The UN's Last Chance

Americans are growing increasingly tired of the UN and it's failure to live up to the mission on which it was formed. Just like every other large bureacracy, it has become corrupt and ineffective at anything except enriching it's individual members.

From IBD:
Posted 2/17/2006

U.N.: Replacing corrupt Secretary-General Kofi Annan should be the first step of a top-to-bottom reform of the dysfunctional world body. Otherwise, the U.N. will lose what little confidence Americans have left in it.

Annan, whose term expires at the end of the year, last week once again displayed his institution's knee-jerk anti-American bias by calling for the closing of the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba.

Annan made a point of distancing himself from accusations of U.S. torture in a report released last Thursday by U.N. human rights officials. But he did echo the report's conclusion, saying Guantanamo should be shut down "as soon as possible."

In fact, the report wasn't an investigation of conditions at Guantanamo at all — its authors refused an invitation from the U.S. to visit the facility. It was just a warmed-over repetition of accusations previously made by lawyers for Gitmo detainees.

Smearing America never distracts the U.N. from gladly taking our money, though. The U.S. funds nearly a quarter of the U.N.'s budget and up to 27% of its peacekeeping operations. It turns out some "peacekeeping" U.S. taxpayers pay for includes sexual assault of war refugees by U.N. forces. Too bad Gitmo investigators were too busy to look into the matter of rapists wearing blue helmets.

A recent internal audit of U.N. peacekeeping operations found $298 million — 30% of the $1 billion total — "subject to waste, fraud or abuse," according to U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton.

Annan, of course, presided over the biggest criminal fraud in history, the U.N.'s oil-for-food scandal, which allowed Saddam Hussein to receive as much as $4 billion in illegal payments, cushioning the impact of the U.N.'s sanctions against Iraq — with Kofi's son Kojo serving as a well-paid consultant in the middle of it all, and his top U.N. aide, Benon Sevan, accused of taking bribes.

The U.N. needs a new leader, but members are more interested in continuing a "tradition" of geographical rotation than finding someone to clean up the corruption. It's Asia's turn, they say, as they trot out a host of mostly obscure names for the top post.

Bolton has correctly countered that "the management question is far and away the most important qualification." He's also pointed out that no Eastern European has ever served as secretary general. Nor has a woman.

It might well be healthy for someone who has lived under communism to head up U.N. reform. His or her first decision could be to abolish the Economic Commission for Europe, an agency set up in 1947 "to give effective aid to the countries devastated by the war." News flash: they recovered quite some time ago.

(Another job for the next secretary general is to end the U.N.'s culture of animosity toward Israel. Bolton railed against the spectacle of U.N. officials on the Day of International Solidarity With the Palestinian People speaking before a map of the Middle East that left out the state of Israel. With Iran calling for the destruction of Israel, "this is more than symbolic," Bolton said.)

After investigating the oil-for-food scandal, former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker called the problem at the U.N. a "culture of inaction." Replacing Annan with a serious reformer may be the U.N.'s last chance at action to prevent losing any credibility it still has.