Tears of joy should be running down all our cheeks at the appointment of John Bolton as US ambassador to that vast wheezing, corrupt monster the United Nations. Dear me. I have been watching this character for a while. He is not so much a bull in a china shop but a bodkin-wielding debunker in a balloon parlour, and he can be expected to pop bloated vanities and false reputations like a jester who has overdosed on "e", writes Kevin Myers.
There's a hell of lot of popping to do in the UN, which remains an object of passionate reverence among the deranged hand-wringers in Irish life, and indeed elsewhere. In fact, the UN resembles the Vatican under Leo X: its fabulous greed is compounded by a total lack of realism and an utter failure to attend to its primary duties. At one level the failure of the UN is structural: an organisation which can put Libya in charge of its human rights committee is clearly a spark plug or two short of a full engine.
But at another, it is a question of personal corruption, as in the fiasco of food and medicines for Iraqi oil: the equivalent of good old Leo's sale of indulgences. Enter Martin Luther in the shape of John Bolton, and watch the UN shake to its wretched foundations as he hammers his 95 theses onto the door of the Palace of Corruption in New York.
You can read about the failure of the UN every single day in almost every single newspaper. In this one the other day, of the hundreds of women who have been raped in Darfur, perhaps just the visible tip of a vast mountain of sexual crime. What has the UN done to compel abject obedience from the wretched government in Sudan? Virtually nothing, as the Janjaweed killers nightly fan out across the western desert, murdering and despoiling as they go.
Freedom does not emanate from the UN, merely compacts with the devil. Virtually nothing that the UN ever does furthers the cause of freedom. If the UN had had its way, Saddam and his lovely boys would still be ruling in Iraq, UN officials would be making millions from the oil scandal, and thousands of Iraqis would be dying because of malnutrition and a lack of medicine.
This doesn't mean that the US was right in everything it did. It should not have insisted it had evidence of weapons of mass destruction, and it should have gone in more properly prepared. This is not just a tactical issue, but also a moral one: a just war requires that the means are proportionate to the task, and they clearly weren't. The failures were not just organisational but also in terms of hardware: the almost unarmoured Humvee personnel carrier is about as suited for urban warfare as an ice-cream van.
But we know what judgment the Iraqis made about the decision to hold a general election in the middle of an insurgency led by the new Mahdi, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the homicidal lunatic who beheaded Ken Bigley and who was behind the car-bombing which killed 125 would-soldiers and policemen in Hilla last week. In an astonishing show of courage and democratic will, unprecedented in any democracy anywhere, millions of Muslims ignored the Islamo-fascist threat and voted.
But the events in Hilla showed us something else too - that all over Iraq thousands of patriotic young men are volunteering to serve their country, and if need be, die in the course of doing their duty and building up a working democracy. They do not do so in the demented, diseased manner of the suicide bomber, but in the calm, measured way of people who know that if they do not step into the breach, then no one will. Freedom is the plant that grows from the soil of such heroism.
There would be no prospect of freedom in Iraq, Kuwait, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, if matters had been left to the UN: yet in all these territories, liberty now strains at the leash. And as we saw in Europe in 1989, what spreads freedom most of all is the insecurity of tyrants: in their hearts, they know they have no legitimacy - and that is what keeps them awake at night, and ultimately causes them to lose their nerve.
To be sure, the cost of Iraqi freedom has been horrific, but so too was the cost of tyranny. In the sewers of the Middle Eastern dictatorships, murderous creatures had prospered and plotted, and their schemes were vast, their fetid imaginations almost boundless in their wickedness.
Initially, they took on the might of the great protector of world freedom when the president was Bill Clinton, who promptly folded his tent and stole away, leaving a note in the sand, declaring: "You win". Thus emboldened, they launched the attacks that were meant to kill thousands and decapitate the US by destroying the White House and the Pentagon. As we know, they outreached themselves, for they took on a US president whose vision of freedom is clear and unwavering.
So too is that of the ambassador he has appointed to UN. Watch John Bolton now. His performances there should be an utter revelation. Hear the pop, pop, pop as the balloons of organisational conceit, of insufferable vanity, of institutionalised corruption are exploded. Better still, observe him take on the remaining protectors of tyranny in the forum of the UN's main assembly, and watch them pale and cringe. Most of all, watch him change the face of the UN forever.