Written by: Beck

150 separate incidents of sexual abuse--including, but certainly not limited to, rape and pedophilia--have now been identified at the UN peacekeeping operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The silence from those outraged at the Abu Ghraib scandal remains deafening.

The problem, however, is not limited to the Congo. Mark Steyn takes us on a whirlwind tour of United Nations sexcapades:

And, of course, corrupt organisations rarely stop at just one kind. If you don't want to bulk up your pension by skimming the Oil-for-Food programme, don't worry, whatever your bag, the UN can find somewhere that suits - in West Africa, it's Sex-for-Food, with aid workers demanding sexual services from locals as young as four; in Cambodia, it's drug dealing; in Kenya, it's the refugee extortion racket; in the Balkans, sex slaves.

[...] But systemic UN child sex in at least 50 per cent of their missions? The transnational morality set can barely stifle their yawns. If you're going to rape prepubescent girls, make sure you're wearing a blue helmet.

The solution, of course, is (part) of what I've been calling for all along: cut the UN's funding. Via Michelle Malkin, we find this Heritage Foundation article on the UN sex scandal.

Kofi Annan has insisted on "zero tolerance" of sexual exploitation by peacekeepers, but U.N. rules apply only to U.N. employees; military personnel fall under the jurisdiction of their own governments. Only a few peacekeepers have been deported, and no U.N. staff have been charged with criminal activity.

That's prompting tough talk from some U.S. officials about American assistance for U.N. peacekeeping missions. The United States will give $490 million next year to support about 62,000 military personnel and civilian police serving in 16 U.N. operations around the world. "Until the U.N. is willing to take decisive action and take responsibility for these acts, we should look seriously at the funding portion of the peace-keeping operations," says a foreign policy aide to Kansas Republican Sam Brownback, who serves on the Senate Appropriations Committee. "I don't know any other way to force Annan to pay attention."

Indeed, going after the UN's funding has ever been the only way to get it to change its policy. What we should really be asking, however, is whether it's even worth our time trying to affect UN policy when the institution itself is so fundamentally, structurally unsound. As ever, the inimitable Mark Steyn puts it best:

It's a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog faeces and mix 'em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That's the problem with the UN. If you make the free nations and the thug states members of the same club, the danger isn't that they'll meet each other half-way but that the free world winds up going three-quarters, seven-eighths of the way. Thus the Oil-for-Fraud scandal: in the end, Saddam Hussein had a much shrewder understanding of the way the UN works than Bush and Blair did.

Your hard earned tax dollars at work folks.

(Hat tip: QandO)