Posted on 12/10/2004 9:32:33 AM PST by Area Freeper
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In wine, the experts say, vintage is everything. If that's the case, 2004 has turned out to be a very bad year for the United Nations. But the United Nations' vinegar may yet prove to be a very good thing for the rest of us -- particularly if the decision is made to break open the casks, pour out the putrid contents and start over.
For adherents of "internationalism" and "collective security" at the United Nations, 2004 has been a tough year. The "Oil-for-Food" scandal, a story that first broke on Fox News, now has "legs" of its own -- and investigators are honing in on those closest to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
To make matters worse for the egocentric Annan, George W. Bush, the man who challenged the United Nations to live up to its own stated resolutions and responsibilities -- and was castigated for doing so -- got himself re-elected. And now, just as Annan is planning to put the arm on American citizens for a multibillion-dollar makeover for his palace in Turtle Bay, along comes his handpicked "High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Changes" with a report that indicts the United Nations for its ineffectiveness.
It all points to a remarkable opportunity for the world's democracies to clean up the festering mess that the United Nations has become -- and create something more suited to the 21st century's new world disorder.
Though the multibillion-dollar Oil-for-Food scam has yet to rise to the level of importance in the U.S. media as the Scott Peterson trial, the international press corps -- usually sympathetic to the United Nations -- has started snooping around in France, Germany, Russia, China and the half-dozen other countries where officials may be implicated.
In the U.S. Congress, there are calls for Annan's resignation and measures to hold corrupt U.N. officials -- now immune from prosecution -- accountable for crimes they commit "while on duty." In Baghdad, FBI investigators, working with Iraqi and U.S. Justice Department prosecutors preparing the case against Saddam Hussein and other high-level officials of his regime, are weighing how they can learn more about how U.N.-administered funds were siphoned off to buy weapons, enrich Saddam and line the pockets of mendacious foreign officials and U.N. bureaucrats. And at the U.N. headquarters, Paul Volker, perhaps prodded by tenacious investigative journalism by Fox News correspondents Eric Shawn and Jonathan Hunt, is promising a "full and fair" report that will expose who got what, even if it goes "to the top" of the U.N. pyramid.
None of this is good news for the long-tenured Annan, who is scheduled to remain in office until 2006. But Kofi is fighting back, collecting billions of dollars to refurbish the 58-year-old U.N. headquarters building in New York -- and build a new 35-story complex next door for an even bigger world-governing bureaucracy. He dismisses his troubles as the consequence of a "conservative, anti-U.N. rabble" -- just trying to make trouble for an international institution that they never liked anyway.
But what no one should ignore is the scathing internal critique proffered by the United Nations' own "high level" panel on U.N. reform. Though the committee's findings fall short -- ignoring for example, the Security Council's anti-Israeli bias, the Human Rights Commission's embrace of dictators or the Refugee Organization's unwillingness to keep terrorists from overtly using U.N.-administered camps in the Middle East as recruiting centers -- they are telling nonetheless. The United Nations's failures in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Congo are as inescapable as the well-documented collapse of the Iraqi disarmament program in the 1990s that led to the current U.S.-led war in Iraq.
Unfortunately, because the authors of the report are U.N. bureaucrats and the United Nations is their sinecure, the committee is unwilling to suggest the unthinkable: doing away with the Security Council as irrelevant to the realities of the 21st century. Yet that is the inescapable conclusion for the democracies bearing the burden of an increasingly expensive, moribund bureaucracy that has proven itself inadequate to the task for which it was founded.
The anemic prescription for improvement -- a recognition that pre-emptive military action is legitimate -- as long as it passes a U.N.-test for approval -- is ludicrous. So, too, is its proposal to expand the Security Council from 15 to 24 members. Courage, once Dan Rather's favorite word, demanded a more realistic proposal: keep the General Assembly open as a place to debate how many blankets are needed to help assuage a humanitarian disaster like an earthquake -- and replace the Security Council with a new Democratic Alliance.
Such a proposal will, of course, create great angst from those who believe that the United Nations -- an entity that has up till now found itself unable or unwilling to even define "terrorism" or "democracy" -- can somehow resurrect itself. That should not deter those democracies -- who know well who they are -- from creating an organization that is capable of bringing multilateral action to bear against adversaries like Al Qaeda, or its ilk.
To do less in this window of opportunity invites anarchists like Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and rogue leaders like those in Pyongyang and Tehran, to further adventures. This is the time to scrap the United Nations as we know it today -- and start over so that our children have a better tomorrow.
No, no, a thousand times No. Don't give into these neocon proposals. We are a sovereign nation, and all we need to do is simply reclaim our sovereignty. A "Democratic Alliance" would be even more powerful than the current UN, and would sap our sovereignty that much further. Don't go there.
