Iraq invasion ‘about dumbest move ever made’
re’s room for reform at the United Nations, starting with the Security Council, but the organization is doing more good than not, Ted Turner, the CNN founder and the largest individual donor to the UN, said on Tuesday. “It’s the seventh inning and we’re down by two runs,” he said, citing global warming, nuclear proliferation, growing population and environmental degradation. “We’ve already got a catastrophe on our hands.” Turner was interviewed before an audience on Tuesday by Paul Holmes, Reuters Political and General News Editor, at the Reuters headquarters in New York. See archived coverage of the event here
Turner addressed some of the questions from readers. Steve Bolin asked “Why should we trust an organization like the UN where dictators and despots, and countries that allow the slavery of children have an equal vote?” Turner noted that every country has “different rules and they’re constantly changing… We have a president who admitted secret prisons.”
A question from a ‘Friend of Ted’ drew a sharper response. ‘Friend’ asked whether he felt his donations to the UN Foundation “created one bureaucracy fund another.” Turner called the notion “ridiculous… You have to have management, otherwise you’ll have chaos.”
Turner’s picks and pans
Picks
– Parliament of Man, a book by Paul Kennedy, on the history of the United Nations.
– Al Gore, the 2000 Democratic candidate for president, is “very responsible, a great leader,” Turner told the audience, referring to the former vice president’s campaign to combat global warming. ”We’ve got to have good leadership now; we can’t afford to waste another 8 years.”Â
– Female politicians. “Men should be barred from public office” for a long spell to bring about a kinder and gentler world, he said.
Pans
– U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 did ‘incalculable damage” to the U.S. Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II each rank as “dumb moves” for Turner, but he said it’s possible the U.S. invasion of Iraq “might be the dumbest; we lost so much. Before Iraq, we were one of the most popular nations on earth and now we’re one of the most feared and distrusted.
– Iran nuclear policy in the West. “It’s a joke to say Iran can’t have nuclear weapons,” he said. “Why don’t we say Israel or India or Russia can’t have them… We’ve got to get rid of all nuclear weapons as quickly as we possibly can.”
Global Voices, the international network of bloggers with whom Reuters has partnered, is the Grand Prize winner of the 
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