N. has other problems:

The United Nations is investigating about 150 allegations of sexual abuse by U.N. civilian staff and soldiers in the Congo, some of them recorded on videotape, a senior U.N. official said on Monday.

The accusations include pedophilia, rape and prostitution, said Jane Holl Lute, an assistant secretary-general in the peacekeeping department.

Yeah, I know that pointing out the double standards is considered unsporting — but imagine how this would be playing if American troops were involved.

UPDATE: Patrick Spero has some observations on this story.

ANOTHER U.N. PEACEKEEPER SCANDAL:

London – South African soldiers have been accused of involvement in a massive sex abuse scandal in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they are on peace-keeping duties.

The allegations include a staggering 50 cases of sex attacks on minors over the past year, carried out by Monuc, the United Nations mission to the DRC, in Bunia in the north-east.

More here.

MORE EMBARRASSMENT FOR THE U.N.:

It is a story that might not sound out of place in any part of the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo but for one thing, the soldiers Faela is talking about are not the rebel groups who devastated Ituri Province, in north-eastern DR Congo, during the last four-and-a-half years of conflict. . . .

Dominique McAdams, the head of the UN in Bunia, admitted that there was a problem.

“I have heard rumours on this issue,” she said. “It is pretty clear to me that sexual violence is taking place in the camp.”

Ms McAdams is not the only member of Monuc to be concerned about the behaviour of their soldiers in Bunia.

Last month the UN announced that it would launch a full investigation into abuse within the camp.

Yet the gap between the intention to investigate and the reality of that investigation in Bunia remains large.

These stories just keep coming.

UPDATE: Sadly, so do these:

Thousands of Congolese attacked UN offices and peacekeeping bases yesterday, angry that fewer than 1,000 UN peacekeepers were unable to prevent 2,000 to 4,000 rebels from seizing Bukavu, South Kivu’s provincial capital, on Wednesday. The DRC’s military in Bukavu unexpectedly collapsed, the chief of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations said.

Fifteen DRC nationals working for WFP remained in the city, most of them hiding with their families for a second day.

The last two WFP international staff members in Bukavu were taken yesterday by a helicopter owned by the UN Mission in the DRC (MONUC) to the north-eastern city of Goma.

If this were happening to U.S. forces, it would be frontpage news worldwide, amid invocations of Vietnam and claims that it symbolized America’s impotent brutality on the world scene. When it happens to the U.N., though, it hardly even counts as news.

JAMES LILEKS IS SLAMMING SALAM PAX for his snarky comments in The Guardian, which thanked Bush for toppling Saddam but complained about poor service afterward:

Hey, Salam? Fuck you. I know you’re the famous giggly blogger who gave us all a riveting view of the inner circle before the war, and thus know more about the situation than I do. Granted. But there’s a picture on the front page of my local paper today: third Minnesotan killed in Iraq. He died doing what you never had the stones to do: pick up a rifle and face the Ba’athists. You owe him.

Indeed he does. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Daniel Drezner says that Lileks is wrong. I don’t think he is, though I do think Bush I was wrong to leave Saddam in power in 1991, and I would add on my own part that Salam showed real courage in his blogging, if not the kind of courage that would (directly) overthrow the tyrant. But I just think that Salam has lost a bit of perspective hanging out with Guardian types in London. And so, I think, does Salam’s friend G, back in Baghdad, who writes to Salam:

tell your friends in London that G in Baghdad would have appreciated them much more if they had demonstrated against the atrocities of saddam.
And if you could ask them when will be the next demonstration to support the people of north Korea, the democratic republic of Congo and Iran?

(Emphasis in original). I agree with G.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon agrees with Lileks. Robert Tagorda agrees with Drezner. For what it’s worth, what I think Lileks objects to about Salam Pax’s letter is not that it’s criticizing the reconstruction, but its snarkish, Dowdesque tone. One Fine Jay observes: “It is understood, that we — all of us living in this nation — freed him and his ilk from Saddam, but we do not demand praise, adulation, nor a hive mind from Iraqis. . . . Maybe we as a nation can ask for a little bit of class, certainly a bit more than what Salam Pax has shown so far.” The Fat Guy agrees, and John Weidner responds to Salam’s point about Bush cleaning up the mess: “What we are doing is not “cleaning up the mess.” It’s more like getting you into good enough shape to start cleaning up your own nasty mess. Sort of like taking in hand someone who’s been on a drunken binge. Get ’em a shower, clean clothes, pep-talk, a lot of coffee…so that maybe they can make it into work and not get fired. What you would call ‘cleaned-up’ is just a starting-point for what we call a clean-up. The best day Iraq ever had is still squalor by our standards.”

Call it “tough love.”

MORE: Useful Fools has an, er, useful roundup of Iraqi bloggers who aren’t Salam Pax.

STILL MORE: Bryan Preston is saying “I told you so.”

Bo Cowgill weighs in with this observation: “James Lileks was unrealistic to expect Pax to take up arms against Saddam as American soldiers did. But that doesn’t mean that Salam Pax’s screed was praiseworthy in the slightest. It was disrespectful and self-promoting. Stop defending Salam Pax on this one.”