Uno Will Fail

[Craig Read]

The UNO is becoming very quickly a failed experiment in internationalism. Too big [55000 employees], too fat [untold waste overlap and corruption], unfocused, and immature this organisation is more of a hindrance than a help in most areas it concerns itself with.

It will never agree internally on reform. Without reform and focus it will die. This is to be applauded, unless the UNO becomes fit, liberal, transparent and shelves its designs on world government through stupidity like the Kyoto accord, we should merrily push it into oblivion.

Even many of the U.N.'s supporters acknowledge its limitations. "It's good for going after health challenges. It's good for dealing with environmental issues ... with human rights. It's good for resolving regional issues as it's done in East Timor," Secretary of State Colin Powell said in an interview in September. "But don't ask it to do things it may not have the competence to do."

Less noticed, the debate has reached inside Mr. Annan's inner circle. In November, he appointed a panel of prominent politicians, former diplomats and U.N. heavyweights to help develop a vision for the U.N.'s future. The panel held its first meeting earlier this month in New York and agreed to keep details of its discussions under wraps. But stark differences have already emerged that, in many ways, mirror the broader debate over whether the U.N. should become more ambitious or more focused.

Some panel members want the panel to deal simply with how the U.N. addresses the core issues of war and peace. Others want to consider a smorgasbord of threats to collective security, from genocide to AIDS. Then there are those who would tackle a grand reform of the U.N.'s basic structure, starting with the Security Council.

The 'inner circle' of King Kofi's palace can't even decide if to decide on a decision of reform.

What a place.

[Neal.F.]

Craig, if anything, the UNO is too liberal already! I know you are referring to classical liberalism, a term which relatively few understand. "Liberal" today has come to mean Michael Moore, Pierre Trudeau or Hitlery Clinton.

I can see the point of the existence of an organization where various governments can get together and discuss how to deal with various issues & problems in the world on a co-operative basis, it must not serve as a supranational governing body.

For one thing, it has no business operating a "world court", nor should one nation which decides to act in its own interest, (as all inevitably do), have to go and beg for permission to do so. Should issues like Iraq be brought up before the international community to see if the problem can be resolved peacefully, or with the assistance of other willing nations? yes. Should the UNO be able to tell the US that unless France, germany China and Russia agree, the proposed operation is not legitimate? No.

Don't be surprised if one fine day the UNO tries to have George Bush and Tony Blair prosecuted as war criminals.

We don't need Blue helmeted peacekeepers. Coalitions of the willing should be formed for such eventualities. That way no soldier may ever have another allegience than to serving his country in the manner he is asked.

Essentially, the UN should exist so that global problems can be addressed, and coalitions of the willing can do something about them. The idea of one-world socialist government must be abandoned.

[Craig Read]

Neil i fully agree you stated:

For one thing, it has no business operating a "world court", nor should one nation which decides to act in its own interest, (as all inevitably do), have to go and beg for permission to do so. Should issues like Iraq be brought up before the international community to see if the problem can be resolved peacefully, or with the assistance of other willing nations? yes. Should the UNO be able to tell the US that unless France, germany China and Russia agree, the proposed operation is not legitimate? No.

Sure or to declare as it did on Nov. 10 1975 that Zionism is a form of racism. This mind numbingly dumb resolution, and it is just one amongst hundreds, does nothing to enhance credibility.

The UNO was conceived to discuss issues and bring peaceful resolution to international tensions. It was not intended to replace the nation state.

News bulletin: THE NATION STATE IS NOT DEAD.

The nattering left proposes the following misconceptions that feed the UNO process. None of them are true:

-Nation state is obsolete crushed by globalisation from above and regional interests from below

-Globalisation means that only cross border solutions will work

-National interests are never in line with the world's greater interests

-Cultures, ideals and faith affiliations trump nationalism

Globalisation does not exist as presented in the media. Any accounting of trade, finance flows and flows of people and power, make the left liberal argument that globalisation is crushing the nation nescient and malinformed. There are financial, communication and technology forces that are global but they operate entirely within frameworks set by nation states.

