Heart of darkness under UN's polite fictions
Reform won't fix the corrupt and dysfunctional centre of Kofi Annan's organization

By Mark Steyn
September 19, 2005
The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16646650%255E28737,00.html 


KOFI Annan is the very embodiment of transnationalism's polite fictions: a dapper soft-spoken African, he seems the soul of moderation. Even when what he's actually saying is highly immoderate, and even when he's standing next to some disgusting dictator as he says it, he's always a reliably decaffeinated Kofi.

So what if his brother and his son and his son's best pal are under investigation in the UN oil-for-food scandal? So what if his secretariat got a $US1.4 billion oil-for-food administration fee, yet apparently couldn't afford an auditor for the program? 
So what if the head of Annan's budget oversight committee was too busy sluicing hundreds of thousands of dollars for himself to notice whether anybody else was on the take? So what if Saddam Hussein used the UN as a money-laundering operation to advance his geopolitical aims? 
Paul Volcker's independent report has decided that, even though Annan knew of the kickbacks since at least 2001, the Secretary-General is guilty of sins of omission rather than commission. He and his deputy, Canada's Louise Frechette, simply failed to notice the world's all-time biggest scam expanding under their noses with the enthusiastic participation of their closest colleagues. 
Possibly, they carelessly assumed it was just the usual nickel 'n' dime UN corruption -- like the child-sex rings and drug cartels that operate out of pretty well every peacekeeping operation. But the point is, while it may have happened on Annan's watch, he wasn't watching, so that's OK. 
Like OJ Simpson promising to hunt down the real killers, Annan and Frechette are committed to staying in their jobs and redoubling their efforts to spearhead the reforms the UN vitally needs. As the media briefing distributed by Annan to his underlings put it: It is time to focus on the important reform agenda because the inquiry's findings underscore the vital importance of proposed management reforms. And if we say vital and focus and underscore often enough, this whole thing will fade away and it will be back to business as usual. 
I, too, am in favour of Kofi Annan staying on, not just till his term expires in December next year, but for five, 10 years after that, if he wishes. If I were as eager for UN reform as its supporters claim to be, I'd toss Kofi to the sharks and get some new broom in to sweep clean. But if, as I do, you believe 90 per cent of UN reforms are likely to be either meaningless or actively harmful, a discredited and damaged secretary-general clinging to office is as good as it's likely to get. 
What's important to understand is that Annan's ramshackle UN of humanitarian money-launderers, peacekeeper-rapists and a human rights commission that looks like a lifetime-achievement awards ceremony for the world's torturers is not a momentary aberration. Nor can it be corrected by bureaucratic reforms designed to ensure that the failed budget oversight committee will henceforth be policed by a budget oversight committee oversight committee. The oil-for-food fiasco is the UN, the predictable spawn of its utopian fantasies and fetid realities. 
Why was there an oil-for-fraud program in the first place? Because back in the 1990s, having thrown a big old multilateral Gulf War and gotten to the gates of Baghdad, the grand UN coalition decided against toppling Saddam. So, having shirked the responsibilities that come with having a real policy, the US, Britain and the rest were in the market for a pseudo-policy. And where does an advanced Western democracy go when it wants a pseudo-policy? Why, the UN! Saddam correctly calculated that the great powers were over-invested in oil-for-food as a figleaf for their lack of will, and he reasoned that in such an environment their figleaf would also serve as a discreet veil for all kinds of other activities. 
That's the essence of transnationalism -- the mechanism by which the world's most enlightened progressives provide cover for its darkest forces. It's a largely unconscious alliance, but not an illogical one. 
Western proponents of sustainable consumption and some of the other loopy NGO-beloved eco-concepts up for debate in New York this past week have at least this much in common with psychotic Third World thugocracies: both groups find it hard to win free elections, both regard transnational bodies as useful for conferring a respect unearned at the ballot box, and neither is unduly troubled by the lack of accountability in global institutions. 
