Tocqueville at Turtle Bay

June 9, 2006
The Wall Street Journal
Original Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114981366024075679.html

When U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan named Mark Malloch Brown as his deputy, we breathed a sigh of relief. The Briton had distinguished himself as head of the U.N.'s Development Program, and his promotion seemed to promise adult-hour at an institution reeling from the Oil for Food scandal.
Well, we're not infallible, and on Tuesday Mr. Malloch Brown gave a speech in which he went out of his way to prove us wrong. Much of the public discourse [about the U.N.] that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, he told a Manhattan audience. The U.N.'s role is in effect a secret in Middle America.
He then accused the U.S. of being the only government not fully supporting the U.N.'s efforts to renovate its Manhattan headquarters -- not surprising, since the U.N. wants to finance the overpriced deal with a loan from Uncle Sam. He also scored the U.S. for opposing the new Human Rights Council, never mind that it is in many ways as bad as the discredited Human Rights Commission it replaces.
To cap it off, he injected himself into the U.S. political debate: Who will campaign in 2008 for a new multilateral national security? The answer to that question is that John McCain hopes it will be Hillary Rodham Clinton, but she's not that dumb.
We weren't previously aware that it's considered appropriate for international civil servants to speak this way about a U.N. member state that pays nearly a quarter of his $287,000 tax-free salary. And we were a little surprised by the absence of any reference in the speech to Oil for Food, sex abuse by U.N. peacekeepers, last year's arrests of two U.N. officials on bribery charges and the suspension earlier this year of eight top U.N. officials allegedly involved in various procurement scams.
But what was most amusing was Mr. Malloch Brown's reference to Middle America and its alleged sources of information. Contrary to what this modern Tocqueville suggests, Americans have an excellent grip on what's going on at the U.N., thanks partly to the reporting of Fox News and these columns, the commentary of Mr. Limbaugh, as well as Congressional investigations by Middle Americans Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois.
In a press conference Wednesday, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton described Mr. Malloch Brown's speech as the worst mistake by a senior U.N. official that I have seen, adding that even though the target of the speech was the United States, the victim, I fear, will be the United Nations. He's right. If Mr. Malloch Brown's speech serves any purpose, it is to remind American taxpayers of everything they don't like about the U.N.