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[Previous entry: "Return to Sender"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Mohammed Said al-Sahaf"] 16 April 2003: "In (partial) defence of the UN"
Though I'm more than happy to take cues from other blogs, I don't much like to write about what other blogs are saying. This is mostly because I really don't care for self-referentialism in any given medium, and I certainly don't hold with news media (and I'd like to think pundit bloggery is a news medium of some sort) creating copy about other news media. It's a process my mother once referred to as "media masturbation," and though it be far from me to knock masturbation—"the thinking man's television," as playwright Christopher Hampton once called it—it's not always an activity one is particularly interested in watching. I wonder which of the world's other great deliberative bodies [Reynolds] is comparing it to? I suppose he must be referring to the high standards of morality in, say, the United States congress or the Tennessee legislature.I would be inclined to say that the UN system, and the Secretariat, are morally neutral; between the different member states, there is a wide range of moral and ethical principles, and the UN system and Secretariat can only pursue and promote those principles—e.g. those set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—which most or all of the member states have professed they support. It is not the function of the UN to impose moral or ethical codes on member states, if only for the reason that this undermines the principle of national sovereignty (which has been cornerstone of international relations since 1648, with the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia). Sovereignty has its limits; as Kofi Annan stated in his 2001 Nobel lecture: The sovereignty of states must no longer be used as a shield for gross human rights abuses.However, violation of a nation's sovereignty is still not a step to be undertaken lightly. What has been rather maddening to the United States lately, of course, is that the UN Charter places priority on the collective security of its members, discouraging the use of war as an instrument of state policy in the process. It would, however, be somewhat unreasonable to blame "those cowardly foreigners" for this, as this norm was set largely at the behest of the Americans themselves, during the FDR and Truman administrations. Then there is, of course, the perception that the UN is ineffectual; there is truth to this, but as an argument against the UN system it is fallacious. An example, again from Glenn Reynolds, is this one: "The United Nations has sent a team to the area to investigate the reported massacre."Reynolds' point, presumably, is that the UN never gets anything useful done, and therefore it has no good reason to get in the way of American foreign policy. There's a small problem to this position, which is illustrated by the question what the oh-so-mighty-and-effective United States is doing about this massacre, or for that matter the entire situation in the Congo. The answer to that is, of course, sweet FA*. Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General, commented less than six months after taking up the post in 1998 that: [G]overnments are always demanding that something must be done, and that something always ends up at the UN.This is the first step in the process of "UN ineffectuality"; the second (upon which I have commented before) is caused by the fact that the Secretary-General takes his orders from the Security Council. After the end of the Cold War, the idea caught on of conducting peace-keeping operations in the interest of "human security," protecting the innocent from the ravages of warfare, especially in cases of civil or ethnic strife. As it turned out, the members of the Security Council were only too happy to pass resolutions (with much fanfare) instructing the Secretary-General to arrange these operations. However, more often than not, those same Council members were, and are, in no rush to supply the troops or other resources required to carry out the mandate. Congo is a good example; the mandate for peace-keeping force is already in place, and is quite robust as mandates go (a new wrinkle is that it allows the blue helmets to fire on combatants in defence of non-combatants, as opposed to only returning fire when they themselves are fired on), but a decent mandate is no damn good when, as in this case, almost nobody is actually willing to commit troops to a very messy situation. It's got to the point that the UNSC has asked Uganda to keep its invading army in the Congo, just to keep the local militias in line. This is the problem at the root of "the UN's ineffectuality"; the charge is valid, but in fairness it cannot be said that the fault lies with the UN system as much as it lies with the member states, and the Permanent Members of the Security Council in particular. The US is more guilty in this regard than most; at the end of 2000, it was still $1.7bn in arrears with its dues, and even though part of this sum has since been paid, the rest is still outstanding. And for all the talk of the UN's "bloated bureaucracy," the fact of the matter is that the Secretariat has slimmed down considerably in the past five years. Its annual operating budget, including the budgets for ad hoc operations (again, mandated