http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=F9F154B3-B1AB-4155-8E16-
B0FE541FC8F3
Rearranging the Deck Chairs at the UN
By
<file:///C:/Program%20Files/Common%20Files/Microsoft%20Shared/Stationery/aut
hors.aspx?Name=Joseph Klein> Joseph Klein
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, January 23, 2008
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is certainly a big improvement
over his predecessor, Kofi Annan. His quiet diplomacy and relative
even-handedness in dealing with such issues as the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict during his first year in office are a refreshing change from
Annan's disastrous tenure. However, in terms of the institution, the change
at the top has made little difference. The United Nations continues to
spiral downward.
Especially disappointing is the situation in Darfur, where there was a
glimmer of hope last year that a combined UN-African Union peacekeeping
force could be put in place which would be large enough to stop the mass
killings there. Ban admitted at his first press conference for 2008 that he
has only 9000 out of the estimated 26,000 soldiers needed. "That is why we
are very much concerned about this ongoing deteriorating situation in
Darfur", he said.
Things have not worked out as Ban had hoped because the Sudanese government
has thrown up all manner of obstacles and China is still running
interference for its ally and major oil supplier. Seventy percent of Sudan's
Chinese oil revenues, which now top $1 billion per year, have been
reportedly used by the Sudanese government to attack the non-Arab population
in the Darfur region.
Another Rwanda is unfolding before our eyes. The UN remains impotent to stop
the genocide. All it seems that Ban Ki-moon can do right now is to continue
begging the Sudanese leader to cooperate, and to make symbolic gestures such
as he did last week in designating actor George Clooney as a UN "messenger
of peace".
The UN also remains a captive of the majority of member states controlling
the General Assembly - many of whom despise democratic values.
The UN's human rights apparatus is still in the clutches of the worst human
rights abusers on the planet, who pat each other on the back for their faux
commitment to human rights. Meanwhile, millions of dollars of U.S.
taxpayers' money are being squandered by these hypocrites on non-stop
investigations and condemnations of Israel. To his credit, Ban Ki-moon has
spoken out against this gross one-sidedness.
Iran continues to thumb its nose at the international community, flouting
Security Council resolutions already on the books regarding its uranium
enrichment program. It promises to ignore any further resolutions, even as
diluted as such future resolutions would be after Russia and China get
through with them. Iran's disrespect of the decisions of the Security
Council is rewarded by appointment of its representatives to high level
positions on UN committees. Iran is also a leading contender for a seat on
the Security Council next year. Ban Ki-moon should speak truth to power and
denounce Iran in no uncertain terms.
Corruption in the UN continues unabated despite some cosmetic improvements
that Ban Ki-moon has introduced. There are minimal controls to detect and
punish misbehavior. Whistleblowers are the ones who are punished for their
'disloyalty' to the UN bureaucracy. New financial disclosure requirements
have not been widely enforced. The audit function is stymied by lack of
resources and interference by member states, which fear their own corrupt
practices may come to light if the auditors are allowed to dig too deeply
into UN procurement practices that implicate officials in those countries.
Then there are all those alarmist reports that keep streaming from the UN
bureaucracy on everything from AIDS to climate change. The UN regularly puts
out reports that are full of exaggerated statistics and worst-case
assumptions designed to gather political and financial support for more UN
personnel, studies and conferences. In November 2007, for example, UNAIDS,
the United Nations coordinating organization to combat AIDS, conceded that
it had overestimated the size of the world-wide HIV-AIDS epidemic and said
that it would have to drastically slash the reported number of people
suffering from the disease.
Serious flaws have also been discovered in papers used and cited by the
United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ("IPCC") in its
own reports. Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen
countries, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC,
criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC. Unfortunately, playing on
the fears that these exaggerated claims engendered, Ban Ki-moon has added
his voice to the hysteria surrounding global warming, which he has called
the defining issue of our time. He even went so far as to blame the
slaughter in Darfur on climate change!
The wealth redistributionist philosophy is also still very much alive and
well at the United Nations. The UN's Millennium Goals started out as
aspirational targets for reducing poverty, eradicating disease, and
increasing the level of education in the developing world, with the help of
the more advanced economies. They have since been used as the rationale for
a multi-billion dollar foreign aid program, with quotas assessed against
each developed country on the basis of a fixed percentage of that developed
country's gross national income. The program would be administered by the
same UN bureaucracy that so distinguished itself with the Iraq oil-for-food
program.
Looking ahead to 2015, the year when the Millennium Development Goals are
supposed to be achieved, the United States alone would be assessed nearly
$140 billion in additional funding. Like all UN programs, the moment that we
insist on accountability for the money that we contribute, we are accused of
neo-imperialist interference with the sovereignty of the recipient
countries. Unfortunately, Ban Ki-moon has become as much of a booster for
this flawed give-away program as his predecessor.
Meanwhile, the UN General Assembly - dominated by the developing countries
that free-ride on the disproportionately large American contributions to the
UN's budget - is busy passing resolutions and taking actions that interfere
with our national sovereignty. A case in point is the resolution passed late
last year calling for a moratorium on executions in all member states that
still maintain the death penalty under their own duly authorized laws. Ban
Ki-moon started his term as Secretary General recognizing correctly that
"the issue of capital punishment is for each and every country to decide."
However, it did not take long for him to reverse course and parrot the
'official' UN establishment's opposition to the death penalty.
We have a Constitution and democratic system of government that has stood
the test of time, under which our own judiciary is fully capable of
determining the crimes for which the death penalty is legally permitted and
ensuring due process for all criminal defendants. We need no help from the
United Nations.
The UN is also lecturing us about how to handle our domestic problems. For
example, a UN official, who toured parts of Louisiana and Mississippi
devastated by Hurricane Katrina, declared that we are not doing enough to
abide by a set of UN principles on "internally displaced persons". The fact
is that since this hurricane hit in 2005, the government has spent more than
$7.7 billion on housing for about 1.4 million households. Many evacuees will
continue to be housed until March 2009 and will be given help to return to
New Orleans. It is true that all levels of government failed in their
initial response to the crisis, but our democracy worked as it should to
cast a spotlight on the problem and build public pressure for the government
to step in and alleviate the suffering. Again, the last thing we need is for
the United Nations to tell us what to do.
In sum, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has been unable to accomplish any
meaningful changes. He still presides over a bloated unaccountable
bureaucracy, which we prop up with billions of dollars of funding without
any significant influence over its budget. The UN remains an impotent body
in dealing with the problems of international peace and security that it was
set up to address. And it remains an Alice-in-Wonderland world in which
human rights are defined by autocratic regimes that routinely commit heinous
crimes against their own people.
Ban Ki-moon launched 2008 with a call for the United Nations to "rediscover
the pragmatism of its principles". Before that can happen, however, the
United Nations must rediscover the principles themselves upon which it was
founded. Sadly, that is not likely to happen.
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