America's bungling UN ambassador

By Benny Avni
01/29/2010
New York Post
Original Source: – HYPERLINK http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/america_bungling_un_ambassador_x307AcMBvymG48ONQ3KtRI http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/america_bungling_un_ambassador_x307AcMBvymG48ONQ3KtRI

Some UN diplomats are starting to wonder: Does Susan Rice, the US ambassador, really care much about the United Nations?

The job was plainly a consolation prize for the woman who tutored candidate Barack Obama on foreign policy in the '08 campaign. And, because the president has given her Cabinet rank, Rice spends at most four days a week in New York -- the rest of her time goes to maintaining her Washington status.

Rice must make sure that her whispers remain as close as possible to the president's ear -- especially if she wants to succeed Hillary Clinton at State one day.

Yet Rice was stung last week when some UN denizens criticized her privately. (Ambassadors from smaller countries say she's talking down to them.) And a former spokesman for several Republican UN ambassadors, Richard Grenell, publicly faulted her part-time presence at the UN building.

Actually, she told reporters, the fact that she spends three days a week in DC is a good thing for America. There's an understanding among my [UN] colleagues that I am speaking authoritatively as one of the president's senior advisers -- and I think that, frankly, very much enhances our ability to get things done, she said, adding, And I think the record speaks for itself.

What record? The most impressive achievement she could point to was an implementation of the toughest sanctions regime in the world to date on North Korea. That's not quite as historic as it sounds: Her predecessors implemented several sanctions resolutions on Pyongyang -- each tougher than the one before and hence toughest to date. Nor has any of this changed Kim Jong-Il's course.

If Rice ever gathers enough Security Council votes to impose new sanctions on Iran, she'll surely present that as historic, too -- when, again, it'll simply be the lastest in a string of ever-tougher Tehran sanctions (though never tough enough to make the mullahs tremble).

Of course, Washington should never look for the hopelessly stagnant Security Council to advance its top international objectives. We do, however, need the United Nations to do things we can't and won't do ourselves. And US taxpayers cover 22 percent of the UN's $5 billion-a-year budget (plus 26 percent of its $7.1 billion peace-keeping bill). So somebody needs to keep an eye on this huge, often wasteful and sometimes corrupt bureaucracy.

But that somebody, so far, hasn't been Susan Rice. As she came in, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has (under pressure from Singapore and Russia, with little resistance from us) shut down the most successful anti-corruption unit in UN history -- the Procurement Task Force, which, since its 2005 inception, has uncovered $630 million in tainted UN contracts and led to several convictions of corrupt UN officials.

Rather than pushing to revive the task force's successes, Rice also let the United Nations fire the task force's former leader, Robert Appleton, an ex-federal prosecutor with an unmatched record of fighting UN corruption.

The result? As the AP's John Heilprin detailed recently, last year the United Nations cut back sharply on investigations into corruption and fraud within its ranks, shelving cases involving the possible theft or misuse of millions of dollars.

Even Team Obama should know by now that the United Nations isn't the sharpest instrument in America's foreign-policy toolbox. But it's a shame that the administration is letting it decay more.