Can the UN be redeemed?

Jerusalem Post ^ | 1-3-05 | DORE GOLD

[SJackson]

The United Nations has not faced such a crisis in confidence since its founding in 1945. News reports naturally focus on the corruption of the UN Oil for Food program and the allegations against Secretary-General Kofi Annan for his son's employment by the Swiss firm hired to oversee its implementation. The UN and US congressional committees are investigating this aspect of the scandal.

But a more corrosive issue is whether Saddam Hussein had manipulated the program to help win the support of UN Security Council members. True, Oil for Food required Iraq to deposit its oil earnings in a French bank account with UN oversight. But it left Saddam sovereign to decide whom he would sell oil to and whom he would buy food from.

How did the UN design a $65 billion program with such easily exploited loopholes? The CIA's Charles Duelfer has determined that Saddam's illegal oil sales and kickbacks allowed him to increase the budget of his Military Industrial Commission a hundredfold. This windfall could have financed illegal weapons of mass destruction programs, had the 2003 Iraq War not intervened. Duelfer's serious charge goes to the heart of whether the UN can be trusted to safeguard international peace and security.

Nor is the UN failure in Iraq an isolated one. Its intervention in Somalia crumbled in 1993. In 1994, though its peacekeeping force in Rwanda warned of an impending extermination campaign by Hutu militias against the Tutsi tribe, Annan's peacekeeping department ordered its troops to remain "impartial." Within months 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered in a preventable genocide.

One year later, UN troops refused to stop the assault of the Bosnian Serb Army against the "safe area" of Srebrenica, leading to the slaughter of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims, right under the UN's blue flag.

In this context, the UN's just-released report proposing sweeping reforms, entitled A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, seems a belated cry, "Don't give up on the UN; it can still be fixed and redeemed." The choice of some authors for the report should raise eyebrows, such as Amr Moussa, Egypt's hard-line former foreign minister, and Yevegny Primakov, a former Russian foreign minister and prime minister, who former UN Chief Weapons Inspector Richard Butler insists was receiving payoffs from Saddam Hussein. The fact that these participants were offset by former US National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft did not provide much comfort for UN skeptics.

Nevertheless, one way to evaluate the panel's work is to consider whether the disasters of the 1990s could have been averted if its recommendations had been implemented 10 years ago. To discern this, we must recognize that what ails the UN is a broken moral compass.

THE UN was born in 1945 at a moment of extraordinary moral clarity. To become a founding member, states had to declare war on one of the Axis powers and in effect become allies of the Big Three.

There was no doubt then that Nazi Germany stood for evil and the Allies for good. But within a few years, the UN standards became muddied with the addition of new members, who sought to alter the organization's ethos to serve their own authoritarian agendas.

Annan's panel recognized that the change from the original 51 members to today's 191 member states meant that "[t]he General Assembly was transformed from a body composed of States that largely resembled one another to one whose membership varied dramatically." A UN that, Soviet participation notwithstanding, had been dominated by democratic values became a tool of Third World authoritarians, who quickly raised the value of "noninterference" above that of human rights.

This dramatic distortion came to roost in the UN failures of the 1990s, which were characterized by a confusion between aggressor and victim. In Rwanda, the UN's initial moral equivalence between Hutus and Tutsis infused the military doctrine of its peacekeeping forces. In Bosnia, UN forces showed more sympathy for the Serb aggressors than for their Muslim victims. One reason the Oil for Food scandal went on for so long, according to former UN official Michael Soussan, was that the UN had more sympathy for Iraq's predicament than its own mandate to root out Iraq's WMD programs.

With respect to Israel, the UN systematically condemned Israeli defensive measures, without addressing the terrorism that forced Israel to act. The UN Human Rights Commission, for example, not only blasted Israel's 2002 Operation Defensive Shield but implicitly justified suicide bombings by referencing a 1982 UN General Assembly resolution recognizing the right of peoples to use "armed struggle" to resist "foreign domination."

When the General Assembly improperly activated the UN's judicial arm, the International Court of Justice, to stop Israel's security fence, Annan's office sent reems of supporting documents to The Hague, without touching on the suicide attacks that had forced Israel to build the fence. Had the UN existed in the Middle Ages with this moral logic, it would have outlawed armor and shields while condoning the use of the cross-bow.

