UN usefulness

[storm1977 0]

Good scotish opinion piece IMO

http://news.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=10392005

Quote

Has impotent UN finally outlived its usefulness?

George Kerevan

THE Boxing Day earthquake is proving to have many unintended political consequences, not least its impact on the United Nations. Isolated diplomatically over Iraq, beset with financial and sexual scandals and manifestly failing to halt genocide in Sudan, the UN must prove its mettle in dealing with the humanitarian crisis in South-east Asia or face a threat to its very existence.

Already, there are serious (and sensible) calls for the UN to be superseded by an expanded grouping of the G8 industrial nations, taking in China, India and Brazil. Such a powerbrokers’ club might be better able to achieve global consensus than the sprawling bureaucracy by New York’s East River.

Such is the internal crisis that last month, Kofi Annan, the UN’s beleaguered secretary general, hosted a secret meeting of his supporters with the aim "to save Kofi and rescue the UN". This was followed on Monday by a major reshuffle at UN headquarters. The British high-flyer Mark Malloch Brown, a former journalist with the Economist magazine, was brought in as Annan’s chief of staff to impose order on the ramshackle agency.

That Annan and his bureaucrats are more concerned with their own skins than with the tragedy unfolding in South-east Asia says volumes about the current state of the UN. No wonder the heading under "United Nations" in the authoritative Oxford Companion to World Politics begins succinctly (and correctly): "The UN is a deeply flawed institution."

The UN was founded as the institutionalisation of the victorious wartime alliance of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union. That model collapsed with the onset of the Cold War and the UN quickly degenerated into a diplomatic battleground for the two power blocks to court the newly independent colonies of the Third World.

With the end of the Cold War, there was a brief honeymoon while the UN flag flew over the broad international coalition assembled to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Thus emboldened, the UN actually warmed to the notion of being a world policeman (the original 1945 model) and sanctioned the overthrow of the vile Haitian dictatorship in 1994.

But the dream fell apart once again. The UN stood idly by as the Balkans descended into medieval savagery: only the unilateral NATO bombing of fascist Serbia in 1999 ended the ethnic cleansing. In fact, the UN’s signal contribution to the Balkan debacle was when cowardly Dutch UN peacekeeping troops let Serbian militia enter Srebrenica in July 1995 and murder 7,000 Muslim men and boys in cold blood. During the decade, UN peacekeepers on the ground similarly failed to prevent mass slaughter everywhere from Rwanda to Somalia.

Scandalous enough, but it merely implied the nations of the world were again too divided (or preoccupied) to support collective action through the UN to deal with the world’s basket cases. With Soviet expansionism a thing of the past, with the Oslo Accords having seemingly taken Palestine off the international agenda, and with the 1990s economic boom bringing prosperity to Asia, few nations cared about the UN as a global peacekeeper.

That should have left the autonomous UN agencies - tasked with everything from feeding refugees to protecting world heritage sites - to get on with their unglamorous but invaluable role. However, two inter-related crises then erupted, and these have now brought the UN not only to impotence (a regular occurrence), but to institutional meltdown under Kofi Annan.

The 9/11 attacks and the rise of al-Qaeda’s terrorist jihad created a new kind of threat to world order that the UN was never designed to deal with. The UN Security Council is a forum for the big players to settle their differences, eyeball to eyeball. You can’t do that with Osama bin Laden. Besides, membership of the Security Council is out of date, with the EU, Germany, Japan, India and Brazil excluded as permanent members.

Either the Security Council is reformed or an expanded G8 is created to replace it. The advantage of the G8 proposal is that it mixes political debate with trade issues - and the only way to get China to stop blocking action against genocidal Sudan or nuclear-mad Iran, which it does in the Security Council, is to link economic matters directly with security issues.

The other new crisis is the descent of the permanent UN bureaucracy into wholesale corruption. There has always been petty sleaze, but it was accelerated vastly by the UN’s oil-for-food programme in Iraq. This was supposed to allow Saddam to trade oil to feed the Iraqi people, while denying the dictator personal access to cash or arms. Instead, Saddam used the colossal billions at his disposal to bribe UN officials to look the other way. No wonder there was a reticence to get rid of him.

Annan is the first secretary general to be recruited from the ranks of the UN permanent staff. As such, he lacks the political experience of previous secretaries general and is more prone to defend his bureaucrats from outside criticism. An official inquiry is currently examining why large UN contacts went to a company that employed Annan’s son. There may be an innocent explanation, but at the very least it suggests the UN has become very lax in its procedures.

The best solution is a new secretary general - perhaps a former prime minister or president - who carries respect in the major world capitals. It might also be more efficient, in the light of the tsunami experience, to hive off the UN’s overlapping civil emergency organisations. These should be merged into a single international rescue agency, led by a senior military figure. Let’s keep politics and humanitarian aid separate.

Today’s world is economically and culturally interdependent in a way it was not 50 years ago. In one sense, that has already made the standalone UN organisation obsolete. Rather than find a new role for the UN, it might be best to give it an honourable burial and create a new economic and political forum for the major powers to manage globalisation. If that is to be the G8, the first steps can be taken at that body’s summit meeting this July, here in Scotland.

-----------------------------------------------------
Sometimes it is more important to protect LIFE than Liberty

[billvon 3,131]

The UN will magically regain its potence when we start to fear China. Suddenly we'll be saying things like "can you believe China, not consulting with the UN before annexing Taiwan? Those international criminals!" And everyone will be waving blue flags and condemning China for doing what we are doing now (i.e. ignoring the UN.)

Or perhaps it won't be china; perhaps it will be the PakIndia confederation. Or the Pacific Rim Coalition. Or whatever. But one thing is certain; superpowers change.

The US used to support the UN because it was one of the ways to defend the US (and our allies) against communism. Now we're not afraid of the USSR any more, so we don't want to deal with the UN. We will need them again someday and will support them when that day comes. Let's hope it's still around when we need it again.

[storm1977 0]

Well, what did you think of his Ideas of creating a New body and including China, which we all know will be a huge world power w/in the next 50yrs?

I think some of the relevance of the UN is gone.
And, on the issues they do pride themselves on, they do a bad job.

I think we need a new world body and a new organization and it is time the UN disbands. We need something relevant from now until the forseeable future. It is a changing world, and the UN doesn't seem to see it that way.

-----------------------------------------------------
Sometimes it is more important to protect LIFE than Liberty

[Botellines 0]

If every member of the United Nations is going to bash the U.N. the very first time it doesn´t agree with its agenda, then i agree with you, the U.N is not very useful.
But whose fault is that?

By the way, as far as i know, the U.S was also involved in the oil-for-food program. How convenient that those american companies involved in the scandal have not been made public... We are ALL responsible for that corruption.

[dorbie 0]

There are two t's in Scottish.

My buddy and I used to joke about the parochial Scotsman, if a train derailed in England killing 100 commuters it wouldn't be beyond the Scotsman to publish a headline "Train Derails, Edinburgh Man Escapes Uninjured", so your post is a fun read.

[markd_nscr986 0]

***My buddy and I used to joke about the parochial Scotsman, if a train derailed in England killing 100 commuters it wouldn't be beyond the Scotsman to publish a headline "Train Derails, Edinburgh Man Escapes Uninjured", so your post is a fun read.



BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Marc SCR 6046 SCS 3004