UNsalvageable?
September 16, 2005
The Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/Printer&cid=1126750772240&p=1006953079865
Sixty years after its establishment, and as it hosts the largest gathering of world leaders in history, the United Nations has been expected by many to fundamentally change its controversial conduct. 
Back when they created it, the allies who defeated fascism had in mind an organization that would treat all sovereign states as equals, enhance the peaceful settlement of international conflicts, and discourage the threat and use of force. 
However, these high principles were abandoned almost from the United Nations' inception. The emergence of the Cold War made all international conflicts a function of that global cleavage, and the world body a mere sideshow in an international arena that was shaped by whatever transpired between Washington and Moscow. The presence of tahe world's chief aggressor in the UN's holy of holies, the Security Council, with a permanent veto, ensured the entire organization's paralysis and the Orwellian distortion of the very concepts of aggression and self-defense to the point that they lost their meaning. 
Understandably, then, when the Cold War ended, hopes were high that the UN would play the kind of role originally articulated in its charter. 
Sadly, those hopes were soon dashed as the post-'89 UN proved no better than its predecessor, when it came to myriad conflicts from Rwanda to Bosnia, and even more depressingly when it came to handling transparently and legally public funds like those involved in the oil-for-food deal with Iraq. Increasingly, America – the UN's biggest funder – and others in the West have grown impatient with its moral cynicism and administrative ineptitude. 
Set against this backdrop, diplomats have worked hard in recent years to produce a blueprint for a redefinition of the UN's purpose and structure. The paper they produced – the outcome document – strove high. It sought, for instance, to allow violation of sovereignty in cases of genocide; update the Security Council's archaic membership by adding to it Japan, Germany, India and Brazil; create a commission to help former belligerents nurture peace; set new international standards for arms control; and grant the secretary-general more power in return for placing him under greater public scrutiny. 
Yet the blueprint soon met the wrath of those it had naively meant to contain. 
Some sought to twist the humanitarian-intervention clause into a shackle, such as when the UN tried to stop the US from targeting Saddam Hussein. The Security Council's expansion was derailed by African nations. Developing countries tried to compel handouts of 7 percent of rich countries' GDP, regardless of the recipients' policies. 
The Old UN's features emerged in their ugliest in the arena of terrorism and human rights. 
Concerning the former, the initial intention to unequivocally delegitimize on any ground the deliberate and unlawful targeting and killing as well as action intended to intimidate a population or to compel a government was contested. An Arab-inspired modification of this clause would have had it add that the war on terror should not serve as an excuse to disallow peoples under foreign occupation to struggle for their independence. 
Ultimately, terrorism remained undefined. Meanwhile, the effort to redefine the membership of the 53-nation, Geneva-based Human Rights Council, which had become a farce in its inclusion of governments as inhumane as Cuba's and Libya's, has been derailed by governments as humane as Egypt's. 
Faced with all this, the US refused to accept the blueprint, thus raising the ire of many who say that, warts and all, the outcome document embodied a historic moment and a rare opportunity. 
We disagree. 
A United Nations that cannot even rationally define the universal problem of terrorism, or exclude Libya and Cuba from sitting in judgment of human rights, is a fatally flawed UN. 
Judging from the dynamics that surrounded that drafting of the outcome document, the UN remains largely at the mercy of nations for whom aggression is a relative term and a legitimate diplomatic tool, one that in fact they will gladly continue deploying at the UN itself, as they have in the past. It would actually be counterproductive to push for a more effective UN, so long as it remains, on fundamental matters of peace and security, pointed in the wrong direction.