Joe Loconte is a senior fellow at Pepperdine University’s School of
Public Policy. He served as a human rights expert on the 2005 US
Congressional Task Force on the United Nations and as an informal
advisor to Andrew Mitchell MP, Shadow Secretary of State for
International Development. His latest book is The End of Illusions:
Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm.
Over two years ago, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the United Nations, world leaders pledged to adopt a “radical” reform agenda at their General Assembly meeting in New York. Most everyone agreed that changes were needed. Financial mismanagement, predatory peacekeepers, failure to stop human rights atrocities—hardly any important U.N. function escaped withering criticism. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, keen to salvage his own tainted legacy, hyped the meeting as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to revitalize the institution. Shashi Tharoor, Annan’s communications director, cast a reformist vision to “significantly alter the international architecture.”
Well, the once-in-a-lifetime results are in: Whatever the actual likelihood of reform, it vanished into the U.N.’s fog of paralysis and prevarication. The organization’s international “architecture”—a labyrinth of corrupt regimes, menacing dictatorships, and boorish bureaucracy—remains fundamentally unchanged. The new Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has inherited an organization that appears impervious to meaningful reform.
Just consider the ongoing problem of transparency and corruption, epitomized by the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food program in Iraq—a perverse fiasco that ranks among the worst in the institution’s history. After the first Gulf War, Iraq was under U.N. sanction for its failure to comply with Security Council resolutions that it fully disarm. From 1996 to 2003, the Oil-for-Food program allowed Saddam Hussein to buy humanitarian aid in exchange for oil. Instead, Saddam generated—through bribes, oil smuggling, and illicit kickbacks—over $21 billion to shore up his sadistic regime. He used oil to buy influence on the Security Council and weaken international sanctions. In the process, millions of ordinary Iraqis faced poverty, malnutrition, disease, and death.
An independent U.S. probe, led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul
Volcker, revealed a staggering deficit of oversight and accountability.
“The Secretariat, the Security Council and U.N. contractors,” Volcker
said, “failed most grievously in their responsibilities to monitor the
integrity of the program.” That’s putting it delicately. Russia, a
prime culprit, refused to cooperate with the investigation. Likewise
for China, Egypt, Vietnam, and the United Arab Emirates. U.N. officials
stonewalled Volcker’s probe and have mostly dismissed his findings.
Whatever one’s view of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, reconstruction efforts
there have been made more difficult, and the suffering of the Iraqi
people more acute, by the U.N.’s bald-faced malfeasance.
Why should any rational person trust the United Nations again to enforce sanctions or run a humanitarian aid program?
Next, consider the U.N.’s track record of defending human rights. The
U.N. Charter welcomes all “peace-loving states” that affirm the
institution’s “faith in fundamental human rights.” Yet the cosmic
distance between the U.N.’s ideals and its day-to-day operations
beggars belief.
The Human Rights Council, which replaced the discredited Human Rights
Commission, suffers from the same noxious disease as its predecessor:
moral equivalency. Human rights abusers—such as China, Cuba, Egypt,
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—sit in judgment on nations that respect the
rule of law. They manipulate the system to shield themselves and their
plutocratic pals from scrutiny. Other U.N. bodies have been similarly
debased. The U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development invited North
Korea, a communist kleptocracy that has pushed millions of its own
people to the brink of starvation, to become a member in good standing.
This Alice-in-Wonderland world, in which dictatorships have veto power
over democracies, heartens despots everywhere and prolongs the human
misery of their victims.
Nowhere is the U.N.’s degradation more grievous than in its recent
failures in Sudan, Burma, and Zimbabwe. Accused of genocide by the
United States, the Islamist regime in Khartoum has helped orchestrate
the killings of about 200,000 people and displaced over two million in
Sudan’s Darfur region. Burma’s State Peace and Development Council
(SPDC)—an Orwellian construction if there ever was one—was named “the
worst human rights violator in the world” by the Conservative Party’s
Human Rights Commission. Under the thuggish rule of Robert Mugabe,
Zimbabwe launched a campaign of social demolition that left 700,000
people homeless and destitute. In each case, brutal dictators have
instigated massive repression and ethnic cleansing against their own
populations.