Nation statism will be around forever. If it does disappear it will take centuries. Given this fact, why then do we put up with a mealy mouthed UNO regime replete with left liberal philosophical cant that is anti-modern, anti-western and anti-nation state ?

[Michael Hardner]

Some of these are interesting ideas, but they're also rooted in the current interests of the US, and their superpower status.

When the UN was formed, the picture was not so clear. The nations of the world aren't interested in having their economies dictated by US or European based supernationals, and look to the UN for protection.

You can say what you like about corrupt and inept governments in many small nations, but destroying the UN will not solve these problems. What will ?

I also find it strange that the US decries the UN so much when it holds so much power there. The US and it's closest ally Britain hold two of the five 'veto' votes.

Does anybody think that a restructuring would allow this to continue ?

Also, although the UN is inefficient and ineffective in many respects it has also done a lot of good with infant immunization and emergency relief in the 3rd world.

And - and I know this is a sore point - the environment. It makes no sense to discuss the global environment on a nation-by-nation basis.

Globalization may not have done away with nation-states but it has made the world a much smaller, and more closely-knit place.

[Craig Read]

The UNO is so useless it descends into farce at times.

Witness the ICJ - a Canadian idea - whose time never should have come.

Milosovic and his party have resurfaced as a powerful bloc in the Serb's recent election. This says much about the idiocy of UN-ICJ processes as it does about the sad state of political and mental affairs in paranoiac Serbia.

The vacation-like leisurely pace of Hague tribunal procedures has given Milosevic, a platform for preaching to followers back home that they are victims of an international hate-Serbia cabal. They are, after all, being tried in a Dutch courtroom before a Jamaican judge by a Swiss prosecutor, in full sight of Serb TV viewers. In the eyes of ardent Serbian nationalists, these once-disgraced hoodlums have become martyrs.

As a result, Milosevic's and the Socialists, boosted by his campaign speeches from The Hague, got 22 seats in the 250-seat chamber in Sunday's elections. Worse the 'Radicals' won the most seats, 81, of any party - and they are the ultra-nationalist left wing party. They are led by Seselj, who's awaiting trial in The Hague for his role in Bosnia's bloody ethnic cleansing campaigns.

Insanity.

Like any other political institution, a judiciary derives its legitimacy from the people it serves. Everyone, even the most odious leader, deserves to be judged by his own peers. The Hague fails on these counts. More perversely, the far-off cases in the Netherlands made The Hague itself, not the perpetrators of Balkan atrocities, the big story of the election campaigns. Thousands of Serbs complicit in war crimes of the 1990s were let off the hook, and Serbia has been thus far denied its reckoning with history.

Welcome to the UNO !!! Where the motto is 'We love dicators and tongue depressors don't send the right message'.

[Morgan]

Speaking about the future of the UN, I wonder if any media types will dare do a follow up on the UN and the $ that came through its hands in the course of running the food for oil program in Iraq?

I wonder if the truth were exposed on this issue if it would cause such an uproar in the US that President Bush would need to re-think ponying out UN dues and expect American taxpayers to pick up the tab for Iraq's re-construction.

Here's a story that came up in the WSJ about the UN corruption involved in the Food for Oil program. But I've not read any good follow-ups. Strange...

Enron style accounting in the UN's food for oil program in Iraq, Sept.25/02, WSJ

Who is Saddam Hussein's biggest business partner?The United Nations. The same U.N. whose secretary-general, Kofi Annan, stands as one of the chief ditherers over removing Saddam.

Here are the ingredients of a conflict of interest.Under the U.N.'s Office of the Iraq Program, which supervises the six-year-old Oil-for-Food Program, the U.N. has had a hand in the sale of more than $55 billion worth of Iraqi oil.  Iraq ships oil out to U.N.-approved buyers under the terms of the sanctions agreement. The U.N. vets the inflow of "humanitarian" imports into Iraq.The process is simple. Iraq contracts to import goods, and the U.N. gives the outside vendors cash collected from the oil sales.

