Clinton for Secretary General?

This blog wanders a bit, but it concerns Bill, not Hillary, Clinton.
TNR has an
article on the plans of the African Union and the Arab League to hold their respective annual meetings in Khartoum, which is a genocidal-monster rogue state. Darfur has simply faded from the front pages of the international press, which is much more concerned by President G.W. Bush defending American National Security in Iraq and by wiretaps.

But I just finished reading Michael J. Totten's piece in the LA Weekly In the Land of the Brother Leader about Muammer Qaddafi’s Libya after thirty-five years of Islamic Socialism. The bleak soulless landscape Totten describes in Libya only has mosques to provide the slightest relief from choking boredom and police-state oppression

And then my experiences traveling in some twenty Arab countries flooded back into memory and I saw the logic of the TNR piece that must confound readers who grew up in the magnificent terrarium of Western Civilization.

To a great extent, the Africans and Arabs feel at home in Khartoum. They are obviously, especially the venal Africans, being handsomely indemnified to hold the AU congress in Sudan. And the AU is a collection of states with a majority of tribal plutocracies.

For every insane socialist tribal kleptocrat like Qaddafi in the Arab League, there is an insane socialist tribal kleptocrat like Mugabe in the AU.

Most African and Arab leaders are not as corrupt as the two above, but are not at all uncomfortable cutting deals with a country systematically murdering a rebellious minority of its citizens. Happens in a lot of their own countries.

And after all, China and France are both business partners with the Sudan, so how could there be any problem?

The US certainly is powerless to affect world events while a shrill minority of left-wing politicians aided and abetted by a highly-partisan left-wing press harasses the Republican majority and appears to be consciously trying to diminish America’s power to defend itself. So forget about American intervention.

The United Nations has become such a bad joke that Harper’s Magazine has a piece advocating Bill Clinton as the next Secretary General, to replace the corrupt incompetent management now ruining the organization’s reputation.

I searched for, but couldn't find the link. I would support Clinton as the best SG this weird world could muster to stem the tide of international anarchy threatening the West.

To wit:

Russia is busy Putinizing the country’s political and NGO systems as the short Stalin-in-waiting threatens Ukraine with a five-fold hike in natural gas prices. Does the gullible West actually believe that Putin, who declared the dissolution of the Soviet Union one of the “greatest tragedies of the twentieth century,” does NOT want to crush Ukrainian independence in a bear hug of Russian nationalism?

And what about a recent survey in Russia that had 37% of respondents favoring Stalin in a history of Russian heroes?

China has eyes on Taiwan, and how long with the US Navy continue its guarantee of Taiwanese independence?

And when China’s paramount status in East Asia becomes overwhelming, what will Japan do after Koizumi eventually retires from the stage and a new generation of Japanese politicos reassess the US-Japan relationship? What about South Korea?

And will India maintain its autonomous status or chase after another showdown with the Paks? Not to mention Iran, which probably had help from Pak entrepreneur A.Q. Khan in furthering its nuclear ambitions?

All this maundering boils down to the fact that the Arab League and the AU, for all the publicity celebrities like Bono and the Gateses can engender, are valuable only as resource bases.

We in the terrarium of Western Civ should worry about countries like India, China, Russia who have cultural capabilities to generate economic and military geopolitical rivalry with the West. Clinton, as an internationalist, is aware of this.

Backwaters like the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America are on the periphery of our true concern, which is to maintain the prosperity and freedoms our ancestors worked and fought hard to achieve.

Bill Clinton has enough perspective to realize all this cognitive dissonance and at the same time to maintain America's paramount role in world affairs.