‘Stingy’
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

If foreigners want to know why we Americans are so skeptical about the United Nations, they need look little further than the inane remarks of the organization’s undersecretary-general, Jan Egeland, about the Bush administration’s response to the disaster in Asia. Mr. Egeland, a Norwegian, did not content himself with lambasting our country as scrooge-like; he also, for good measure threw in the accusation that there would be sufficient relief funds if only we raised taxes so as to meet the suggested quota of 0.7% of GDP to be devoted by the developed nations of the world to overseas aid.
Mr. Egeland has sought to backtrack, but no one doubts where he and the international bureaucratic “New Class” think that the blame for the predicament of the victims lies, once the obvious natural causes have been discounted. In fact, in response to the request of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Crescent for $6.7 million, the American government has immediately provided $4 million and has earmarked a further $11 million in foreign disaster assistance funds – including $2 million to USAID in Indonesia, the worst-hit country, for rice and water purification. This is only the beginning, administration officials say, and does not take account of the unparalleled generosity of private citizens to relief charities.
Mr. Egeland struck the wrong tone at a time of tragedy. But his ideological assumptions deserve examination. As with Kofi Annan’s denunciation of the Iraq war as illegal, his remarks throw into sharp relief the growing tendency of unelected international civil servants to criticize member states – even though they are supposed to be working for them. This arrogance now extends to unsolicited commentary on domestic tax and spending priorities. And it tends to be targeted at the free and democratic member states most exuberantly of all. Inevitably, they assume that greater expenditure by the First World on the Third World is good, no matter what has been proven by economists such as the late, great Peter Bauer.
But why is the U.N. the funnel through which all of this must be coordinated? Claudia Rosett, sifting the horribly leached bones of the oil-for-food program in Iraq in the pages of this newspaper, has shown beyond peradventure that the U.N. is neither competent nor the fount of humanitarianism. By comparison, the much-maligned Halliburton looks like a model of corporate rectitude. A truly radical policy for the second Bush term would be to subcontract disaster relief to the Texas conglomerate. At least its senior management would be refreshingly free of the kind of cant we get from the U.N.