Goodbye to the U.N.
By
Mark Falcoff, Fred Gedrich, Alan Dowd
No U.N. in Iraq
By Fred Gedrich
After doing everything in their power to block the removal of Saddam Hussein,United Nations head Kofi Annan and countries in the obstructionist Security Council are now plotting to give a “central role” to the U.N. in post-war Iraq.Critics of President Bush are demanding that he hand over much of the responsibility for reconstruction to the global body. Before America takes this advice it would be a good idea to examine the U.N.’s record on this front.
The fact is, the United Nations has a troubled history in peacekeeping, terror prevention, and nation-building. Since the founding of the world body, there have been 291 wars resulting in 22 million deaths. During this period the U.N. authorized military intervention to deter aggression only twice: in response to North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950, and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990--both under strong U.S. leadership.
Sadly, in both instances the belligerent madmen who started the wars remained in power, due to U.N. restrictions, at great cost to the civilized world. Despite a dozen international treaties and scores of Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, the U.N. has done absolutely nothing to reduce global terror. In fact, the organization refuses even to define “terrorism,” perhaps because numerous members practice the deadly trade themselves. The U.S. Department of State lists 36 terrorist organizations operating with impunity in at least 60 U.N. member countries. Recently, two thirds of 191 U.N. members failed to meet an important Security Council filing deadline on actions taken to
combat terror.
The U.N. human rights record is equally appalling. Freedom House--a U.N.-credentialed organization founded by Eleanor Roosevelt--estimates that approximately two billion people (one third of the world’s population) are victims of human rights abuses. How has the U.N. responded? By selecting Qaddafi’s Libya (a terrorist state and one of the world’s worst rights abusers) to head the U.N.’s Human Rights Commission, which can only be thought of as a sick joke.
Much of this nonsense occurs because 102 of the U.N.’s 191 members do not have completely free and democratic governments. Fully 47 members are notorious dictatorships, and the U.N. roster includes six terrorist states.
These have forged alliances among themselves and the U.N.’s largest voting bloc, the Non-Aligned Movement, to advance their political agendas and vote their brethren into prominent positions within the U.N. system. That’s why a practitioner of state terror, Syria, sits on the Security Council, and nearly half of the Human Rights Commission is packed with documented abusers.
What is perhaps most relevant to today’s debates over Iraq is that the U.N. record at rebuilding countries is poor. Its experiences in Haiti, Somalia, Cambodia, Kosovo, and elsewhere illustrate the body’s ineptitude. In Cambodia, the U.N. allowed a despot to take over the government. When things get tough, the U.N. is more apt to cut and run than face a difficult challenge--as it did a few years ago in Somalia, and this summer in Baghdad (where it simply pulled out most of its workers rather than deal with security challenges). In Kosovo, four years and $2.4 billion in international aid haven’t allowed the U.N. to turn over the reins of government to locals.Contrast those failures with U.S. successes in nation-building in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the post-Marcos Philippines.
Our putative allies Chirac, Schroeder, and Putin are more interested in acquiring power, influence, and money under the aegis of the U.N. than they are in defeating terrorism or improving the welfare of the Iraqi people. The price the United States would have to pay to gain their support for a U.N. intervention would far outweigh anything positive the U.N. could bring to Iraq.
According to a recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans believe the U.N. is doing a poor job. They are right. It would be dangerous to put U.S. interests, the welfare of the Iraqi people, and global security from terror in its hands.
Fred Gedrich is a senior policy analyst at Freedom Alliance and a former State and Defense Department official.
Coming UN-done
By Alan Dowd
The United Nations spent most of its existence between 1953 and 1990 in a virtual coma. Then, on the eve of the first Gulf War its members came together to isolate Saddam Hussein and roll back his invasion of Kuwait. But 12 years later, somewhere along the road to Baghdad, the United Nations died.
