SUMMIT SETS UNREALISTIC LIMITS

The New Millennium Summit at the United Nations ended in New York earlier this month. The summit brought together 150 presidents, prime ministers, kings and dictators -- although the dictators were politely called by other titles during the politically correct gathering.

At the end of the summit, there was a declaration. In essence, this gathering of world leaders decided it wants to eliminate every problem -- poverty, war, AIDS, pollution, human-rights violations, hunger, disease -- in the world. And a deadline -- 2015 -- was set.

Most of the declaration had been hammered out before the actual summit. Bureaucrats, sitting in for the highly visible kings and prime ministers, negotiated away from the limelight of the formal gathering in New York.

While the summit itself attracted plenty of media coverage, the negotiations that led to the summit declaration were barely touched by news reports. All of which was somehow reminiscent of the failed effort by Hillary Clinton to mastermind a national health-care plan in secret. When it comes to really big plans, there are a lot of reasons to hold discussions behind closed doors, it seems.

Can you imagine the give-and-take of the pre-New Millennium Summit debates?

Imagine this exchange between government minions: "Let's keep poor people in poverty a little longer while we exploit oil reserves and stockpile military arsenals," "How long?" "Oh, how does 15 years sound to you?"

So it was interesting to see that the 150 world leaders vying for precious TV time in New York would agree to stamp out poverty and so forth in exactly 15 years.

What, do you suppose, is so magical about the next 15 years that didn't exist in the last 15 years? Or the last 50?

And don't you suppose that the leaders of impoverished nation's would have agreed to any deadline, knowing that no goal as all-encompassing as ending worldwide pollution can be accomplished in a mere 15 years? And certainly not without opening the treasuries of developed nations to the greedy, grabbing hands of third-world countries.

Ah. There's why it was so easy to get 150 nations to agree on an end to human suffering as we know it. Somebody's pockets will get lined with gold. A lot of somebodies, probably.

Let's hope the United Nations has scheduled a follow-up summit for 2015, a checkup meeting where the agenda would be accountability.

Empty promises get a lot of headlines. Let's see if the poor can trade headlines for food.