Ouch

Mark Steyn whips out the massive cluebat and starts laying about with it in his latest piece.

But if you object to what's going on in those Abu Ghraib pictures - the sexual humiliation of prisoners and their conscription as a vast army of extras in their guards' porno fantasies - then you might want to think twice about handing over Iraq to the UN.

In Eritrea, the government recently accused the UN mission of, among other offences, pedophilia.

In Cambodia, UN troops fueled an explosion of child prostitutes and AIDS.

Amnesty International reports that the UN mission in Kosovo has presided over a massive expansion of the sex trade, with girls as young as 11 being lured from Moldova and Bulgaria to service international peacekeepers.

In Bosnia, where the sex-slave trade barely existed before the UN showed up in 1995, there are now hundreds of brothels with underage girls living as captives.

The 2002 Save the Children report on the UN's cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa provides grim details of peacekeepers' demanding sexual favors from children as young as four in exchange for biscuits and cake powder.

"What is particularly shocking and appalling is that those people who ought to be there protecting the local population have actually become perpetrators," said Steve Crawshaw, the director of Human Rights Watch.

By now you're maybe thinking,

"Hmm. I must have been on holiday the week the papers ran all those stories about 'The Shaming of the UN.'"

In the last few days, The Daily Mirror has had to concede that their pictures of members of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment committing atrocities are all fakes.

The Boston Globe has admitted that their pictures of US troops sexually abusing Iraqi women are also phony.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has apologized for claiming that Israel was implicated in the events at Abu Ghraib.

Why would these big-media fact-checked-to-death news operations get suckered so easily?

Because, to the great herd of independent minds, these stories conform to their general view that all the ills of the world can be laid at the door of Bush, Blair, and Sharon.

Honestly, let's cut to the chase, shall we? These people aren't anti-war, they're just on the other side. Either that, or they are so grossly incompitent that they shouldn't be allowed near a typewriter for the rest of their natural lives.