This statement by British minister Clare Short has stunned me into near-speechlessness:

The president has announced that the US, Japan, India and Australia would coordinate the world’s response.

But former International Development Secretary Clare Short said that role should be left to the UN.

“I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to coordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN when it is the best system we have got and the one that needs building up,” she said.

“Only really the UN can do that job,” she told BBC Radio Four’s PM programme.

“It is the only body that has the moral authority. But it can only do it well if it is backed up by the authority of the great powers.”

Short's anti-American bias shines through in this ludicrous and blatantly stupid assertion. The notion that the UN has any moral authority, let alone be the sole sanctuary of it, should have been universally dismissed in the Oil-For-Food corruption that Kofi Annan has tried to cover up all year. As I recall, that also started as a massive relief fund for victims of the UN's unwillingness to give Saddam the boot instead of starving the Iraqi people to death. The Sole Bastion Of Moral Authority managed to put billions of dollars into Saddam's pockets while enriching the member-states that made sure no one unseated Saddam.

And, while we're at it, let's remember that the Paragon Of Moral Virtue at Turtle Bay set up a safe zone for Bosnian Muslims in the city of Srebrenica, encouraging them to seek refuge from marauding and genocidal Serbs. After that, they conveniently stepped aside and allowed the same Serbs to sack Srebrenica without a single UN gun being fired in defense of the refugees -- 7,000 of which were slaughtered while the UN ran away.

Don't forget the up close and personal outreach in Congo that the Secular Saints Of The Order Of Blue Helmets performed to the women and female children. They spread love -- in the form of exploiting the females of almost all ages in exchange for food and water, turning the refugee camps into their personal seraglios and worse.

It's the Clueless Clares of the world who sacrifice the downtrodden of the world to the brutal and incompetent clutches of the UN for the greater purpose of having a single world government. The idea that Short can make this kind of assertion with a straight face shows the depth of corruption on the radical Left. I say bravo to George Bush for bypassing the grifters and rapists of the UN.

Addendum: NZ Bear (and his dad) first noticed Bush's deliberate avoidance of the UN for relief aid. Check out his detailed analysis.

UPDATE: The US has added the UN to the "core group", according to this report by CNN:

Secretary of State Colin Powell conferred by video hookup with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan Thursday on assistance to the victims of the Asian and African tsunamis and then added the United Nations to the core group planning relief efforts. ...

The coalition or core group set up Wednesday by President Bush will hold another conference call among top officials Thursday night. Besides the United States, the participants are Australia, India and Japan.

Top officials of the four countries sought to coordinate their efforts to avoid duplication in a conference call Wednesday night. For the second session the United Nations is being added, said a senior official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

This appears to have been a warning shot across the bow of the UN, as the US did not add them until a videoconference between Kofi Annan and Colin Powell took place. One might imagine that Powell explained all the reasons why we no longer trust the UN with relief aid. It appears from this report that the UN has been invited to participate in the core group, not to lead it. Bush, in other words, plans to make them squirm.

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