The New United Nations: American Pressure At Work
By NewSisyphus
Close observers of the United Nations are, depending on their political ideology, either thoroughly confused or quietly satisfied at the latest turn of events. Any reading of the world body’s actions and its leaders pronouncements over the past five weeks reveals that a sharp turn to the American view of what needs to be done both internally and externally in the U.N. has gained a good deal of ground.
Take today’s trip to Syria by U.N. envoy Terje Roed-Larsen for example. Prior to his trip, Roed-Larsen briefed the international press in Amman, Jordan, on the message he expected to deliver to the Great Ophthalmologist in Damascus:
"I expect that we will get the commitment and timetables for the full implementation of 1559," Roed-Larsen said, referring to the resolution that the United States and France steered through the Security Council last September.
When asked whether that meant the complete withdrawal of Syria's 14,000 troops in Lebanon as well as its intelligence officers, Roed-Larsen responded: "I said 'full' and 'timetables." (Emphasis added).
We don’t think we’d be offending anybody if we noted that U.N. envoys rarely employ such, well, Rumsfeldian straight-forwardness, especially when dealing with the Arab press. Roed-Larsen went on to note the same day that the degree of world-wide solidarity on this issue was “remarkable.” The demands for full and complete Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon came not only from Washington and Paris, but also from Amman and Riyadh.
Reports on how the actual visit with the “President” of Syria have just come over the wire, and it appears that Roed-Larsen wasn’t exaggerating the message he had been instructed to deliver:
Roed-Larsen arrived in Syria from Lebanon earlier Saturday and held a meeting with Assad that was attended by Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa and his deputy Walid al-Moualem, [said] the Syrian Arab News Agency.
The envoy said the meeting was ``very constructive'' and he was ``much encouraged by President Assad's commitment to the full implementation'' of the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for Syria's immediate withdrawal from Lebanon.
Assad decided a week ago to call Syria's 14,000 troops home after relentless U.S.-led international pressure and anti-Syrian protests in Lebanon. By late Friday, almost all of Syria's troops in Lebanon had moved into the eastern Bekaa Valley -- nearly three weeks ahead of a March 31 target date to complete the first phase of redeployment.
Larsen said the redeployment to the Bekaa Valley before the end of this month will include the withdrawal of ``a significant number of these Syrian troops, including intelligence,'' from Lebanon into Syria.
"The second stage will lead to a complete and full withdrawal of all Syrian military personnel and the intelligence apparatus,'' the U.N. envoy said, adding that he will continue his dialogue with Assad and other concerned parties. (Emphasis added).
We’re sure we all remember the last time a Scandinavian U.N. envoy delivered the same message as the President of the United States to an Arab dictator. We’re a long way from the days of Hans Blix and his fellow sneering “peace-makers,” who, by refusing to recognize that the United States had a legitimate national security interest in assuring Saddam Hussein’s full compliance with all U.N resolutions, made war inevitable.
What is responsible for the momentum of change sweeping through the United Nations at the moment?
The answer lies in four related but separate phenomena: Fox News and other conservative media, the rise of the Blogosphere, the Republican majority in the United States Congress and, most importantly, the President himself. Each has played a role which, together, has created a moment of pressure that is bending an unwilling United Nations to the American view of what is to be done.
Fox News and the Oil-For-Food Scandal
First, it is clear beyond doubt that had Fox News not pursued the United Nations Oil-For-Food Scandal, no one would have. It is simply a fact that the kind of international bureaucratic corruption the story implicates is of no interest whatsoever to the MSM, for reasons both political and cultural.
Political, because to target one’s political bedfellows is simply bad tactics. Much better, like in today’s Washington Post for what must be the 116th time, to take perfectly ordinary Congressional junkets attended by left-wing-scare-monster Tom DeLay and sneer and slime about it enough until there is the “appearance” of scandal. (The next step in the liberal playbook of course, is the serious and high-minded editorial that points out that while no actual corruption can be proved in this instance, it is the duty of all good public servants of the Republic, and especially [insert conservative’s name here], to resign since even the appearance of corruption weakens our democratic system and the public’s faith in our institutions of government.)
Cultural, because despite all evidence to the contrary, it is simply a matter of faith among liberals that the United Nations is an embryonic trans-national governing body that uses democratic norms to enforce the ever-increasing tangle of legal obligations that will usher in, if not world government, at least an international consensus of good behavior. It simply stuns and amazes us that people continue to believe this despite the record of abject failure of the U.N to act in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Cambodia, Iraq and, now, Sudan. Fortunately for liberals, there are always a number of academics to explain why the latest genocide is really the United States’ fault, Rwanda being only the latest example.
(We’re also sure all good liberals would have cheered President Clinton and lined up around the block to enlist had he ordered the invasion of Rwanda, its occupation and the spending of multi-millions of dollars to clean up the mess afterwards. We’re also equally sure that Clinton would have debated the matter for 9 months and gotten Security Council approval for such a war before going in, just like he did when he went to war against a European country, Serbia, and bombed its capital, Belgrade, with an emphasis on targets downtown. But, we digress.)
The basic outlines of the Oil-For-Food Scandal are well known, and there is no need to go over the damning evidence which even the U.N. Secretary General now admits reveals serious issues of corruption. What is more important was the impact of the story on American public opinion. By September of 2004, during the height of the Presidential campaign, a Fox News poll revealed that:
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54 percent of the U.S. public believes the United Nations does not reflect the values of average Americans. Only 29 percent say that U.N. policies reflect said values.