Not only have these governments mostly avoided U.N. censure or
sanction: They’ve been rewarded with seats and privileges in U.N.
bodies. The Security Council allows Sudan to dictate the terms of any
U.N. troop deployment to stop the killing. The General Assembly yawns
with indifference over the bloodletting in Burma and Zimbabwe. The
Human Rights Council—caught up in the machinations of China, Russia,
and the Organization for the Islamic Conference—has essentially ignored
all three regimes.
In Complicity With Evil, Adam Lebor, former London Times correspondent,
accurately describes the U.N.’s culture of contradictions. “If there is
a sense of shame among Secretariat officials for the U.N.’s failures…it
is not a career hindrance,” he writes. Instead of confronting regimes
for their atrocities, the U.N. system “confers legitimacy and prestige
on those perpetrating human rights abuses, providing them with
psychological and political succor and the plentiful company of kindred
spirits.” By far and away the country most often criticized by U.N.
bodies is the democratic state of Israel.
Finally, the United Nations has more or less abandoned its original
purpose: the preservation of international peace and security. True,
U.N. humanitarian relief can be effective, and U.N. peacekeepers have
helped stabilize a handful of post-conflict situations. Yet the ongoing
scandal of U.N. peacekeepers who sexually exploit civilians seems to
defy reform, or even serious scrutiny. Too often—in Lebanon, Rwanda,
Somalia, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere—the blue helmets have stood aside as
chaos and killing erupted.
Given the U.N.’s obsession with lofty resolutions and interminable
“dialogue,” none of this should be surprising. It’s worth recalling
that even the original architects of the United Nations—Great Britain
and the United States—soon realized the organization would be useless
in checking the rise of Soviet Communism in Europe. That’s why they
created NATO, the most effective political-military alliance in the
history of the West. (When the United Nations failed to end the Bosnia
war or prevent humanitarian disaster in Kosovo, NATO stepped in.)
NATO’s member states have mutual security interests and a shared set of
moral and political ideals. By contrast, U.N. officials laud their
institution’s commitment to universal membership and
multiculturalism—the very features that guarantee impotence in the face
of genocidal horror.
The United Nations is performing no better in the new security
environment: the emergence of radical Islamic terrorism and global
jihad. More than six years after the events of 9/11, the General
Assembly still cannot agree on a definition of terrorism. Meanwhile,
the U.N. offers governments such as Syria—a leading exporter of
terrorism around the world—a seat on its Security Council. It grants
any member state an “inalienable right” to nuclear technology (just
read the fine print in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). And it
allows countries such as Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan—all of which
have broken their nonproliferation obligations—to shape global
arms-control policies.
We need fresh thinking. We need a competitive alternative to the
de-moralized status quo. We saw this alternative in action last month
in the General Assembly, when a caucus of democratic states—including
the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, the Czech
Republic, New Zealand, Poland, and Spain—pushed through a resolution
condemning Iran for “systematic violations of human rights and
fundamental freedoms.”
A coalition of democracies, prepared to work outside the U.N. system
when necessary, is the best hope for defending human rights,
confronting rogue regimes, and defeating terrorism. Dictatorships,
whether military or religious in nature, will always seek to crush the
aspirations of free people. Government by the consent of the governed,
equal justice under law, the protection of minorities, free speech,
freedom of religion—democratic values are promoted best by a coalition
of states that actually put them into practice.
U.N. mavens, anxious to preserve their relevance, peevishly denounce
the idea. Perhaps out of desperation, Secretary-General Ban last week
named actor George Clooney a “messenger of peace” to promote the
organization’s globetrotting efforts. Clooney might attract more women
to U.N. committee meetings, but he won’t do much to advance the U.N.’s
actual mandate: to protect generations from “the scourge of war” and
defend “the dignity and worth of the human person.” It’s time for an
alliance of democracies—a “coalition of the willing”—to rise up and
offer the world a better choice.
