Mary Robinson Is Not Worthy

President Obama, for God-knows-what reason, has decided to award former U.N. bureaucrat Mary Robinson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian honor.  Years ago, I expressed my intense distaste for Mary Robinson:

Mary Robinson was the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2001, during the height of the Great North Korean Famine, while China flagrantly violated the U.N. Convention on Refugees to keep the starving millions outside its borders. While millions more died in a famine that was certainly preventable, but for the diversion of North Korea’s coffers to higher priorities. While North Korean concentration camps filled to the brim with families whose children had to the temerity to ask for another dollop of gruel, where was Mary?

You can read the rest here, but to summarize, Robinson squandered her tenure and the moral authority it might have carried to suck up to the radical chic crowd and the least representative member states in the U.N., mainly by sniping at easy, soft targets.  Meanwhile, Mary Robinson was ineffective, incompetent, and apparently unconcerned about the greatest humanitarian tragedy to have taken place on her watch.

I see that I’m not the only one to question what honor Mary Robinson has earned, though the controversy seems focused on other reasons.  John Bolton’s objections are probably no great shock, but I suspect that President Obama was caught off guard that 45 Republican members of Congress would go to the trouble of circulating and signing a letter of protest.

Really, Mary Robinson is a walking illustration of what’s wrong with the U.N., why its role should be limited to vaccinating kids and delivering sacks of grain, and why it ought to be the foreign policy of the United States to gradually de-fund the U.N.’s political activities and gently build new and better international institutions whose member states have freely elected, accountable governments.  I’m almost cynical enough to believe that that’s why President Bush supported the candidacy of the conspicuously worthless Ban Ki Moon.