Turtle Bay Tea Party
Kofi Annan wants to reform the U.N. again. Watch out for your wallet.

BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, June 29, 2005 12:01 a.m.

The threat of the U.S. withholding cash from the United Nations has sent Kofi Annan into overdrive recently, with the secretary-general putting his name to yet another round of articles proclaiming such stuff as a fresh start and much progress and grand plans for reforming the U.N.--which he is particularly practiced at, having done it twice already, in 1997 and 2002. 
This is a moment at which there is much to be learned about the U.N., though less from Mr. Annan's epistles than from the realities that have engendered them. We'll skip lightly past the footnote that Mr. Annan's articles lauding his own plans and importance are actually written by members of his ample public relations staff, whose tax-free salaries are covered in substantial part by U.S. taxpayers. We'll pause only for a moment to note that Mr. Annan, having denounced the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein as illegal, managed in a Washington Post piece last week to credit himself for progress in Iraq with nary a nod to the U.S.--though the vital act allowing for all that Iraqi forward motion was the toppling of Saddam Hussein. 
And we'll give Mr. Annan the benefit of the doubt. Surely it was just another of his memory lapses, similar to those encountered by investigators of the Oil for Food scandal, that led him to omit any mention of the sacrifices of the Americans, British and other non-U.N. coalition members who for more than two years have been clearing and securing the way for the Iraqi progress about which he is now preening. 
Let's even assume that this time, his record of failures notwithstanding, Mr. Annan is serious about U.N. reform. Who knows? At this stage, the secretary-general may be able to glean some pointers from the eight or nine or 10 investigations (even France has finally found it unavoidable to launch one) still trying to mop up after his own mismanagement of the U.N. Oil for Food Iraq program--the signature relief deal of Mr. Annan's U.N. leadership to date. Oil for Food fortified Saddam, helped corrupt the U.N. Security Council, and has since provided such diversions as the evolving tale of how the U.N. Office of the Iraq Program happened to hire a company that for more than five years paid the secretary-general's own son for not working in West Africa. 
Why despair? Mr. Annan might yet take a cue from the report of the U.S. bipartisan task force on U.N. reform, which urges that U.N. managerial practices be backed up by some form of adult supervision. It might even help focus his thoughts that the House on June 17 passed a bill by Rep. Henry Hyde that would slash U.N. funding if the U.N. doesn't shape up--though the U.N. Secretariat's main focus so far seems to be lobbying the public, and the Senate, to drop the idea. 
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But as Mr. Annan sets the stage for his next reform jamboree at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly this September, there's something the rest of us need to understand. On the 38th floor of today's U.N., whence top management holds forth, there is one thing that matters more than anything else. It is not grand diplomacy. It is not world peace. It is not global prosperity. And it is certainly not transparency or any big push for democracy. It is money. 
That might at first sound odd for an institution that to a great extent still works on what was once known in the last century as the Marxist principle of reallocating resources from each according to his ability, to each according to his need--starting with U.N. dues, and proceeding posthaste to the needs not of the word's poor and downtrodden, but of the U.N.'s own largely secret and erratically audited multibillion-dollar menu of ever-expanding projects. As we learned at great cost in the last century, the result of allowing secretive and unaccountable authorities to do all sorts of deciding about who deserves what is not utopia. It is more like George Orwell's 1984. 
For the core budget alone, the U.S. has been assessed this year for well over $400 million, or somewhere in the neighborhood of more than 10 times the amounts paid by China and Russia combined. That's despite the reality that though both those countries also find funding enough at home to field lively military programs, both--like the U.S.--enjoy permanent seats on the Security Council. And neither is exactly a force for enlightened governance. 
That's disturbing. But if there is one item in all Mr. Annan's talk of reform that should provoke distinct horror, cold sweats, and mighty fears over the trajectory of the U.N., it is a small cipher embedded in Mr. Annan's tastefully printed and expensively bound proposal for U.N. reform, In Larger Freedom, Annex item No. 5(d). That would be the proposal that developed countries contribute 0.7% of their gross domestic income to the cause of official development assistance. 
For the U.S. alone, where gross national income now totals about $11 trillion, that would add up to more than $82 billion per year--by itself more than 10 times what the U.N. has already failed miserably to manage well. And though Mr. Annan does not spell out exactly how such official aid would officially reach its intended beneficiaries, the clear implication is that it would go through the official U.N.--generating a great gush of cash, with no more need for the U.N. to worry about reform, or Mr. Annan and his successors even to strain themselves sending staffers to lobby Washington, or signing self-laudatory Op-eds. 
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Sound familiar? It should. It is unnervingly similar to the U.N. arrangement via Oil for Food in which Saddam paid 2.2% of his oil revenues to the U.N. to supervise the program. As long at the deal continued, the flow of funds to the U.N. was automatic. And because the money belonged by rights to the people of Iraq, but Mr. Annan did his U.N. deals not with them, but with Baghdad's tyrant, the effect was taxation without representation. The predictable result was a carnival of graft in which both Saddam and his biggest business partner, the U.N., hoodwinked the general world public and short-changed most of the 26 million Iraqis who were neither family members of U.N. top officials, nor cronies of Saddam. 
Investigators are still trying to follow the money from that last U.N. grand scam. To think seriously for even a second about Mr. Annan's plan to levy a percentage tax, of any size whatsoever, on the GDP of the developed world, is a route not to help for the hungry, but to Orwell's Animal Farm. The European Union seems so far to find this acceptable--perhaps because the continental elite know that once again, America would pay the lion's share of the biggest bonanza that global bureaucracy has ever seen. But the idea ought to inspire Americans, at least, to take those costly copies of Mr. Annan's reform report (round III) and, in the spirit of Boston, 1773, throw a Turtle Bay Tea Party. 
Ms. Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Her column appears here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe on alternate Wednesdays.
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