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Without a doubt, Fox News and Fox News alone pushed this very important story out into the open air and full sunshine. And Americans discovered they didn’t very much care for what that sunlight illuminated.
The Blogosphere and United Nations Corruption
Closely related to the pressure brought to bear on the United Nations by the United States’ most popular cable news network was the pressure of the new media and the Blogosphere. In addition to amplifying and providing a neutral ground for a free discussion about the Scandal, the Blogosphere also allowed people to exchange little-noticed news stories about the war crimes being committed by U.N. forces in Asia and Africa.
With the world’s MSM obsessively focused on the idiotic actions of a handful of reserve MPs at Abu Ghraib, U.N. forces were, among other things, using refugee children for sex and trading food aid (most of which was donated by the people of the United States) for sex from desperate refugees.
We understand that the U.N. depends on the military contribution of member nations to staff its peacekeeping operations and, further, that many of these units come from nations with no real military tradition beyond “he who has the gun rules and takes what he wants.” Nevertheless, the fact is that the U.N. is directly responsible for these troops and their actions in the field. Certainly, had any American troops even been remotely involved in any of these actions it would be the lead story in the world’s MSM for months on end.
By January of this year the Blogosphere had managed to keep these stories on the radar screen to such an extent that even the BBC took a break from making stuff up about the Prime Minister and took notice:
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A United Nations inquiry has found that UN peacekeepers working in DR Congo sexually abused girls as young as 13.
The report by the UN watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, investigated abuse allegations in the north-east Congolese town of Bunia.
The probe found a pattern of sexual exploitation of women and children, which it said was continuing.
Head of UN peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno said he was outraged and angered by the abuse.
The report said many of the victims were under 18, with some as young as 13.
They were usually given food or small sums of money in return for sex.
The investigation looked at more than 70 allegations against military and civilian UN personnel in Bunia.
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It found seven cases against UN staff, all but one of them peacekeepers, involving sexual exploitation of under-age girls, were fully substantiated.
While these stories and others continue to go unnoticed in the American and the European left, except insofar as they are useful to question the motives of those who raise them, they have not gone unnoticed by the American people. Neither were their elected representatives sleeping.
The Republican Majority in Congress and the United Nations
We simply do not feel it is possible to overstate the significance of the fact that during this time when the United Nations was falling into disrepute there were Republican committee chairmen with the understanding, ability and power to do something about it available. Like the MSM with the Oil-For-Food Scandal, had the Democrats still been selecting committee chairs, nothing much would have come of the revelations beyond a few press release sound bites.
Leading the charge for reform and accountability in the U.N. is House Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays, chair of the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, and Republican Norm Coleman of Minnesota, chair of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee’s investigative subcommittee.
Both of these men has used the power of the U.S. Congress, specifically its power to subpoena, to force answers and accountability out of a recalcitrant U.N bureaucracy. Had no Republican majority existed, neither would have been in a position to ask questions, let alone lead investigations. Instead, we would have been at the mercy of men like Senator Carl Levin whose skepticism of everything President Bush says is matched only by his inane gullibility when confronted by a statement by anybody with U.N. credentials.
Of course, the real power here is exactly the power the Framers intended Congress to wield: the power of the purse. The simple fact that the United Nations relies on funding from the United States, and, thus, the approval of the United States Congress, has concentrated the mind. Congress has tried using withholding dues in the past as a lever to force change, to mixed success. This time, however, with a growing consensus that the United Nations is not reflecting American values or concerns, when added to the obvious existence of the worst sort of corruption at Turtle Bay, the power that be in the U.N have evidently decided that Congress could do its worst and not pay a heavy political price for doing so.
The President and John Bolton
All of this provided the strategic backdrop behind the President’s brave and shrewd choice of John Bolton to be the next U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton, a fierce critic of the United Nations, enters the body at a time when it knows it is effectively on probation in the eyes of the USG and most of the American people. Since the above collection of pressure points has lead the U.S. to a position of influence and unprecedented opportunity to reform the U.N and change its role, a critical reformer like Bolton is exactly what is needed.
Not that this is appreciated on the left. Making us even more happy that he doesn’t occupy the Oval Office, Senator John Kerry yet again revealed, as he did during his campaign, a kind of political immaturity and stubborn inability to grasp the issues when he remarked:
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"This is just about the most inexplicable appointment the president could make to represent the United States to the world community," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.
He said Bolton's nomination "carries with it baggage we cannot afford."
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Apparently Senators like Kerry, Dodd and “Slow Joe” Biden think that now that we have an unprecedented opportunity to press for a more American-friendly multilateralism and true reform at the U.N., now is the time to send someone in to apologize.
The fact is that today’s visit by a U.N. envoy to Damascus to repeat what are essentially American demands reveals that not only are Kerry, Dodd, Biden and the MSM hopelessly out-of-touch they are also hopelessly wrong.
By their own standards and statements, the actions of Fox News, the Blogosphere, the Republican Congress and the President should be alienating the United Nations, making true multilateralism well nigh impossible. Instead, what we are seeing is a U.N. leadership now moving in ever-closer lockstep with American concerns. Looks like Chimpy McBushitler has once again out-smarted both the American and international left.
On Bolton’s nomination, at least one man disagrees with Kerry and his crowd:
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United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today warmly congratulated John Bolton on his nomination to be the next United States Permanent Representative to the world body and looks forward to working with him on UN reform, among other issues.
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Whatever his other faults (and they are many) Annan is a man with the ability to clearly see the handwriting on the wall even as over-smart New England dullards continue to miss the forest for the trees.
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