by the Council) like the International Criminal Tribunals, is currently about $1 billion; hardly significant, compared to, say, the requested US defence budget for FY2004 ($380bn). Under the circumstances, the US's continued refusal to pony up its arrears is a severe impediment to the functioning of the Secretariat. When one dredges up the example of "the UN's failure" to do anything about the Rwandan genocide in 1994 (a favourite example among American UN-bashers), one is in effect talking of the failure of the members of the Security Council to prevent or stop the genocide. Initial reconnaissance by the Department of Peace-Keeping Operations (DPKO) suggested 5,000 troops would be required for UNAMIR (UN Assistance Mission In Rwanda). It was the United States, at that point still reeling from the debâcle in Mogadishu three weeks before, which urged a limit of 500. In the end, approval was given for 2,548 troops (of whom about 1,300 actually arrived in country in time, and with woefully inadequate amounts of equipment to boot), but UNAMIR was given a severely restricted mandate; the United States was in no hurry to support UN operations with its own personnel again. Kofi Annan, then head of DPKO, has been criticised for refusing to grant authorisation to the UNAMIR force commander, a Canadian general named Romeo Dallaire, to conduct a number of operations which might have prevented—or at least limited the extent of—the genocide. But Annan refused this authorisation because the proposed action exceeded the mandate, and it is not unreasonable to suspect that the US government had made it explicitly clear to DPKO that it did not want to be placed in a position where it might have to send troops into Africa again. Indeed, once the genocide started, the US urged the withdrawal of 90% of the troops who actually were in country. The easy out for American right-wingers is, as always, to blame Clinton, but not only is this unfair—Republicans were just as scared, if not more so, of body bags affecting their chances of re-election before 9/11—it also misses the point, which is that the blame cannot reasonably be placed on the UN system. As I said, the United States has frequently been more to blame than most, but I should qualify that statement: The US has been more to blame than most members of the Security Council, but not more than most Permanent Members. France's entanglement with the former Iraqi régime is becoming more evident by the week, as is Russia's, and China has probably played a part as well. In this regard, there are echoes of Rwanda: most of the weapons the Hutu government received for its police and army were either supplied or sponsored by France. Most of the machetes used in the killing were of Chinese manufacture. Russia may not have played much of a role in Rwanda, but the few times it supplies peace-keepers is when one of the warring parties is a friend—e.g. the Serbs—and the commitment of its troops to peace-keeping, rather than protecting their pals, is generally open to question. In this regard, it is clear that while the US sins by omission, the others sin by commission as well. But it was not always thus. Winston Churchill once remarked that "you can always rely on the Americans to do the right thing, after they've exhausted every other option." Lord knows the United States has made more than its share of missteps since 1945; this is the country whose successive administrations gave us My Lai (or rather, the toleration of the US Army's disgraceful failure to adequately punish those responsible), support for a whole host of unsavoury juntas (Chile, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador) and insurgents (Savimbi, the Contras with the possible exception of Eden Pastora, the Afghan mujehadin and their "Afghan Arab" buddies such as Osama bin Laden) under a philosophy which appeared to consist of the following phrases: The enemy of my enemy is, if not my friend, at least a useful tool;I'll acknowledge that some of these actions were, or at least seemed to be, the best available means to the end of defeating communism, but I reject the notion that America is a "paragon of virtue" on the global stage; it gets its hands dirty, and pursues its own interests, just like everybody else. I will concede in this regard that the United States has cleaned up its act abroad since the end of the Cold War, promoting democratic progress in many of its former client states. In her book So Be It (about her experiences while covering the Vietnam War), the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci tells a joking parable about an American family on holiday in Judea, approx. 