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COMMENTARY
September 17, 2005
The nuts, & Bolton
The United Nations celebrated its 60th anniversary this week, with one of its giant confabs by Turtle Bay, kicked off with addresses from President Bush and others. According to the programme notes, this “world summit” was to the purpose of reforming the venerable organization, so that it might better tackle terrorism, poverty, political oppression, recurring genocide, and similar global inconveniences.As usual, the result was a farce. The various large voting blocs, consisting of alliances between numerous poor, backward countries under unaccountable, irremovable, dictatorial regimes, led the way in blocking each Western proposal in their usual way. We have the Arab League, the Islamic Conference, the African group, and the Non-Aligned Movement, whose overlapping memberships create a working majority in the General Assembly. They vote with disciplined consistency to prevent anything being done that might advance such causes as democracy, free trade, legal transparency, bureaucratic accountability, or the defence of the most elementary human rights. They were able to prevent passage, this time, even of a resolution that would condemn in principle the gratuitous slaughter of civilians. This on the argument of Arab states that it might benefit Israel in some way. Anything that is achieved, is done through the Security Council, where for the present membership is restricted, and urgent business can be piloted by the combined action of the five founding permanent members (an artefact of the victory parade at the end of World War II). And yet the single most earnestly proposed “reform” is to wash out this arrangement with new permanent members, and thus make the Security Council yet another grandstanding venue. The massive bureaucracy which the UN sustains, at headquarters and in its sprawling regional offices, notoriously does more harm than good to anything it touches. Even the defensive Volcker Report, on UN management of the vast “oil-for-food” fraud that preserved Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq while laundering money on a globally unprecedented scale, gives hint of the degree of corruption. Other investigations, brought through Western pressure, have exposed the role of UN peacekeeping missions in spreading prostitution and child abuse almost everywhere they have been sent. And U.N. health and aid programmes achieve almost uniformly counter-productive results, usually from ideological motivations. While dictators in the Third World, and liberal politicians and pressure groups in the West, continue to affirm some mysterious “moral authority”, the reality is that the UN has evolved into a gargantuan lobby to resist the spread of democracy and constitutional government, protect established criminal behaviour, and advance utopian projects that no electorate on the surface of the earth has ever supported. The current secretary-general, Kofi Annan, whose own brother and son are deeply implicated in kickback scams (along with a cross-section of his most senior bureaucrats), is the ultimate author of “reform” proposals that do not merely ignore the known causes of corruption and ineptitude, but would enlarge the possibilities for them, by spawning extravagant new layers of unaccountable bureaucracy. In an important article in the (U.K.) Spectator this week, the exiled Canadian journalist Mark Steyn did the best job I have yet seen of adumbrating the whole mess (in more words than I have at my disposal this morning). It is a great pity we can no longer read him in the Canadian mainstream media, for in addition to his celebrated wit, he has the broad grasp of events, and focused horse-sense to make him unquestionably our country’s leading journalist. If you can find it, go read: “There is no cure for the UN.” Here’s the nub. Were serious reform of the UN accomplished, it would be turned from an ineffective anti-American and anti-Western organization, into an effective anti-American and anti-Western organization. That is absolutely inevitable from the membership structure, with its voting blocs. So, better a UN that continues in a state of abject dysfunction, than one that can be more efficiently evil. Back to me. It would follow, on the usual paradoxical principle, that it was rather dumb of President Bush to send, as the new American representative, John Bolton. He is a man committed to making the UN work, and whose reputation portends he will press for reform effectively. That is: dumb, for precisely the opposite reason from that presented ad nauseam by the liberal media, Democrats, Euros, leftists, etc. They thought it made no sense to appoint a man who would resist their own consensus. But perhaps, by further paradox, the critics will turn out to be right, and Mr Bolton the obstructionist will make consensus on any effective reform of the U.N. impossible. In which case, praise the Lord. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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