Related link: John McCain touts democratic alternative to the United Nations
Joe Loconte is a senior fellow at Pepperdine University’s School of
Public Policy. He served as a human rights expert on the 2005 US
Congressional Task Force on the United Nations and as an informal
advisor to Andrew Mitchell MP, Shadow Secretary of State for
International Development. His latest book is The End of Illusions:
Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm.
Over two years ago, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the United Nations, world leaders pledged to adopt a “radical” reform agenda at their General Assembly meeting in New York. Most everyone agreed that changes were needed. Financial mismanagement, predatory peacekeepers, failure to stop human rights atrocities—hardly any important U.N. function escaped withering criticism. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, keen to salvage his own tainted legacy, hyped the meeting as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to revitalize the institution. Shashi Tharoor, Annan’s communications director, cast a reformist vision to “significantly alter the international architecture.”
Well, the once-in-a-lifetime results are in: Whatever the actual likelihood of reform, it vanished into the U.N.’s fog of paralysis and prevarication. The organization’s international “architecture”—a labyrinth of corrupt regimes, menacing dictatorships, and boorish bureaucracy—remains fundamentally unchanged. The new Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has inherited an organization that appears impervious to meaningful reform.
Just consider the ongoing problem of transparency and corruption, epitomized by the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food program in Iraq—a perverse fiasco that ranks among the worst in the institution’s history. After the first Gulf War, Iraq was under U.N. sanction for its failure to comply with Security Council resolutions that it fully disarm. From 1996 to 2003, the Oil-for-Food program allowed Saddam Hussein to buy humanitarian aid in exchange for oil. Instead, Saddam generated—through bribes, oil smuggling, and illicit kickbacks—over $21 billion to shore up his sadistic regime. He used oil to buy influence on the Security Council and weaken international sanctions. In the process, millions of ordinary Iraqis faced poverty, malnutrition, disease, and death.
An independent U.S. probe, led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul
Volcker, revealed a staggering deficit of oversight and accountability.
“The Secretariat, the Security Council and U.N. contractors,” Volcker
said, “failed most grievously in their responsibilities to monitor the
integrity of the program.” That’s putting it delicately. Russia, a
prime culprit, refused to cooperate with the investigation. Likewise
for China, Egypt, Vietnam, and the United Arab Emirates. U.N. officials
stonewalled Volcker’s probe and have mostly dismissed his findings.
Whatever one’s view of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, reconstruction efforts
there have been made more difficult, and the suffering of the Iraqi
people more acute, by the U.N.’s bald-faced malfeasance.
Why should any rational person trust the United Nations again to enforce sanctions or run a humanitarian aid program?
Next, consider the U.N.’s track record of defending human rights. The
U.N. Charter welcomes all “peace-loving states” that affirm the
institution’s “faith in fundamental human rights.” Yet the cosmic
distance between the U.N.’s ideals and its day-to-day operations
beggars belief.
The Human Rights Council, which replaced the discredited Human Rights
Commission, suffers from the same noxious disease as its predecessor:
moral equivalency. Human rights abusers—such as China, Cuba, Egypt,
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—sit in judgment on nations that respect the
rule of law. They manipulate the system to shield themselves and their
plutocratic pals from scrutiny. Other U.N. bodies have been similarly
debased. The U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development invited North
Korea, a communist kleptocracy that has pushed millions of its own
people to the brink of starvation, to become a member in good standing.
This Alice-in-Wonderland world, in which dictatorships have veto power
over democracies, heartens despots everywhere and prolongs the human
misery of their victims.
Nowhere is the U.N.’s degradation more grievous than in its recent
failures in Sudan, Burma, and Zimbabwe. Accused of genocide by the
United States, the Islamist regime in Khartoum has helped orchestrate
the killings of about 200,000 people and displaced over two million in
Sudan’s Darfur region. Burma’s State Peace and Development Council
(SPDC)—an Orwellian construction if there ever was one—was named “the
worst human rights violator in the world” by the Conservative Party’s
Human Rights Commission. Under the thuggish rule of Robert Mugabe,
Zimbabwe launched a campaign of social demolition that left 700,000
people homeless and destitute. In each case, brutal dictators have
instigated massive repression and ethnic cleansing against their own
populations.