The U.N. is not going to cease to exist in name, of course. But it has already ceased to exist in practice. Recall that it took eight weeks for the Security Council to agree on a resolution requiring Iraq to comply with existing resolutions. And that came only after President Bush threw down the gauntlet: “Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?”
According to its charter, the U.N. is supposed to be an instrument for “the maintenance of international peace and security.” But instead of functioning like a useful tool, the U.N. has come to think of itself as an end in itself. French president Jacques Chirac condemned the deposing of Saddam Hussein because it was “undertaken without the approval of the United Nations…which is the only legitimate framework for building peace in Iraq.”
If the U.N. is the sole source of legitimacy for “building peace,” Chirac has some explaining of his own to do. On the very same week that coalition forces attacked Saddam’s regime, after all, hundreds of French troops poured into the Central African Republic to protect French interests there after a coup, and France didn’t ask the U.N. for pre-approval. And during the U.N.’s farcical peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, Chirac “issued…orders to the French generals in Bosnia…that went outside the U.N. command system,” as David Halberstam notes in War in a Time of Peace.
Also in 2003, Chirac threatened East European governments for siding with Washington rather than Paris on Iraq: “If they wanted to diminish their chances of joining the EU,” he snarled, “they couldn’t have chosen a better way.” It seems Washington doesn’t have a monopoly on unilateralism.
The balking from Paris and Moscow when the U.S. and Britain asked for a lifting of the U.N. sanctions on Iraq was another nice bit of international hypocrisy. The French began a concerted push to end U.N. sanctions on Iraq back in January1999, characterizing them as cruel to the Iraqi people. The Russians called for their elimination even earlier. Somehow those humanitarian concerns lost their urgency when their countries’ commercial ties to Iraq evaporated with Saddam’s regime.
The U.N.’s contempt for U.S. leadership and allergy to military action followed it into postwar Iraq.When U.S. troops offered to protect the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, they were snubbed. To avoid being associated with the allies, the U.N. instead contracted with a private security firm. The foolishness of this course was demonstrated on August 19, when the weak protection allowed a truck bomber to kill the U.N. chief and scores of others. (U.S. troops had also been excluded from the scene of Iraq’s other horrendous bombing, the assassination of Ayatollah Baqir Al-Hakim in Najaf, which killed more than eighty people.)
Hoping to speed up the postwar stabilization effort, Bush reached out to the U.N. again this summer for approval of a multinational peacekeeping force. Some nations were willing to send troops only if there was a U.N. resolution. As before, the French and German governments responded with diplomatic gamesmanship. The war may have transformed Iraq, but it apparently did nothing to change the U.N. Security Council or the obstructionists who control it.
Americans have been given a lesson. Bureaucrats at the U.N. must never be allowed to control and validate U.S. military action. President Bush’s original position was the right one: “When it comes to our security, we don’t need anybody’s permission.” The United States should not subject itself to the U.N. charade again on any matter of grave importance.We now know that the Security Council is more concerned with limiting U.S. power than containing rogue regimes like North Korea, Iran, and Saddam’s Iraq. At this juncture in history, America hasn’t the luxury of allowing the Lilliputians to tie it down.
Alan Dowd is director of the Hudson Institute.
Behind the Human Rights Mask
By Mark Falcoff
Readers of The American Enterprise may have been a little surprised when the United Nations Human Rights Commission failed to pass a resolution condemning Cuba at its 59th annual session in Geneva last March and April. After all, the Castro dictatorship had arrested nearly 80 journalists, librarians, and human rights activists literally days before, and sentenced them behind closed doors to prison sentences as long as 25 years.
When the U.N. Economic and Social Council meeting in New York a few days later actually voted to re-elect Cuba as a member of the Human Rights Commission, instead of the object of one of its investigations, any reasonable observer might have been stunned.
In my own case, however, the reaction to both events was somewhat muted. I knew what to expect--for I had been a member of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission’s Geneva meetings. After that experience, nothing the U.N. does will be capable of shocking me.
