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March 29, 2005
Reform at the UN - or Replacement?
The other day in the paper I saw the following story about the United Nations:
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan yesterday called for an international inquiry into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, after an initial U.N. inquiry found that the Lebanese government, intelligence and police services had bungled the criminal investigation.There may have been a time when I would have applauded this type of action, and believed that such an inquiry might get to the bottom of the matter. After all, the Lebanese police can hardly be expected to issue any report critical of Syria, the likely perpetrator. But those days are long passed.
The scandals and problems at the UN are many, so please excuse me if I miss a few;
- Oil-for-Food ('nuf said there)
- Peacekeepers in Congo, Somalia, Kosovo, and elsewhere raping and otherwise sexually abusing the very people they are supposed to be protecting
- Failure to provide relief to the victims of the recent tsunami, and then attacking the United States for forming a coalition of nations who were successful in bringing aid
- Failure to stop what is just about genocide in Sudan
- A Security Council that will not enforce it's own resolutions
- A Security Council that passes an ever-increasing number of resolutions to little or no effect on the world scene
- They put the worst human rights violators on the planet in on the UN Human Rights commission
- Iraq under Saddam was voted chair of the UN Committee on Disarmament
- A General Assembly that, in general, is virulently anti-Semitic and shows it in their actions and speech
- The World Conference on Racism, held in Durban South Africa 2001, turned into an anti-Semitic and anti-American hate-fest
- They promote fatally flawed treaties such as the Kyoto protocol on "global warming", which would have the effect of crippling the US economy
- The promotion of the World Court, whose purpose would be to prosecute Americans and Israelis, while largely ignoring third-world kleptocrats
The situation has gotten so bad that even Kofi Annan has recognized that something needs to be done. As such, he has issued a 62 page proposal for reform, the text of which can be found here.
The Grand Bargain
According to the Financial Times, (hat tip Belmont Club), what Annan has in mind is a kind of "grand bargain" (the FT article is subscription only, so I'm going on what Wretchard has on his site)
Mr. Annan's officials say the package basically proposes a bargain whereby rich countries help the poor to develop, by promoting the Millennium Development Goals, while poor countries help alleviate rich countries' security concerns. In both cases, Mr Annan says, action must be underpinned by respect for human rights.Of course this means more money from the United States, Europe, and other developed nations. Don't count on any of them to support this.
And, as Wretchard points out, by "security", Annan means the Security Council. And forget about going around it. From the text of the UN report, Annan says "The task is not to find alternatives to the Security Council as a source of authority, but to make it work better"
Without going into details, Annan proposes increasing the size of the Security Council by adding members from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. He offers two proposals, which vary by the number and term of the new seats, and whether they are permanent or rotating.
This is not a plan for action; it is an attempt to permanently prevent action. With so many competing interests on the Council, gridlock would be enshrined forever.
If would also, of course, have the effect of diluting American power. As it is today, the council would not vote to enforce their own resolutions regarding Iraq.
Even if we buy the notion of a "grand bargain", it is hard to see how and deal would work. Is Annan saying that the underdeveloped nations could attempt to "buy off" their votes each time an Iraq-like situation arose? Does anyone seriously expect such a deal to work?
Perhaps we should back up a moment. What is the purpose of the UN? In another post, Wretchard thinks that the UN can or should fill these rolls:
- To set a global agenda that brings the principal concerns of the nations to the forefront. This is the function that the General Assembly is supposed to fulfill;
- To keep the peace through the collective action of the Great (a function of the Security Council) and;
- To provide essential international services, which nation-states would not provide otherwise, through specialized technical agencies.
Wretchard proposes a electronic "moderated forum", by which I think he means web-based discussion group. Nice idea, but no one will buy it. Honest discussion is the last thing third-world kleptocrats want.
My Analysis and Recommendations
Fundamentals
The basic problem with the United Nations is that all nations are admitted as equals, regardless of their form of government or human rights records. Every country is simply a "member state". The UN is not immoral so much as it is amoral.
It is for this reason that it cannot agree on a simple definition of "terrorism", or for years a resolution remained on it's books equating "Zionism" with "racism". It is also why China, Cuba, Egypt, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe can be on its Human Rights Commission, and why Saddam's Iraq could chair it's commission on disarmament.
The Security Council
We need to forget trying to change the Security Council. The entire purpose of the Security Council is to prevent action. The founders set it up with a balance of power in mind that would prevent the most powerful nations from waging war with it's approval. And given that they had just finished a world war that left 52 million dead, this was hardly an unreasonable goal.
The Cold War may have been marked by stalemate, but it was a stalemate of which Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have approved. I also think that it was a good thing.
The world has now moved beyond the Cold War. Instead of containment, we are now properly trying to encourage and spread freedom throughout parts of the world (Reagan's "rollback" was nothing compared to what is happening today, apologies to the Gipper).
Stalemate is no longer acceptable, if we believe that Security Council authorization is necessary in order for war to be legal and just. One of the most unfortunate consequences of the Gulf War was the notion that only the Security Council can authorize war. Since I can think of no reorganization of that body that would make it act in a more responsible manner, and since I certainly do not accept the idea that only it can authorize war, I propose that we simply ignore it.
Let the left scream. It's what they're best at, anyway.
At this point we need to stop and point out the founders of the UN, most notably FDR, can be forgiven if they foresaw none of this. As I mentioned, their objective was to prevent another world war, and in that they succeeded.
The General Assembly
In the General Assembly all nations have one vote regardless of GDP or population. Fortunately it is also powerless. Nevertheless, it can be quite troublesome, especially when it passes odious resolutions such as the infamous one which equated Zionism with racism.
We cannot do much about this body, and although it is troublesome it is also powerless. My proposal is to let it be.
Peacekeeping
As Captain Ed has noted, the UN recommendations on ending sex abuse by it's own peacekeeping troops is nothing but a whitewash. The UN "solution" is to simply transfer responsibility to the nations that provide the troops. But this would leave the foxes to guard the henhouse. The problem at the root of the sex-abuse scandal is that the governments whose armies are involved condone, tacitly or otherwise, this type of behavior. Attempts to enforce standards of behavior are not likely to succeed given the nature of these governments.
We therefore need to require that nations who wish to send peacekeeping troops meet minimum standards of democracy and human rights within their own countries. Given that
they see peacekeeping as a moneymaking enterprise (the UN pays them much more per soldier than they cost to support) they will have every incentive to reform. They will squawk loudly at first, and there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but we can succeed if we do not blink.
Financial
I believe that it is impossible to seriously reform the United Nations. I would therefore withdraw as much monetary support as we legally can and then proceed to ignore it.
Our task, then, is to build an alternative institution or institutions. It or they need not even be permanent, but may be ad hoc, that is, designed to meet a present need, and then disbanded when it's goals have been met. This institution(s) would be built around several principles:
- Membership is dependent upon having some basic form of representative government
- Membership is dependent upon meeting basic human rights standards
- Withdrawal from the organization is an option
- The organization exists for a specific purpose, and once it has achieved its goal or met its objectives it must disband or reorganize
- The Council for a Community of Democracies - founded in 2001, " a leader in the worldwide Community of Democracies, an inclusive transnational movement fostering democracy and cooperation among the world’s democracies and assistance to aspiring democracies in their transition through a new Democracy Transition Center;"
- The Proliferation Security Initiative - a global effort that aims to stop shipments of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), their delivery systems, and related materials worldwide. Members of the PSI are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, the UK and the US.
Posted by Tom at March 29, 2005 11:28 AM
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Comments
Hello. nice book. thanks
Posted by: Tartrate at February 22, 2007 3:27 AM