Ollie ping
They should shuttle the UN over to France where it belongs. I deliver goods in NYC right near there and I`m sick of these freggin` Diplomats parking anywhere they please, in front of loading docks, or having their freggin` missions block off entire streets so Abdul from Arabia can park his 20 limos. The city must spend a fortune on these idiots, not to mention the police who have to stand guard in front of these jackass diplomats multi-million dollar condo buildings. I was in one last year and it`s unreal, private chefs, maids, butlers for one freggin` guy who probably votes against the US 99% of the time.
Just a small nit pick, but it was Claudia Rosett of the WSJ who has done great work on this story, and has been for some time. Fox has done great work as well.
Yes, and the bills that go with it.
There is no perfect solution.
1)These world bodies are un-elected.
2)High sums of money are funneled into these organizations.
These two facts help produce a culture that is ripe for corruption.
If we disband the U.N. and create a new body, it will eventually resemble the body we disbanded.
Yet, there are times when a world body is useful to serve as a forum for heads of government to assemble and be heard. In matters of world wide threats like Communism, Nazism, and Terrorism.
In current practical terms we cannot withdraw from the U.N. unless nations vulnerable to the prejudices of the U.N. join us (Israel).
Also, there is the consideration that the U.N. currently acts as a buffer to prevent the rapid strengthening of the E.U., as well as prevents a void that a country like China would fast move to fill. The U.N. has been shown to be a weak corrupt body. It still remains the premier challenge to U.S. authority. In absence of this weakened body we would face challenges from half a dozen nations (and a few dozen third worlds) in a race to determine which nation will earn the right to be our premier opposition.
I do think this has been behind the administration's decision to strengthen NATO and the U.N.
The fall of the U.N. is now inevitable given the scandel that expands at every moment, the only question is timing. IMO, I don't think Bush wants it to implode in the midst of the WOT. Barring that option, he would like to have an operating world body ready to fill the void of power before challenges of other nations mount.
Agreeed!!!!
The United Nations should be replaced by a United Democratic Nations. If a nation does is not a democratic republic or a constitutional monarchy with a democratically elected legislature, that nation should be ineligible for membership. Nations which are dictatorship, oligarchies or which have other forms of governments which are not truly democratic should be barred from membership and any nation which reverts to a nondemocratic form of government (a government such as Iraq which claims to be democratic because it has elections even though there is only a single name for each post on each ballot) should be expelled.
Each nation should receive as many votes in the General Assembly should receive the integral number of votes equal to its number of citizens of voting age divided by 10 million. Countries that most people have never heard of except in a UN news release which have 50 to 100 thousand people will get zero votes but will be heard in the General Assembly.
The dues should be paid by those nations with at least one vote in the General Assembly. The budget will be prorated by the number of votes. Any nation which would be entitled to a huge number of votes (say China with about 1 billion people which would entitle China to 100 votes -- assuming China ever became eligible to join the United Democracies) in the General Assembly will have its number of votes reduced if it does not pay its dues on a basis pro-rated to what it pays in dues. If the US pays its dues, it will receive its 28 votes. If China only pays 10% of dues, it will receive 10 votes.
The only nations which will be represented on the General Assembly will be those nations which pledge to enforce United Democracies Security Council rulings with military force. No nation without a military of at least 50,000 will be eligible for a seat on the Security Council. No nation which does not pay its full dues will be allowed to hold a seat on the Security Council. The number of votes each member of the Security Council will have will be determined by the cost of supporting the number of troops that nation has committed to operations supported by the United Democracies Security Council in the past 10 years. For example, if the United Kingdom is bearing 25% of the cost of existing United Democracies peace establishing and peacekeeping missions in the past 10 years (or since the inception of the organization when each nation would have one vote), the United Kingdom would receive 25% of the votes. That is, we should not allow some piss-ant nation like Mozambique to determine on an equal footing with the US and UK where US and UK troops should or should not be used. The initial membership of the United Democracies Security Council should be the US, the UK, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Japan as those nations have shouldered much of the burden of enforcing the UN Security Council's resolutions and have demonstrated a desire to export democratic ideals and to oppose totalitarianism in recent times.
If we were to try to realign the UN to give vetos to the countries that truely deserve them (such as China and India) there is a good chance the rest of the world would vote us off the Security Council.
Several conservative pundits have suggested that France doesn't deserve a veto, but China does. The only way to rectify that would be with some sort of vote, in which case there's a chance we could be removed as well. We are not popular at the UN, and France is.
No, the only way to rectify it would be for France to agree to give up its veto. There's no way to do an end-run around a country's veto power.
By the way, China does have veto power.
Bush and his Father are both "new world order" zealots. Who would they get to dictate to the world if the UN was scrapped?
This President only became a "new world order zealot" when the terrorists forced his hand. He ran on an anti-nation-building platform, but he had no choice but to seek regime change in Afganistan, Iraq and soon elsewhere.
Bush loves the UN.
Did it stop him from disobeying a direct order from them?
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