In the first place, the Commission (like the U.N. itself) is home to some of the world’s most unsavory regimes. No less than 53 countries are represented on the HRC. The membership was arrayed in concentric ovals in Geneva, and, amazingly, the inner oval consisted of outright police states: countries like Syria, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, China, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Cuba, and Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya (which, almost amusingly, currently chairs the Human Rights Commission). The next oval outward grouped together countries slightly less objectionable but who often vote with the first group--India, Pakistan, most of the African countries, plus odd ducks like Colonel Chávez’s Venezuela. The third oval is made up of most of the Latin American republics plus South Africa, and (on some issues) small European countries like Ireland or Belgium--who are currently trying out for the role of Progressive Conscience of Humanity. They sometimes vote with the Western democracies, but are generally unreliable. Both Argentina and Brazil abstained on this year’s Cuban resolution--one that didn’t even condemn the Castro regime but merely begged the dictator to allow a representative of the Commission in to “evaluate” the situation. South Africa likewise managed to kill a resolution on Zimbabwe because, whatever his sins, dictator Robert Mugabe is, after all, black. (So are his victims--a point Pretoria chooses to overlook.)
The fourth oval encompasses the only countries that have any right to be there at all--the democracies built on genuine individual rights: the Western European countries, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. These are in a distinct minority and have to do some powerful horse trading with the second and third ovals just to maintain a grasp on the agenda.
As long as the Commission is allowed to be this large, and refuses to impose any real-world tests for membership (does the country in question actually respect human rights itself?), it is simply naive to expect anything productive of this organization.
A second reason not to expect much of U.N. bodies like this is that in the world of the United Nations, what are called economic and social rights are supposedly given equal weight to civil and political rights (although in practice the latter are most often treated as an expensive luxury that nobody really needs). In U.N.- speak, the “rights” that are regarded as fundamental are airy ones like the “right” to food, the “right” to adequate housing, the “right” to clean air and clean water, the “right” to proper disposal of toxic wastes, and so forth. By clogging the agenda with such practical issues, the Third World countries deflect attention from their prisons and torture chambers. Their selective terminology allows them to sit in judgment on Western countries.After all, their constitutions declare the “right to food”--does yours?
Third, from the United Nations point of view, human rights are advanced only to the degree to which vast bureaucracies are created and expanded. If there is a problem, the U.N. proposes to create tax-free jobs for bureaucrats and politicians (mostly from undemocratic states), paid for largely by the “rich” countries. If you balk at this, that proves “you don’t care about human rights.” If you do pony up the cash, somehow human rights are being advanced--regardless of the actual situation on the ground.
Fourth, far too much time is devoted to letting the so-called Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have their say. Most of these are not really non-governmental in any meaningful sense. Some, like the Federation of Cuban Women, are actually state propaganda organs. Others are financed by the U.N. or the European Union, or individual European governments. Many others are creatures of regional bodies like the Arab League. I would estimate that speechifying from such groups takes up roughly 35 to 40 percent of the time of U.N. agencies. This has concrete economic consequences, because the translators earn $300 an hour, and there are five official languages at the U.N., which means every speech has to be translated in 25 different directions. The United States pays for 23 percent of the costs of this. The length of the sessions—and the corresponding bill--could be drastically reduced by eliminating NGO pontificating, which adds nothing whatever to the deliberations.
Fifth and finally, it is distressing to see how deeply our own State Department is committed to quixotic ventures like the U.N. Human Rights Commission--apparently unfazed by its membership, its leadership, most of all, its failure to focus seriously on real human rights violations. Too many of our diplomats, like diplomats everywhere, seem to be fascinated by process. Some even seem distressingly anxious to win the approval of thugs and murderers. As one told me,“if there are 190 countries in the world and they all vote against you, maybe you’re wrong.” I found myself replying to him somewhat tartly that overwhelming sentiment can’t change the facts of a matter.
I don’t think I’ll be invited back next year.
Mark Falcoff is a Latin American specialist at the American Enterprise Institute.