Though the report's recommendation that terrorism be defined as "any action ... intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants" - without the Arab bloc's exception for "resisting occupation" - is clearly a step forward, it remains to be seen whether it will translate into the censure of aggressors and support for their victims.

Annan's panel dryly admits that "the norms governing the use of force by non-State actors have not kept pace with those pertaining to States." The UN has, in other words, been slow to assert its collective will against terrorism, while placing limitations rights of states to self-defense.

This asymmetry is a recipe for continuing global chaos. But it is not clear from the Annan panel how it is to be remedied. What is perhaps the central recommendation of the report - the expansion of the Security Council from 15 to 24 members - seems irrelevant to the problem.

Can the UN be redeemed? It certainly has a role to play in giving out food and tents in an emergency. The World Health Organization is crucial for stopping epidemics. But in the critical field of international peace and security, there may be no substitute for the kinds of "coalitions of the willing" used by Bill Clinton in Kosovo and by George W. Bush in Iraq, outside of the formal authorization of the UN Security Council.

These coalitions of allies have one built-in advantage: They have a clear sense of who their allies and adversaries are; therefore, they are not crippled by the moral confusion that characterized the judgments of the Security Council in failed interventions over the last decade.

The writer, author of Tower of Babble: How the UN Has Fueled Global Chaos, served as Israel's ambassador to the UN and is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (www.jcpa.org).

[OldFriend]

In answer to the question.

NO

[Perseverando]

Not NO, but _ _ _ _ NO!!!!!

[Always Right]

If I wrote this artile it would have been exactly one word, no.

[pookie18]

The answer to the question is YES...since they have the worth of ~1 book of S&H Green Stamps...

[William of Orange]

I certainly hope not, after the demise of the UN, the US could take the lead in creating an organization for the likeminded, that's most of the western nations with the possible exception of weasly France.

[PGalt]

A collection of collectivist/socialists who produce NOTHING.

[Judith Anne]

No. The UN cannot be redeemed. And I'm sick of this country paying taxpayer dollars to prop the sick bleep up.

[Jibaholic]

The question isn't "Can the UN be redeemed?" but "Should the UN be redeemed?" And the answer is no, it shouldn't. Just by its very existence the UN is a threat to the soveriegnty of the US. A redeemed UN would carry much more authority and make it much more difficult for the US to act unilaterally in its defense.

[backhoe]

My 2¢'s about the UN?

Neal Boortz has the right idea- kick them off US soil, plop them down in Haiti, and tell them, "when you get this straightened out, give us a call..."

Moreover:

--Sex abuse charges rock UN in Congo-
-- Interesting this is being posted today. Talk show host Dennis Prager had the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Doree Gold, on his show today. Mr. Gold has just written a book about the UN called the Tower of Babble(i think this was the title). Some of the things he was saying about the UN were unbelievable.

--TV campaign urging: Kick U.N. out of U.S.-
"I say we just give the entire country of Haiti to the UN."--or move them to Zimbabwe or another country in Africa. Let them see what the really do for the world.

--UN knew of Saddam's oil-for-food thefts: BBC-
The sooner we resign from this corrupt organization and kick them off our soil, the better.

Click this picture & goto "last" for the latest UN scandals:

American Policy Center on-line Declaration of Independence from the U.N.

[Piquaboy]

Why even try?

[TXBSAFH]

I wish the UN could be redeemed, but I do not think it can. It is time for the US to leave and not look back.

[EQAndyBuzz]

I would keep UNICEF and a conference room scrap everything else. Have oversight of UNICEF be the Red Cross.

Now the UN can torn down and its conference room be relocated to the TGIFridays in Times Square.

[kcvl]

NO.

[Publius6961]

Can the UN be redeemed?

NO!

[philetus]

[LittleMoe]

No and they can start by getting rid of Kofi Anin

[Publius6961]

A collection of collectivist/socialists who produce NOTHING, solve nothing, relieve nothing.

The only way I might consider the U.N. salvageable, is if all its employees, from the top down are volunteers.

No pay, no service fees, no skimming off the top, no credit cards, no expense accounts, no diplomatic immunity.

Take it or leave it.

[PGalt]

Collectivist/socialists will take it. (Not your advice)

[evad]

Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

The cancer is too deep....cut it out.