Tower of Babel
The UN has become what Churchill most feared 

By Peter Worthington
April 15, 2006
The Toronto Sun
Original Source: http://torontosun.com/News/World/2006/04/15/1535488-sun.html


In 1946, Winston Churchill urged that the newly formed United Nations become a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words ... in a Tower of Babel. 
This inspired the title of the excellent book, Tower of Babble, by Israel's former ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, that shows how hopeless and craven the UN is when dealing with international issues. 
Secretary General Kofi Annan even undermined weapons inspections by the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) aimed at bringing Saddam Hussein to heel long before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and after Saddam had defied 16 UN resolutions to change his ways ... or else. 
Now a new book is in the works by Claudia Rosett that promises to be a devastating condemnation of UN corruption. April's Commentary magazine published her assessment: How Corrupt Is the United Nations? 
The simple answer: Very. 
The UN even misleads the world on its funding, claiming its core budget is $1.9 billion, with 29,000 employees. When various UN agencies are included, like UNICEF, the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the World Food Program (WFP), etc., the total budget is closer to $30 billion and 60,000 employees when local staffs are included (excluding 85,000 peacekeeping troops). 
Paul Volcker's probe into the UN's Oil-for-Food program, designed to help Iraqis but not Saddam, confirmed massive corruption involving bid-rigging, conflicts of interest, bribery, theft, nepotism and sexual harassment. 
Saddam himself skimmed up to $17 billion from the $64 billion program which, Rosett writes, was buying 'milk' from a Chinese weapons manufacturer, contracting for 'vehicles' and 'detergent' with Sudan, and negotiating for missiles with North Korea. 
Kofi Annan (whose son was on the take) has since described Oil-for-Food as a mistake in a good cause, neglecting to point out that the UN collected 2.2% of oil revenue as sort of agent fees -- roughly $1.4 billion into the Secretary-General's spending fund. 
Small wonder Saddam felt immune and prosperous; small wonder Kofi Annan wanted no military action against Iraq; small wonder that Annan's former chief of staff (Iqbal Riza) shredded three years worth of UN executive suite Oil-for-Food documents the Volcker inquiry was hoping to examine. 
Although founded to advance peace and prosperity, the UN, in the age of terror has been in most ways useless and in some ways positively dangerous, Rosett says. 
With its many partnerships and vast amounts of money, the UN has become a gigantic bureaucracy. With its lax controls, diplomatic immunity and culture of impunity, the UN is ripe for corruption and for arms deals masked as medicine and soap. 
The UN vowed never again to abdicate as it did in Rwanda and Srbrenica when faced with genocidal horror. 
Yet with genocide in Darfur, the UN has refrained from acting against Sudan, which remains a member of its Human Rights Commission in Geneva, along with such bastions of individual liberty as China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe. 
When the UN sought to have exclusive rights to collect money and direct aid relief for the South Asian tsunami victims, the Financial Times discovered a year later that there was little or no accounting for funds. Expenditures for travel, vehicles, accommodation, conferences, and lavish meals far exceeded those of private charities. 
Rosett sums up that although the UN was founded as a forum of governments, it has -- in contravention of its own charter -- evolved into something larger, more corporate and more menacing: a predatory, undemocratic, unaccountable and self-serving vehicle for global government. 
While facets like the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNESCO serve a purpose, the UN political structure is more threatening to the peace, security and freedoms to which most human beings aspire.