U.N. Scandals--Who Cares?

Simply put, the United Nations is a mess. It never achieved its founders' dream of becoming a global parliament, first because of the cold-war's bi-polar stalemate and then hysterical third world anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. It rarely held the moral high-ground, mostly because a majority of member states remain thuggish dictatorships. After more than a half century, only two sorts of Middle-Eastern Arabs can vote in fair elections: (1) Israeli Arabs; and (2) Arabs diplomats representing their dictator in the U.N. General Assembly.

And it's getting worse. According to the December 13th National Review (available on line as of December 7th), the oil-for-palaces scandal is:

more than just the biggest scandal in the U.N.'s history; it may well be the biggest financial fraud in modern times. Set up in the mid-1990s as a means of providing humanitarian aid to Iraqis, the Oil for Food program was subverted and manipulated by Saddam Hussein's regime, allegedly with the complicity of U.N. officials, to help prop up the Iraqi dictator. Saddam's dictatorship was able to siphon an estimated $21.3 billion from the program through oil smuggling and systematic thievery, by demanding illegal payments from companies buying Iraqi oil and kickbacks from those selling goods to Iraq.

Saddam's intentions weren't a secret--the money built 19 rococo presidential palaces, imported weapons despite U.N. sanctions, and "bought" allies to veto any invasion resolution:

The report largely implicates France and Russia, whom Saddam Hussein targeted as he sought support on the UN Security Council before the Iraq war. Both countries were influential voices against UN-backed action.

A senior UN official responsible for the scheme is identified as a major beneficiary. The report, marked “highly confidential”, also finds that the private office of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, profited from the cheap oil. Saddam’s regime awarded this oil during the run-up to the war when military action was being discussed at the UN.

Oil-for-food profits were intended as emergency relief for ordinary Iraqis outside of Saddam's control. Instead, Saddam got most of the money, and turned America's UN opponents into a "coalition of the bribed" that wouldn't budge. So, notwithstanding widespread criticism of Bush's negotiation skills, no diplomacy--Republican or Democrat, tough or "nuanced"--could have changed the outcome.

Saddam also bought the UN itself, starting at the top. According to the report of U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer (page 33) UN Diplomat Benon Sevan, executive director of the Iraq program, got vouchers for more than 7 million barrels of oil from Saddam. Though he denies the allegation, Mr. Sevan fled New York a month before his term expired and since has refused to meet with investigators. And Reuters reports that Secretary-General Kofi Annan's son Kojo "was paid $2,500 monthly -- a total of $125,000" by a Geneva-based company who got Iraqi oil vouchers. Hundreds more U.N. staffers are being investigated.

Not satisfied with a financial scandal, the U.N. added several sex scandals:

The UN chief suffered another blow yesterday when he was forced to admit that civilian and peacekeeping personnel on UN duty in Congo had committed acts of gross misconduct. Officials plan to make public on Monday the lurid results of their investigation into UN officials having sex with under-age local girls.

This follows repeated similar allegations about other U.N. offices. Dissatisfied that the Secretary General "overruled the findings of an inquiry into groping charges against the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers," U.N. staff this week approved a resolution expressing "'no confidence' in the world body's senior management."

Reporter Claudia Rosett has done more to expose U.N. corruption than anyone. In her view,

The importance of this story involves not only undisclosed conflicts of interest, but the question of the role of the secretary-general himself, at a time when talk is starting to be heard around the U.N. that it is time for him to resign, and the staff labor union is in open rebellion against "senior management."

She believes that getting "to that bottom will need a much harder look at the top--where Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself resides."

Secretary General Annan's not been shy about expressing his opinion, says the Chicago Trib:

He has pronounced the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein to be "illegal," and he warned before the recent assault on Fallujah that a military campaign and "increased insurgent violence" put Iraq's January election at risk.

If only the Iraqi people could hear the secretary general summon equivalent candor about their billions of dollars in oil money that Saddam Hussein looted while Annan's UN looked the other way--or corruptly assisted.

But Annan's suddenly silent, and the U.N. is stonewalling investigators as if it were a mafia family.

What to do? The National Review has two suggestions:

Future U.S. funding of the United Nations should depend on substantial, not cosmetic, reform. The outcry over Oil for Food may ultimately lead to a reformed, streamlined, and transparent U.N. Annan should get out, well before his term expires at the end of 2006; prospective candidates are already jockeying for position. The U.N. needs to clean up its act and make a fresh start; Annan's resignation may not be a cure for the U.N.'s ills, but it would be a step in the right direction.

Professor Reynolds endorsed the second idea and suggested an alternative: Vaclav Havel, former President of the Czech Republic. It's a great notion. However, ColdFury and others doubt Annan can be induced to leave.