Those of us who believe that big government is by definition remote government, and that therefore the pretensions to world government of the UN make it potentially the worst of all, should, in theory, argue for withdrawal from the organisation. Outside a few college towns and effete coastal enclaves, I don't believe there would be any political downside for candidates campaigning on a platform of pulling out of the UN entirely. But as a matter of practical politics I can't see the US leaving the UN any time soon. 
Can the US force the UN to reform itself? I mean really reform itself, not just get-Kofi-off-the-hook reform. Well, look at it this way: with hindsight, the UN was most effective when it was least effective -- the four decades between Korea and the Gulf, when the Cold War mutually assured vetoes at least accurately represented the global stand-off. 
Now, however, we're in a unipolar world, and the UN is no longer a permanent talking-shop for the world's powers, but an alternative power in and of itself -- a sort of ersatz superpower intended to counter the real one. Consider the 85 yes-or-no votes the US made in the General Assembly in 2003: 
The Arab League members voted against the US position 88.7 per cent of the time. 
The ASEAN members voted against the US position 84.5 per cent of the time. 
The Islamic Conference members voted against the US line 84.1 per cent of the time. 
The African members voted against the US position 83.8 per cent of the time. 
The Non-Aligned Movement members voted against the US stance 82.7 per cent of the time. 
And European Union members voted against the US position 54.5 per cent of the time. What these figures demonstrate is that the logic of the post-Cold War UN is to be institutionally anti-US. Washington could seize on Annan's present embarrassment and lean hard on him to reform this and reorganise that and reinvent the other and, if they threw their full diplomatic muscle behind it, they might get those anti-US votes down to, what, a tad over 80 per cent? And along the way they'd find that they'd reformed a corrupt dysfunctional sclerotic anti-US club into a lean mean functioning effective anti-US club. Which is, if they're honest, what most reformers mean by reform. 
Obviously, within those various blocs, the US has many friends. But the regional voting structure of the UN means that even relatively well-disposed allies become less friendly when their voice is filtered through geographic groupings that prize solidarity over all. 
For example, Libya became chairman of the UN Human Rights Commission because it was felt to be Africa's turn, and Africa put up only one candidate and the European Union had agreed to vote as a bloc and they didn't wish to be seen to be disrespecting Africa by voting against its preferred candidate, so they abstained. So, by filtering Britain's voice through one transnational body (the EU) into another (the UN) to vote on the candidate of a third (the African Union), Her Majesty's Government is now on record as having no objection to the world's leading human rights body being headed by a one-man dictatorship that blows up American airliners in British airspace. Its a good thing the UN has moral authority, because Britain certainly doesn't. 
Thus, transnationalism artificially diminishes the voice of second-tier powers and artificially inflates basket-case psycho states. 
Any real reform of the UN would begin by dismantling the deeply unhealthy regional structure. Instead, reformers complain that the permanent Security Council membership excludes all of Africa and Latin America, and demand that Brazil and South Africa be brought on board as regional house captains. That would be a disaster. An India that sits alongside the US as a fellow democracy, trading partner and beneficiary of the Britannic inheritance is one thing. An India that represents an invented power bloc defined by the increasingly outmoded constraints of geography would just be a vehicle for taking those 85 per cent negative votes up to the Security Council. 
Yet we're now being told that the US is obstructing the 60th anniversary relaunch by impeding the Security Council's expansion. One can only hope so. Relaunching the UN in a fast-changing world is like trying to redesign a horse and buggy for a moon shot. 
The polite fictions of Kofi Annan really belong to the lost world of September 10, 2001. It was very agreeable if you were one of the bespoke chaps cruising from summit to summit -- UN, EU, G8 -- mediating the cares of the planet. And it was all terribly sophisticated, as sophisticated as an urbane Paris boulevardier from the fin de siecle, impeccably coiffed and coutured but riddled with syphilis. Since Osama bin Laden blew apart those polite fictions, the effective international relationships -- the US and Australia, the US and India -- have taken place without the construction of permanent secretariats. Let's keep it that way. The best way to avoid having to reform transnational bureaucracies is not to have them in the first place.