Plus Ça Change …

By Joshua Muravchik
September 12, 2005
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB112648149226937545,00.html
The U.N. General Assembly convenes this week to commemorate the organization's 60th anniversary, but the atmosphere may be marked more by lamentation than celebration thanks to the damning report of the Volcker committee on the Oil-for-Food scandal. Reports . . . of waste, inefficiency, and corruption, even within the United Nations itself . . . too [often] turned out to be true, it said. Competence, honesty, and accountability . . . too often were absent. In response, Kofi Annan offered apologies, then this reassurance: The inquiry's findings underscore the vital importance of proposed management reforms, many of which are at this very moment being negotiated among member states in the General Assembly.
So they are. Even the U.S., the member-state most critical of the U.N.'s record and of Mr. Annan's, is working closely with him to find new procedures and mechanisms to remedy the body's shortcomings. But will any of it help? Can the U.N. be fixed by means of thoroughgoing administrative reform, as the Volcker committee prescribes? Or does the problem lie deeper?
Whatever changes may be devised will be only the latest in an endless procession. Edward Luck, the pre-eminent academic expert on the U.N., writes of the deja vu nature of U.N. reform, noting that in 1945 before the U.N. could hold its first meeting, a number of states were already calling for its reform.
All secretaries-general have endorsed reform, but none more assiduously than Mr. Annan. Even before being sworn in, he designated an undersecretary general as Coordinator for United Nations Reform. This was Maurice Strong, a Canadian. Unfortunately, Mr. Strong had to step aside in the course of the Volcker investigation when it was discovered that he had put his daughter-in-law on the U.N. payroll and that he had business ties to Tongsun Park, the influence peddler who has been charged with receiving millions from Saddam Hussein's regime while failing to register as a foreign agent as required by law. Lest anyone fear that Mr. Strong's departure would lead to a slackening of reform efforts, Mr. Annan announced that the task was being transferred to Deputy Secretary General Louise Frechette. But she, too, fell foul of the Volcker committee, which criticized her for knowing about Saddam's abuse of Oil for Food but failing to include any reference to the kickback scheme in the many reports [she] forwarded to the Security Council.
Out of the parade of U.N. reforms, one particularly germane one was the inception in 1994 of the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), the capstone of U.S. efforts to design a barrier against U.N. corruption. To secure its creation, Washington twisted many arms and spent much political capital. According to the OIOS mission statement, its purpose is to promote . . . responsible administration of resources [and] a culture of accountability and transparency. The Oil-for-Food program was launched two years later. When the scandal broke, many people asked in perplexity why the program had not been audited. The answer was that it had been audited -- 58 separate times -- by the OIOS. What earthly reason can there be to suppose that yet another round of U.N. reforms will prove any more effective than all that have gone before?
Why is the U.N. so insusceptible to effective reform? One reason is that its 18,000-strong bureaucracy is run on the basis of a baroque system of affirmative action: Staff is hired according to region and nationality, not merit. To remedy what his advisers acknowledged was a problem of deadwood, Mr. Annan's reform package includes a request for a one-time buyout of nonperforming officials in order to refresh the staff. But unless merit becomes the basis for hiring, new deadwood will replace old.
A deeper reason why the U.N. cannot be fixed is that it is a consortium of governments, not answerable to a citizenry. Granted, it is no longer the dictators' club it once was. Today, about 60% of member states have elected governments. But it is still a club. Whereas in a democratic polity there are strong incentives for politicians to bring to light one another's failings and misdeeds, in the U.N. all incentives are for governments to scratch each others' backs. The Volcker committee reports that rumors of the abuse of Oil for Food were rife in U.N. corridors; indeed, it laments that the rumors were even worse than the sordid reality. But it was not in anyone's interest to blow the whistle. (Even the U.S. failed to do so: Its paramount goal was to prevent Saddam from using the program to import weapons, so it felt it had to conserve its chits to combat something bigger than mere garden-variety corruption. And U.S. officials may have been reluctant to tangle with Jordan and Turkey, allies that smuggled Iraqi oil.)
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Still, this malfeasance might have been a price one could afford were the U.N. fulfilling its mission. Alas, the illicit oil deals were only a reflection of a more profound corruption -- that is, the mockery the U.N. has made of the purposes for which it was created. Foremost among these is keeping the peace. In design, the U.N. was to command forces capable of putting down aggressors. In practice, the structure never came into being. The only two times the U.N. has acted against an aggressor were in Korea in 1950 and Kuwait in 1990-91; on each occasion, it merely called on the U.S. to round up a posse. In recent times, wars within countries have become more common than wars between them, and it seemed that the U.N. might find its niche. But the performances in Bosnia, Rwanda and Somalia were so wretched that Mr. Annan was led to conclude: Peacekeepers must never again be deployed into an environment in which there is no cease-fire or peace agreement.
Despite its deficit in military power, the U.N. might still have played a role as moral beacon. But the U.N. long ago squandered its moral standing by its record on human rights -- one of its other original purposes. Each year, up to half the governments that are the worst human rights violators are elected to the human rights commission. Very rarely do any of them come in for a word of criticism. Instead, the commission spends much of its time denouncing Israel.
If the U.N. cannot be fixed, what then? A false dichotomy is often drawn between the U.N. and unilateralism. This mirrors FDR's fear that if we did not create the U.N., the U.S. would revert to the disastrous isolationism of the 1920s and '30s. His ally, Churchill, put more stock in alliances and regional organizations, but he too believed that only the U.N. would keep the U.S. in the game. Of all the thinkers of the day, only Walter Lippmann made the point that it would be possible to have an internationalist foreign policy without having a global organization.
This remains true today. The U.S. cannot abolish, expel or abandon the U.N. It can, however, focus its support on the U.N.'s valuable humanitarian agencies while letting its political side, with its pretensions to world government, wither. It can work to build and strengthen alliances, coalitions, regional bodies and cooperation among democracies. Through such instruments it can forge an internationalist and multilateral foreign policy that will serve the noble purposes enshrined in the U.N. Charter better than the U.N. has done for the last 60 years.
Mr. Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is author of The Future of the United Nations: Understanding the Past to Chart a Way Forward, forthcoming from AEI.