Even if Annan were replaced, would it be enough? Diplomadic, a group blog by career U.S. Foreign Service officers, is pessimistic that leadership change could prompt organizational reform:

Even the much praised UN technical agencies, such as those dealing with refugees, are bastions of waste and corruption. No need here to discuss the disaster that is called UNRWA and what it has done to set back peace in he Middle East for nearly 55 years, all the while providing lucrative employment for generations of UN bureaucrats. The much-ballyhooed UN Development Programme (Note: Although the USA pays the lion's share, the UN uses British spellings) likewise is hugely expensive, over-staffed, painfully slow in delivering meaningful assistance, and rife with anti-Americanism. These programs [or, if you prefer, programmes] generate a blizzard of statistics showing that everything, everywhere is getting worse all the time, and desperately requiring more money for more UN programs and agencies.

The American taxpayer is getting ripped off in a big way by the UN. The "need" to play the UN's political games damages the US ability to act forcefully in its own interests. If the UN wants to stay in New York and frequent the bad restaurants and bars that have sprung up around UN HQS, that's fine -- but not with US tax money.

It's not just Americans who are short-changed--the U.N. seemingly can't even tie its own shoelaces lately. On Friday, the U.N. admitted it "is failing to protect millions of people displaced by conflict in Sudan's Darfur region and violence in other hotspots around the world." The U.N.'s recent fiascos are well known but rarely discussed:

[T]he real reason this wasn't reported was because the media didn't want to do anything that might belie John Kerry's claim that the U.N. was the panacea for all of the world's problems. With the oil for food scandal, this scandal and the allegations of graft that have the UN staff considering an unprecedented vote of no confidence in Kofi, the media, after having ignored these real stories for over 8 months for political reasons, will have to start playing catch-up with all the under-reported news of the past year, especially since the American people levied their vote of no confidence in the UN a few weeks ago.

Conclusion: Thank God our President doesn't apply any sort of "global test." America's foreign policy cannot be predicated on the agreement of thuggish dictatorships or bribed "allies."

Kofi should go. But I wouldn't spend a dime of U.S. diplomatic capital on the effort. Nor would I withdraw from, or expel, the organization--it's not worth the negative publicity.

Captain Ed urges vigorous reform:

More and more, the UN reveals itself to be a noble idea but mostly a failed experiment. The democracies should construct a new multilaterial organization to deal with security issues. Otherwise, the oppressors will continue their cruelties through the auspices of the United Nations, demeaning the US and other democracies that lend it credibility and its victims false hope.

I say, "why bother?" I'd continue the Congressional investigations, and push for the promised January release of the U.N.'s internal investigation of Oil-for-Palaces. But that's all. America's already founded a "coalition of the willing" in Iraq, and diplomacy will be more effective in ad hoc multilateral, or targeted bi-lateral, discussions.

This isn't your father's U.N. anymore. It's no world government and certainly no moral paragon, especially as compared with the United States. Rather, the U.N.'s become irrelevant. America's best response: ignore it. The U.N. will either reform and mature or remain and meander. I'm entirely indifferent.

More:

Thomas Bray in Sunday's Detroit News:

[T]he problem with the United Nations goes far deeper than Annan's questionable leadership. Annan, who has spent virtually his entire career as a UN bureaucrat, last year appointed a group of elderly statesmen to assess possible reforms in a world much changed since 1945, when the United Nations came into existence.

Their report is due in several months. But even that isn't likely to get at the more fundamental question of why the United Nations should be considered much more than an occasionally convenient place for diplomats to jaw about things.

The United Nations and, before it, the ill-fated League of Nations were predicated on the belief that the chief threat to peace and human decency was nationalism. What was needed, it was thought, was a collective counterbalance to the nation-state, a trans-national agency that would uphold ideals of freedom, peace and prosperity against future Hitlers and Tojos.

But this ignored harsh realities. Few of the 191 member states would recognize true freedom if they stumbled across it. Most are dictatorships or squalid, dysfunctional principalities and kleptocracies with little interest in real human rights. The all-important Security Council might include France, England and the United States, but also the Soviet Union, which was committed to imposing communism on as much of the world as possible.

Just how absurd the United Nations has become is highlighted by Libya's recently serving as head of its Human Rights Commission -- and the U.S. seat on the commission was handed over to that garden spot of liberty, Syria.

While nationalism certainly has a dark side, what reason is there to think a world government of some sort would be better? As the oil-for-food swindle makes abundantly clear, the politics of the UN is pretty much like politics everywhere: a mix of high hopes (feed the Iraqi people), low motives (award the lucrative contracts for oil to Saddam's French and Russian friends) and a self-interested bureaucracy (cover up the crime).

Still More:

Follow-up stories Monday by William Safire (in the NY Times) and Glenn Reynolds (WSJ). And RightWingNews intervews Jed Babbin, deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H. W. Bush Administration, author of Inside the Asylum: Why the United Nations and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think, and a contributing editor of The American Spectator Magazine and a contributor to NRO:

I don’t think the UN is ever going to really be of assistance in the war on terrorism because if you look at the make-up of the UN you see that of 191 members, fewer than 50 are democracies. So basically 3 out of 4 of the members of the UN are despots, dictators, rogues and terrorists themselves. ...It’s about as good as making a big plea to the Mafia to come in and help you clean up corruption.