The U.N. has approved about $34 billion in such deals so far. The money it hasn't yet doled out--at least $21 billion--sits in U.N.-administered bank accounts. U.N. officials refuse to divulge much information about these accounts--not even the countries in which they're held. Measured in dollars, this is by far the U.N.'s largest program. The sums involved are large enough--and their handling has been perverse enough--for this program to deserve more attention than it has so far received.

Conceived in 1995 as a way to deliver humanitarian aid despite sanctions against Iraq, Oil-for-Food has matured into an unholy union between Saddam Hussein, with his command economy, and the U.N., with its big, buck-passing bureaucracy. By now, the two are effectively partners in what might just as well be called the Oil-for-U.N.-Jobs program. Even with its weapons inspectors barred from the country, the U.N. by now has 10 agencies employing 900 international staffers and 3,000 Iraqi nationals inside Iraq to administer the program, plus another 120 or so in New York.

Combining Iraq's oil exports and aid imports, they oversee a flow of funds averaging about $15 billion a year, more than five times the U.N.'s core annual budget. 

Even assuming the utmost integrity by the U.N. staff, it is worth asking whether Mr. Annan and his entourage might by now have a stake in the status quo. In which case, listening to Mr. Annan's views on Iraq makes about as much sense as once upon a time heeding Arthur Andersen's pronouncements on Enron.Making this picture all the more Enron-like is the extent to which Mr. Annan and his crew have winked at Iraq's gross violations of U.N. agreements, and not only on weapons inspections. The U.N. sanctions on Iraqi oil sales were meant to stop Saddam from diverting oil revenues to his own uses. Instead, they provide a facade of control that is dangerously misleading.

Saddam has been getting around the sanctions via surcharge-kickback deals and flat-out smuggling, to the tune of $3 billion a year, according to the dossier released yesterday by Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Back in May, The Wall Street Journal's Alix Freedman and Steve Stecklow gave a thoroughly documented account of how Iraq "has imposed illegal surcharges on every barrel of oil it has sold, using a maze of intermediaries to cover its tracks." Last week, the Washington-based Coalition for International Justice released an exhaustively researched 70-page report, detailing Saddam's dodges and how this year alone, despite "smarter" U.N. sanctions, he will rake in billions for his "personal treasury."

When President Bush on Sept. 12 addressed the U.N., he charged that Saddam has "subverted" Oil-for-Food, "working around the sanctions to buy missile technology and military materials." So the remaining virtue of the U.N.'s Iraq program would have to be the humanitarian relief. Not quite. Under the Oil-for-Food deal, it is not the U.N. but Saddam who decides what is needed, who in Iraq gets what, and which countries he should contract with. He must submit his proposals to the U.N. Security Council, which can turn them down. But the bulk of his requests are approved. The U.N. then disburses the cash from the "Iraq accounts" and monitors the delivery, trying to ensure it follows Saddam's plan.

The result is that U.N.-approved aid goes to reinforce Saddam's control over what is already a Soviet-league state-run economy. Part of what helped Saddam rise to power in the first place was Iraq's embrace in the 1960s of Soviet-style central planning, which by rationing goods and controlling people's livelihoods serves as a powerful tool for political control. Today, with private business largely smothered, except in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, the only significant source of foreign exchange is oil. All oil in Iraq belongs to the state. Saddam decides who will benefit from its sale, and who will be deprived. "The government of Iraq has the sole responsibility for allocating the money," says an official of the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food Program. "We cannot tell them, we only advise them."

An author of the Coalition for International Justice report, Susan Blaustein, notes that Saddam has stolen Iraq's oil from his fellow countrymen. She points out that in accommodating this arrangement, "the U.N. is colluding in that theft."The U.N. designates that Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq is to receive a share of the Oil-for-Food revenues, with some of that administered on the ground directly by the U.N. It is Saddam, however, who controls the buying of food and medicine. Though the U.N. has allocated $6.8 billion for northern Iraq since the start of the program, only $4.6 billion has been contracted for. Even less has been delivered.

Under the category of medical supplies, for example, only 28% of the total allocated funds have been translated into goods received. While billions sit in U.N.-run accounts, sources in the north report shortages of such staples as surgical gloves.