33CE, who try to rescue that Mr. Jesus, who seemed so nice, from the cross. Dad gets ladder and a pair of pliers, and proceeds to remove the nails from Jesus' hands, whereupon Jesus topples over, dangling by his feet, which are still attached to the cross. The point of the story is that, in dealing with foreigners, Americans tend to have the best intentions at heart, but they can be so clumsy. Certainly in dealing with the United Nations, both the system and the other member states, the US has been hampered by maladroitness. As a recent report, "Enhancing U.S. Leadership at the United Nations", from the Council on Foreign Relations put it: The Task Force concludes, however, that the United States is not nearly as effective as it can or should be at the UN. The Task force takes issue with U.S. practices at the UN that it says undermine Washington's effectiveness, including frequent U.S. reluctance to support international agreements, the practice of withholding or threatening to withhold dues, and long-term gaps in the confirmation of a U.S. permanent representative to the UN.The report looks into ways the United States might work the UN system better, in order to get it to work more in favour of the US than it currently does. Though this is undoubtedly achievable, the matter of the extent to which it is so is open to debate. The Singaporean ambassador to the UN, Kishore Mahbubani, noted: Were the General Assembly to be perceived as a compliant American instrument, it would quickly lose the respect, trust and commitment of the 5.75 billion people who live outside the United States.Indeed, the behaviour of the General Assembly has frequently been a source of annoyance to the United States, for instance when it passed a resolution in the 1970s condemning Zionism as a form of racism (this resolution was repealed about twelve years ago). But UNGA resolutions are not binding, so there is no actual damage done, yet it reinforces the notion that democracy—in this case the democracy of represented governments—does not necessarily entail submitting to the United States. This explains Ambassador Mahbubani's paradox that "that the demonstrated independence of the General Assembly from US domination—while not serving short-term American interests—does indeed serve long-term American interests." It would be— Correction: it is a mistake for supporters of the war on Iraq to make hasty generalisations. The fact that the French and Russian governments have been acting in bad faith is undeniable, but it is a mistake to discount all opposition to the war on this basis; I was in favour of this war, but had I had to base my decision solely on the case made by the Bush administration, I would not have been. As far I am concerned, this war was the Right Thing To Do, and that opinion is not outweighed by the fact that I strongly suspect that it was waged mostly for the wrong reasons. Now is the time to prevent those wrong reasons from bearing fruit, but those who opposed this war solely out of distrust of the administration's motives will not be heard in DC. That is unfortunate, and we should be grateful for Tony Blair; by involving the UK in this war, he still has the ability to influence its aftermath for the better. It might be noted, moreover, that the Clinton administration pursued a policy of régime change in Iraq, albeit via Iraqi opposition (internal and in exile); in his election campaign, however, Gore—like Bush—advocated a more aggressive approach. It may, therefore, be argued that this war is not being fought just because there's a Republican in the White House. And at least there would have been a Commander-in-Chief who had, at some point in his life, been in the same time zone as an actual war. Conversely, the fact that the present administration has done the Right Thing in this instance in no way affects my further opinion of it; I still the think its withdrawal of the American signature from the Rome Statute was a mistake, and I still think the domestic side of the "War on Terror" is being very badly handled indeed, to name but two issues. In light of the French and Russian skeletons emerging from the closet, the decision to override the Security Council was the correct one in this instance, but that does not mean it will always be the correct choice. American conservatives like Richard Perle and Dennis Prager sneer that an organisation like the UN Security Council, containing the likes of China and Syria, cannot possibly confer legitimacy on any course of action, and that a coalition of liberal democracies has all the legitimacy it needs. I disagree. The UN is supposed to work for all 191 member states, not just a few; the point is that when even the likes of China and Syria have to admit that the course of action proposed by the US is the right one, there can surely be no doubt that it is. Thus, the UNSC grants a very real legitimacy indeed; endorsement not only by one's friends, but by one's (for want of a better word) antagonists. Again, in the light of France and Russia's actions, there will have to be a reckoning in the wake of this crisis; but the UN is a unique institution. In the words of Mr. Mahbubani: Distance has disappeared. The world has shrunk to a global village. Every village needs a village council. The UN represents the only real village council we have.Given that the existing "coalitions of liberal democracies"—NATO and the EU spring to mind—have been just as divided as the UN regarding Iraq, Perle's "alternative" doesn't seem a particularly viable idea. The UN will have to adapt—this should not be a problem, as it's done so before—but it will, it must, endure, if only because there is no decent alternative to it. * - "Sweet Fanny Adams"; a British term meaning "not a damn thing." Source note: in this article, I have drawn heavily on, among other things, a number of articles from The Economist. They are, in order of publication date: "Pope Kofi’s unruly flock", 06-Aug-1998; "The UN’s missions impossible", 03-Aug-2000; "Irrelevant, illegitimate or indispensable?", 20-Feb-2003; "Duct tape needed", 20-Mar-2003 |
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