United Nations provides easy cover for corruption
David Warren
April 1, 2006
The Ottawa Citizen
Original Source: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=0c5a64dc-77d7-463f-9d32-fe0e6ffc9f30
This has been another week of infamy at the United Nations -- it has strung quite a few hundred of them together -- and while one can't refer to a low point in an institution that is morally bottomless, the failure to do anything even mildly credible about the nuclear threat from Iran is at least worthy of note.
Three weeks after the urgent matter of Iran's non-compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was referred to it, the Security Council issued a non-binding presidential statement. The members could not even draft a Security Council resolution. They could not bring themselves to repeat the grave charges tabled by their own International Atomic Energy Agency, nor even acknowledge that the IAEA had presented the case to them for action. They found no fault in the Iranian president's repeated promises to wipe out Israel, or in his public musings about the Koranic apocalypse being at hand.
Instead, they expressed serious concerns about, for example, Iran's decision to resume enrichment-related activities, and called upon that country to take steps ... which are essential to build confidence. After which, Iran replied with a huge public raspberry.
Let me not exempt the Bush administration from criticism in passing. By undertaking pointless bilateral talks with Iran over its sponsorship of the insurgency in Iraq, the U.S. removed such wind as it had put in the sails of its European allies. And by assuring everyone that the American response to Iran's intransigence will be expressed only through the United Nations, President Bush let the air out of everything else. Granted, the Pentagon has been observed developing a strategic plan for dealing with Iran in the most direct possible way; but it produces one of those for every imaginable contingency. It means nothing until it calls up troops.
To my mind, it is the height of irresponsibility to refer anything to the United Nations. This is the organization that previously enabled the intransigence of Saddam Hussein; and that channelled billions of oil-for-food dollars to him and his stooges while pocketing the change, thus providing Saddam with the means to buy protection from politicians in France, Russia and elsewhere. It is the organization whose peacekeepers are running pedophile rackets all over Africa and that gobbled large sums designated for the relief of tsunami victims in Indonesia. That operates under a secretary-general who persistently sabotages American and other Western efforts to fight international terrorism. I could go on.
At perhaps a deeper level of corruption, the UN ideal provides ideological cover to the whited sepulchres of the international left -- a rhetorical cudgel to be used against any defender of Western values and moral norms by posturing revolutionaries in the Third World, and the West's own intellectual traitors. Behind and beneath them is what one of the UN's own internal auditors has called the culture of impunity, wherein traditional diplomatic immunities have been freed from all traditional accountability, in a bureaucracy that exists to serve itself.
 I shall never have the space to begin pealing through the UN's layers of perfidy and shame. Instead, I will refer my reader to the current (April) issue of the monthly Commentary magazine, where the field is staked by Claudia Rosett, a journalist who has been covering the UN beat remorselessly for the Wall Street Journal and New York Sun.
But apart from all that, we must remember that even if the UN were honestly managed, and staffed by sages and saints, it would not be the appropriate forum for dealing with threats from such rogue states as Iran. For success in such a confrontation requires discipline, nerve and tactical skill, under bold leadership. This can never be provided by a club that consists of nearly 200 members with conflicting interests, or even by a Security Council in which several veto-wielding powers devote their joyful energies to tripping each other up. The UN can be a forum for formal and informal diplomatic exchanges, a clearing house of some sort, but it cannot offer transnational solutions to real world crises, because there are no such solutions to be had.
Sovereignty exists at the national level, where governments armed with police and soldiers tend national interests and cultivate the means to enforce a national will. This is the unchanging reality through the foreseeable future. Forget about speaking truth to power. The only way to say boo to Iran is with a bigger power.
David Warren's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday.