Rely on the U.N.? Are You Kidding?

by George Melloan
March 16, 2004 
Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/PA2VJBNA4R/snippet/0,,SB107940240359656394,00.html

After the U.S. and Britain invaded Iraq a year ago, Secretary-General Kofi Annan told listeners at the United Nations that there is lots of unhappiness in this building. Well, now we can see why. Who would have known better the new dangers to the U.N.'s reputation opened up by the possibility that Saddam Hussein's private files would soon become public knowledge? 
It was by then widely understood that Saddam had corrupted the U.N.'s huge oil-for-food program, but the extent of that corruption would not become public until Saddam's friendship list became public this year. As the Journal's Therese Raphael wrote1 last week, the U.N.'s own Benon Sevan, director of the program, was on the list and a letter was unearthed at the Iraqi oil ministry further implicating him in Saddam's hanky-panky.
There were a lot of people on Saddam's honor role, which helps explain the opposition to the war at the U.N., in Russia, in France and even in some influential quarters of the U.S. The Bush administration was charged with unilateralism, meaning it didn't get U.N. final approval before pulling the trigger. These critics seemingly never paused to wonder whether Vladimir Putin and Jacques Chirac were practicing a little unilateralism of their own with the not-very-respectable motive of protecting themselves from embarrassment.
U.N. dignitaries say with a wee bit of justification that they were just administering a faulty program designed in the Security Council. It allowed Saddam too much leeway to evade U.N. sanctions by giving him control over the choices of who could buy Iraqi oil and who could ship in food and medicines. Naturally, the Iraqi gangster would find ways to skim off billions of dollars from the roughly $100 billion in contracts he was allowed to enter into during the course of the now-defunct program.
But that doesn't let the U.N. off the hook, and investigators in both Iraq and the U.S. are going to want to know more about how the program was managed. They will want to learn about how the U.N. itself was given a stake in the form of the commissions it received for what we now know was sloppy, to say the least, administration. The U.N., for all its high-flown pretensions, has never been a model of transparency. This will be a good occasion to pry open its broom closets and see what dirt got swept behind the doors.
Somewhat more to the point, since this is an election year in the U.S., is the debate over whether the U.S. should scrupulously adhere to multilateralism when addressing an international problem. Bill Clinton thought so, which is why those problems piled up during his eight years in office. John Kerry, who bids fair to be the Democratic candidate this year, seems to think so too, although the agile Bostonian is adept at straddling any issue and taking it to both the right and left simultaneously.
Mr. Bush was under enormous political pressure last year to get Security Council approval for going to war in Iraq. He took the process as far as he could without being forced by France, Russia and the disapproving Mr. Annan to abandon the whole project. Ostensibly, this is what his critics wanted, although don't bet that they wouldn't have then adopted a new line of attack, calling him an indecisive weakling.
But that was then and this is now. The war demonstrated the formidable power of the U.S. military. The monstrous extent of Saddam's savagery was made public with the discovery of mass graves. We now know that he managed to corrupt the U.N. itself, along with some leading politicians in its member states. The world, in short, looks a lot different than it did a year ago.
What we know now is that multilateralism -- the code word for going to the U.N. -- doesn't solve problems. It just buries them. The U.S., which was the prime mover in establishing multilateral bodies such as the U.N., the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and others after World War II, must still take a firm hand in guiding them over a half century later.
With the U.N., that is admittedly difficult. Early on, it became the central political arena for Cold War debate. In the all-nation General Assembly, states governed by wily dictators sometimes gained ascendancy over democracies, as is manifested by the presence of Libya, Cuba and their ilk on the Human Rights Commission. The United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) in Paris became so corrupt that the U.S. and Britain pulled out of it in the mid-1980s, with the U.S. returning only recently. The Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome adopted voodoo science, condemning a modern technology, gene-splicing, that improves crop yields. The Environmental Program employed more voodoo to create the global warming scare, a scheme for taxing the industrial nations into poverty. A body supposedly designed to preserve world order has allowed several genocides -- in Cambodia and Rwanda, for example -- to go unpunished.
And on and on. So much for multilateralism. But the U.N., despite its failures, does have a certain utility. It gives national leaders the protective cover of international law when they must use military means to remove a threat to world peace. The U.S., as the world's most powerful nation, must always lead such efforts; but the U.N. provides a convenient umbrella for others to follow.
In a new book entitled America's Inadvertent Empire, (Yale University Press) William E. Odom of the Hudson Institute and Robert Dujarric of the National Institute for Public Policy discuss America's even greater responsibility for world order now that the Cold War is history. [T]he United States is in a strategic position for which history offers no precedent, they write, because of the sheer magnitude of U.S. power in all its dimensions, from economic, to demographic, to military, to scientific, to cultural. When the additional power of U.S. allies is considered, the magnitude is truly staggering.
The obvious conclusion: America has no choice but to lead. The United Nations, for all its failures, is a sometimes useful adjunct. But it is no substitute. And neither is that favorite notion of the left, multilateralism.