Delving into these matters gets tough, because the U.N. shuns transparency. Given that more than $20 billion from the Iraq program is now sitting in U.N. escrow accounts awaiting some combination of Saddam's planning and U.N. processing, one wonders which banks, and which of those countries now taking part in the Iraq debate, might be getting thick slices of Saddam's business. A few years ago, all Oil-for-Food funds were kept at a French bank, Banque Nationale de Paris. More recently, the funds have been diversified among five or six banks, according to U.N. treasurer Suzanne Bishopric. But the U.N. does not permit her to disclose the names or locations of the banks, or details such as interest accrued."We don't like to make public where our money is," says Ms. Bishopric. 

Who audits the program? It's a strictly insider job: The U.N. secretariat, supplemented by a rotating set of member nations, with the task currently delegated to the government of the Philippines.Neither does the U.N. disclose which countries get what amount of Saddam's trade. Oil industry experts say France and Russia--both of which have resisted removing Saddam--have led the pack, with billions in deals. Russia being a big oil producer itself, these purchases are not for home consumption, but for resale at a profit. 

An official in the U.N. controller's office says he is forbidden to disclose figures on Iraqi trade with individual countries. "If I did, I would get an earful from the countries' missions."In another craven move, the U.N.'s Iraq program even allowed Saddam to dictate in October 2000 that he no longer wanted the Oil-for-Food accounts to be held in the currency of the enemy, meaning U.S. dollars. Obediently, the U.N. switched all Iraq funds from that stage forward to euros, in effect helping Saddam impose his own version of sanctions on the U.S. 

What helped breed this monstrosity of a program was a system that at its inception sounded worthy enough. To fund most of its operations, the U.N. has to assess its members, rattling the cup for funds. Not so with Iraq. Oil-for-Food aims to make Saddam's government pay for all the evaluating and inspecting and directing meant to ensure that Saddam's oil gains go for humanitarian uses. So the U.N. plan allocates various percentages of the revenues for different parts of the program.Today, that means 59% for Baghdad-controlled central and southern Iraq, 13% to the autonomous Kurdish north, 25% for Gulf War reparations and 0.8% for weapons inspections (what weapons inspections?).

And--oh yes--2.2% for U.N. administration of the program, $1.2 billion so far. That's enough that the U.N. secretariat, awash in Iraqi cash, has turned over a surplus $211 million for aid to Iraq. That still leaves a cumulative $1 billion bankrolling U.N. administration of a program that by now, in effect, has the U.N. working, on commission, for Saddam . As a man of integrity, Mr. Annan might want to footnote that in the debate over what to do about Iraq.

Poor Kurds. UN money held in French bank(s)? Russia and France getting the lion's share of Iraq trade. Saddam wanting money in Euros...but note what he carries on himself as "spare change" - US money - ha, ha, ha!

[udawg]

That way no soldier may ever have another allegience than to serving his country in the manner he is asked.

Just a side note. There's a series of books by Orson Scott Card about some military geniuses, children bred to command the human forces in a battle against the alien attackers. Good books, all of them, not the point however.

In the third book of the series, a war is set to erupt on earth, after the aliens have been defeated. For years, this outside threat has caused international differences to be set aside. Now that the threat is gone, all the countries have national interests as priorities again.

Makes for good reading, if you look at the subtext, where the children have to decide between serving their birth countries and serving the interests of the world.

[Craig Read]

I probably erred when i posted this - the Title should be "UNO HAS failed." Sorry to have offended those who knew the obvious.

I pull this out of some writing i did previously - it sums up pretty well the insipidity of the Useless Nattering group:

"The UN's charter proclaims that "faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, and in the equal rights of men and women" are principles central to peace and security. Regrettably, the U.N. has failed to act upon the centrality of human rights to its mission. Secretary-General Kofi Annan apparently recognized this reality in his Nobel lecture when he said: "The sovereignty of states must no longer be used as a shield for gross violations of human rights."

