That’s not me talking in the post title, it’s Economist blogger Emma Bond, writing on her Tumbler blog about a friend’s email, which makes note of the following UN entity:
Open-ended Ad Hoc Working Group of the General Assembly on the Integrated and Coordinated Implementation of and Follow-up to the Major United Nations Conferences and Summits in the Economic and Social Fields
(H/T to the inimitable Hayes Brown and his UN blog.) I haven’t been blogging much on account of some family issues, but … this is why You Need to Read My Book, Living With the UN: American Responsibilities and International Order, which is now available in hard copy and Kindle at Amazon. Among other things, the book recommends that the US simply skip all the UN roadshows, mass confabs, and assorted UN conferences, and instead urge that anything actually important be taken up in the course of ordinary business. It also observes that in any case, US policy toward the General Assembly should be containment, because overall it is an organ of the UN devoted to waste and wickedness. (I’ve posted the first three chapters of the book to SSRN as a sample.)
(Added: One of my fellow bloggers at the Opinio Juris blog, where I also posted a version of this, objects that I’m being snarky and taking a cheap shot. On reflection, I think he’s right, as are a couple of comments here to the same effect, and I’ve amended and extended the post over there to say something less sarcastic and more substantive about the problems of a highly diffuse UN that creates entities more easily than it can eliminate them, and which, again on account of its diffuse nature, has trouble forcing itself to make considered internal tradeoffs in relation to scarce resources. I’m going to leave this post as is, but if you want a more substantive and less snarky version, go over to this post at OJ.)