Not only have these governments mostly avoided U.N. censure or
sanction: They’ve been rewarded with seats and privileges in U.N.
bodies. The Security Council allows Sudan to dictate the terms of any
U.N. troop deployment to stop the killing. The General Assembly yawns
with indifference over the bloodletting in Burma and Zimbabwe. The
Human Rights Council—caught up in the machinations of China, Russia,
and the Organization for the Islamic Conference—has essentially ignored
all three regimes.
In Complicity With Evil, Adam Lebor, former London Times correspondent,
accurately describes the U.N.’s culture of contradictions. “If there is
a sense of shame among Secretariat officials for the U.N.’s failures…it
is not a career hindrance,” he writes. Instead of confronting regimes
for their atrocities, the U.N. system “confers legitimacy and prestige
on those perpetrating human rights abuses, providing them with
psychological and political succor and the plentiful company of kindred
spirits.” By far and away the country most often criticized by U.N.
bodies is the democratic state of Israel.
Finally, the United Nations has more or less abandoned its original
purpose: the preservation of international peace and security. True,
U.N. humanitarian relief can be effective, and U.N. peacekeepers have
helped stabilize a handful of post-conflict situations. Yet the ongoing
scandal of U.N. peacekeepers who sexually exploit civilians seems to
defy reform, or even serious scrutiny. Too often—in Lebanon, Rwanda,
Somalia, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere—the blue helmets have stood aside as
chaos and killing erupted.
Given the U.N.’s obsession with lofty resolutions and interminable
“dialogue,” none of this should be surprising. It’s worth recalling
that even the original architects of the United Nations—Great Britain
and the United States—soon realized the organization would be useless
in checking the rise of Soviet Communism in Europe. That’s why they
created NATO, the most effective political-military alliance in the
history of the West. (When the United Nations failed to end the Bosnia
war or prevent humanitarian disaster in Kosovo, NATO stepped in.)
NATO’s member states have mutual security interests and a shared set of
moral and political ideals. By contrast, U.N. officials laud their
institution’s commitment to universal membership and
multiculturalism—the very features that guarantee impotence in the face
of genocidal horror.
The United Nations is performing no better in the new security
environment: the emergence of radical Islamic terrorism and global
jihad. More than six years after the events of 9/11, the General
Assembly still cannot agree on a definition of terrorism. Meanwhile,
the U.N. offers governments such as Syria—a leading exporter of
terrorism around the world—a seat on its Security Council. It grants
any member state an “inalienable right” to nuclear technology (just
read the fine print in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). And it
allows countries such as Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan—all of which
have broken their nonproliferation obligations—to shape global
arms-control policies.
We need fresh thinking. We need a competitive alternative to the
de-moralized status quo. We saw this alternative in action last month
in the General Assembly, when a caucus of democratic states—including
the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, the Czech
Republic, New Zealand, Poland, and Spain—pushed through a resolution
condemning Iran for “systematic violations of human rights and
fundamental freedoms.”
A coalition of democracies, prepared to work outside the U.N. system
when necessary, is the best hope for defending human rights,
confronting rogue regimes, and defeating terrorism. Dictatorships,
whether military or religious in nature, will always seek to crush the
aspirations of free people. Government by the consent of the governed,
equal justice under law, the protection of minorities, free speech,
freedom of religion—democratic values are promoted best by a coalition
of states that actually put them into practice.
U.N. mavens, anxious to preserve their relevance, peevishly denounce
the idea. Perhaps out of desperation, Secretary-General Ban last week
named actor George Clooney a “messenger of peace” to promote the
organization’s globetrotting efforts. Clooney might attract more women
to U.N. committee meetings, but he won’t do much to advance the U.N.’s
actual mandate: to protect generations from “the scourge of war” and
defend “the dignity and worth of the human person.” It’s time for an
alliance of democracies—a “coalition of the willing”—to rise up and
offer the world a better choice.
Related link: John McCain touts democratic alternative to the United Nations