Since the U.N.'s creation, millions have been killed, maimed, starved, tortured or raped by brutal rulers whose governments nevertheless wield great influence in the U.N. General Assembly and the Security Council. These facts clearly reflect the inadequacies and failures of the U.N. For example, North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong Il, has inflicted a holocaust on his people. Defectors and observers have estimated that more than a million people have starved to death in brutal Gulag-type camps. The resulting flood of refugees into China, where an estimated 360,000 North Koreans may now be hiding in an effort to escape brutality, has not produced action in the U.N., though the U.N. High Commission on Refugees is fully aware of this human catastrophe. China classifies these tragic human beings as "economic migrants" and "not refugees," while cynically embracing the refugee convention as the "Magna Carta of international refugee law" and thereby earning the applause of U.N. officials.

The U.N. Human Rights Commission has become a travesty. Two years ago, the U.S. -- which has worked diligently to make the commission an effective instrument -- was replaced by Syria, a corrupt, totalitarian supporter of terrorism. This year, in spite of American efforts, Libya was elected to chair the commission, an egregious challenge to the commission's integrity considering Libya's rule by a militant tyrant responsible for the 1988 bombing of a U.S. civilian jet in Lockerbie in which 270 people were murdered. U.S. opposition to Libya was supported only by Canada and Guatemala; 33 countries voted for Libya, while our European "friends" conspicuously abstained from voting at all. In electing such states as Syria, Libya, Vietnam, China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Zimbabwe to serve on the commission, the ostensible guardian of human rights, the U.N. has forfeited its commitment to those values.

In 1948, the U.N. recognized Israel as a new state and member. Shortly thereafter, Israel's Arab neighbors -- refusing to accept the U.N. decision -- invaded Israel. Since that time, and until quite recently, neighboring Arab states have publicly considered themselves in a perpetual state of war with Israel, and have acted accordingly. How has the U.N. responded? Since 1964, the Security Council has passed 88 resolutions against Israel -- the only democracy in the region -- while the General Assembly has passed more than 400 such resolutions. The U.N., an organization committed to peace, permitted Yasser Arafat to address its General Assembly in 1974 with a pistol on his hip, and subsequently formed -- under U.N. auspices and with U.N. funding -- three separate entities with large staffs which advance the Palestine Liberation Organization's anti-Israel agenda: the Division for Palestine Rights; the Committee for the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People; and the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Human Rights Practices Affecting the Palestinian People. No Arab state has ever been chastised by the U.N. for actions against Israel and for its defiance of the 1948 U.N. resolution.

Is it any wonder that many Americans hesitate to place their security concerns in the hands of the U.N.?"

It is no wonder - the real wonder is why does Canada support it ? [the reasons are selfish of course].

[Craig Read]

The Cdn media has not reported anything on the most important and RELEVANT multi-lateral initiative on security in quite sometime - called the PSI - the Proliferation Security Initiative. PSI is mandatory in a world of terror and WMD.

Canada just joined the PSI program btw. Though the media have reported 0 on this.

The PSI allies have agreed to interdict shipments of WMD, delivery systems and related materials at sea, in the air and on land. More than 50 nations have signed on to PSI's principles and may be called on should their help be needed.

The Proliferation Security Initiative's 11 original participants

Australia Italy Portugal

Britain Japan Spain

France Netherlands U.S.

Germany Poland

[Canada, Norway and some others have now agreed to join the original 11]

But to really annoy the socialists and libs there's no headquarters, no secretary-general, no talkfests -- and, perhaps most important of all, no French or Russian veto. "PSI is an activity, not an organization," a senior US official states It's an action-oriented group that "needs to be agile and move fast."

Case Example Libya:

The media dwell on helicopter crashes in Iraq and tell you that Afgh. and Iraq are disasters. Untrue - but easier to report on then say PSI and Libya.

The Brits and the Yanks provided intelligence, learning in late September that a freighter bound for Libya was carrying thousands of parts for centrifuges, a key component in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. With the help of the German government and the German shipping company that owned the freighter, the U.S. got the ship diverted to a port in Italy, where it was boarded and the illicit cargo seized.

PSI is a worthy international operation and should receive more Cdn support - meaning de facto we need more military spend. As well the media should be reporting this not ignoring it.