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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (100218)	2/13/2005 2:46:49 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793731

Andrew Sullivan on the UN and Iraq American Future By Marc Schulman on UN I see little, if anything, to disagree with in Andrew's column in The Times (UK): timesonline.co.uk There’s no question that proven corruption at the UN will serve only to increase Washington’s suspicion of its activities, even its existence. Congressional committees are even now hard at work. In a Republican party where opposition to the UN is a surefire way to win primary voters in a few years’ time, the grandstanding has only just begun. At the same time none of this can be genuinely shocking. When a largely unaccountable transnational organisation filters billions of dollars into Third World countries via such countries’ representatives, corruption is inevitable. Kleptocrats do not good bureaucrats make. And because the UN treats every sovereign country as morally indistinguishable it cannot easily avoid the kleptocrats. Or the tyrants. That’s why the current UN Commission on Human Rights working group is made up of the Netherlands, Hungary, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe. No, I’m not making that up. Next up: Robert Mugabe on the gay rights commission; Kim Jong-il to monitor non-proliferation; and Ayatollah Khamenei on women’s rights. So we have a morally bankrupt organization claiming that it is the sole source of international legitimacy. What a joke. The Iraq case is particularly instructive. In Britain the debate over war hinged a great deal on whether the UN Security Council would give its blessing. The premise was that this would give the invasion some kind of moral legitimacy. In plain English: Vladimir Putin and Jacques Chirac were the critical arbiters of morality. But we now also know that the UN solution of sending round after round of weapons inspectors while maintaining sanctions and the oil for food programme was absurd. The inspectors could never prove what they were supposed to prove without Saddam becoming an entirely different kind of leader (and they would not have been sent at all without British and US insistence). The oil for food programme succeeded in minimising some of the deprivations experienced by the Iraqis, but it was also a critical source of funding for Saddam (and a bribery fund). More significantly, the majority of Saddam’s income in the 1990s came from illicit oil deals — often with the UN members who were supposed to be enforcing the sanctions. The only word for this is a farce — with kickbacks. Sullivan has this exactly right: Imagine we had followed the UN line and not gone to war. The corrupt oil for food programme would have continued, while pressure to remove sanctions increased. Saddam would have gradually rebuilt the ability to threaten the region and the world. Hundreds of shady businessmen, lobbyists and bureaucrats would have seen their bank accounts padded with lucrative oil contracts. The Iraqi people would have continued to live in a fast-collapsing police state, kept barely alive by medicine and food supplies from the UN that were also the means to keep them under Saddam’s thumb. How on earth would this have been anything but a disaster and an injustice? Yes, critics of the war are right to say that we now know the WMD threat was greatly exaggerated. But it is equally true that we now know that the status quo the war critics preferred was inefficient, corrupt and deadly to the Iraqi people. I’m not one of those who think the UN should be abolished. We need something like it. We need a forum in which the world can sometimes come together and discuss world problems. Where genuine peace exists it can make sense to send UN peacekeepers to police it. When international disaster strikes the UN can be a useful instrument for delivering aid. He's right here, too: But precisely because it has to represent all nations, it cannot represent justice or even any meaningful definition of the word “peace”. As long as Saudi Arabia is determining what human rights are, it’s a joke. Yes, it can be useful as a mechanism for the great powers to enforce their will in less naked and more consensual a fashion. But without those great powers, it’s useless. Remember Srebrenica? Or Rwanda? If the UN is powerless before genocide and corrupt in the face of dictatorships how can it be relied on to do anything of real significance in the world? That kind of work is left to the despised leaders of the West — the George Bushes and Tony Blairs and Michael Howards. They are accountable to voters, whereas UN bureaucrats are accountable once in a blue moon to Volcker. We have learnt a lot since the liberation of Iraq. Western leaders are fallible. They even occasionally preside over serious crimes in pursuit of their policies. But without these western leaders and military powers, the Taliban would still be in power and Saddam would still be skimming off UN dollars. And Annan would be making excuses. After all the huffing and puffing of the past three years, doesn’t that tell you all you really need to know? It sure does. But why is it that the world must rely on Anglo countries (America, Britain, Australia) to the exclusion of all others to actively oppose the "evil-doers?" What's wrong with the French and the Germans? Are they so intent on diminishing the power and influence of the Anglos that they will automatically and instinctively support any regime, no matter how despicable it may be?