(via LGF)  Fox News reports Nelson Mandela's brilliant insight into the basis of contemporary international geopolitics and conflict resolution:

Former South African President Nelson Mandela, who Bush has praised as a hero of human rights, joined the chorus of critics by calling Bush arrogant and implying the president was racist for threatening to bypass the United Nations and attack Iraq.

"Is it because the secretary-general of the United Nations is now a black man? They never did that when secretary-generals were white," Mandela said.

This kind of crap is hard to make up.    Just like Iraq leading the UN commission on disarmament.  

The thread they have in common?   Group Identity Politics and the rules & conventions necessary to support this construct.  

Disagree with a particular policy?  Then you must clearly be anti-group X who supports that policy.  And the more we want to damn your policy, the more we'll use the biggest possible group definition that it offends.   Gender.   Race.   Religion.  

Need someone to run an organization?   Well, Group Y hasn't had their fair shot at running it.    Think Group Y's candidate might not be equipped to solve this problem?   Well that's because you're subconsciously & incorrectly imposing the biases of your own group belief system.

What's the equitable solution to the world's problems?   A split that appropriates to each group fairly regardless of underlying & individual virtues.   At least that's what France is trying to do in the Ivory Coast.

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An illustrative example of the games played in group politics:

The Libya vote is instructive. There are 53 members of the Human Rights Commission. Thirty-three voted for the Colonel. Three voted against — the United States, Canada and Guatemala (God bless her). Seventeen countries abstained, including Britain. Is that really the position of Her Majesty’s Government? Not really, and they’ve all manner of artful explanations for why the vote went as it did — it was the Africa bloc’s turn to get the chairmanship, they only put up one candidate, the EU guys had all agreed to vote as a bloc, they didn’t want to appear to snub Africa, blah blah. So the net result of filtering Britain’s voice up through one multilateral body (the EU) into another (the UN) is that you guys are now on record as having no objection to the leading international body on human rights being headed by a one-man police state that practises torture and assassination and has committed mass murder within your own jurisdiction.

That’s a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with UN-style multilateralism. There aren’t a lot of Gaddafis, but their voice is amplified because of the democratic world’s investment in UN proceduralism.

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