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COMMENTARY
January 21, 2004
Odd couple
The United States and the United Nations have come to detest one another insofar as two stupendously large bureaucratic organizations are capable of manifesting human emotions. Thanks to the throat-clearings of its secretary-general Kofi Annan and to debates in e.g. its Security Council the whole world knows what the U.N. thinks of the U.S. (and Israel). But what I find interesting is the degree to which the sentiment has come to be reciprocated even in Washington's state department -- the closest thing the U.S. government has to a world federalist cell. One gets the tone speaking to almost anyone in there but especially towards the top where I suspect Colin Powell the secretary of state has taken almost personally the numerous attempts by U.N. officials to sabotage his diplomacy and question his honesty in presentations of fact. The mutual antagonism was even more apparent in the last couple of weeks when the head of the U.N.'s IAEA Mohamed ElBaradei manoeuvred to claim some of the credit for the opening of Libya to atomic inspections. The state department's John Bolton (arms control undersecretary) immediately fired a rhetorical shot across his bow. The final exposure of the Libyan secret weapons programmes depended on an Italian and U.S. interception of a German-owned ship at sea carrying Pakistani-designed centrifuge parts to Libya from Malaysia via the Gulf. It depended originally on long-applied secret diplomatic pressure from the Blair and Bush administrations clinched by the exhibition of their power in Iraq. The U.N. had nothing whatever to do with any part of it. Mr. Bolton wanted Mr. ElBaradei to be darn sure everyone understood that before granting the IAEA the right -- not to shoulder in on the U.S. and British investigations in Libya but to monitor and confirm their results. The latter were not prepared to surrender control to an outfit that has proven its incompetence again and again -- in Iraq Iran Korea Pakistan -- and incidentally Libya. Worse the U.N. appears to have bartered away the expertise it had in weapons inspection until the early 1990s in the glory days of "Unscom" -- an agency under usually aggressive leadership which actually did succeed in finding all kinds of serious things Saddam Hussein was hiding in Iraq. For complex and unedifying reasons that agency metamorphosed into the aptly-named "Unmovic" under the leadership of Hans Blix -- a low-key inspector short on expertise who thought his job was to prevent the U.S. from acquiring a pretext for direct action; and whose lumbering inept probably infiltrated operation may have allowed Saddam to remove prize exhibits to Syria and elsewhere. The case of the IAEA is somewhat different because it never was much use -- having failed to adapt to new international circumstances after the Cold War. It acts more as an information clearing house than as the last line of defence against the sudden evaporation of New York London or Rome. There are strong indications the U.S. and company have broken open a huge ring of lethal weapons dealers centred in Pakistan's secret nuclear programmes. They are astounded by the scale of operations of which the IAEA had no clue and are only beginning to make a reckoning. Naturally the U.N. whose job it was to do what the U.S. and company are now doing for themselves want to get in on the action. And this for the oldest of bureaucratic motives: for they now need a reason to exist. The U.N. is no good at doing anything that requires muscle or nerve. But it is perfectly good at counting beans or refugees or votes. It has retained considerable expertise in organizing refereeing and monitoring free elections which are -- thanks to the muscle and nerve of such as Bush and Blair -- now required in Iraq. And because the U.N. can at least pose as a disinterested party it is in a position to broker agreements between contending factions that such interested parties as the U.S. and U.K. are not. That is why the U.S. and friends have been since the fall of Saddam begging the U.N. to come in and do its stuff. But the U.N. still sulking from the invasion it was unable to prevent and stinging from the terrorist firebombing of its field headquarters in Baghdad is playing hard to get. In short it won't do what it's good at and no one else can do; it insists on doing what it's no good at and someone else is doing. In the background the Bush administration and a surprisingly large number of European and other states far from giving up on the U.N. are pushing for its comprehensive reform; with resistance from all the usual suspects. Listening recently to Kofi Annan's musings I would no longer bet this isn't going to happen. What we have here is a marriage of convenience between the U.S. and U.N. -- our new international odd couple. They need each other -- the U.S. being the needy partner currently in Iraq and the U.N. almost everywhere else. Circumstances are forcing them to work together and they may soon co-operate whether they like it or not. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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