Katie Couric had it wrong

02.06.2003

Mark Steyn thinks maybe we should quit the UN. He may be right. His article in Britain's The Spectator is moving. After all, the UN seems to have sunk into irrelevance. Libya's Gaddafi now heads the UN Human Rights Commission. In May, Iraq (yes, that Iraq) assumes leadership of the UN Conference on Disarmament. So what's the point?

Here's a (lengthy) excerpt:

I can't see it myself. UN support for the war presently depends on Washington giving certain understandings to France. Nothing very moral about that. Some of us think the Iraqi people should be allowed to decide for themselves whether, post-Saddam, they want anything to do with the dictator's best pal, M. Chirac. But no, apparently the moral position is to hole up in the smoke-filled rooms until Jacques comes around.

So I find myself in a position the pollsters don't seem to have provided for: I support a US-led war against Saddam, but not a UN war. My reasoning derives from the first Gulf war: as Colin Powell explained in his memoirs, one of the reasons for not pressing on to victory was that to do so would have risked 'fracturing' the international coalition. In the multilateralist paperwork, the members of the coalition get alphabetical billing, so the United States comes last. You know who's first? Afghanistan. What did they contribute? Three hundred mujahedin. Don't laugh, that's more than some Nato members managed. Ninety per cent of the countries who made up Bush Sr's Stanley Gibbons collect-the-set coalition -- Belgium, Senegal, Honduras -- wouldn't have been involved in taking Baghdad and storming the presidential palace, but all claimed the right to act as a drag on those who would have. So the UN-ification of the first Gulf war is a big part of the reason it ended so unsatisfactorily. Those Republicans who think making Bush dance through the UN hoops this time round is merely a harmless interlude had better be confident that the same pressures won't again undermine American purpose at a critical stage in the conflict.

...

In the real world, Libya is an irrelevance. So is Cuba, and Syria. In the old days, the ramshackle dictatorships were proxies for heavyweight patrons, but not any more. These days President Sy Kottik represents nobody but himself. Yet somehow, in the post-Cold War talking shops, the loonitoons' prestige has been enhanced: the UN, as the columnist George Jonas put it, enables "dysfunctional dictatorships to punch above their weight". Away from Kofi and co., the world is moving more or less in the right direction: entire regions that were once tyrannies are now flawed but broadly functioning democracies -- Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America. The UN has been irrelevant to this transformation. Its structures resist reform and the principal beneficiaries are the thug states.

The Libya vote is instructive. There are 53 members of the Human Rights Commission. Thirty-three voted for the Colonel. Three voted against -- the United States, Canada and Guatemala (God bless her). Seventeen countries abstained, including Britain. Is that really the position of Her Majesty's Government? Not really, and they've all manner of artful explanations for why the vote went as it did -- it was the Africa bloc's turn to get the chairmanship, they only put up one candidate, the EU guys had all agreed to vote as a bloc, they didn't want to appear to snub Africa, blah blah. So the net result of filtering Britain's voice up through one multilateral body (the EU) into another (the UN) is that you guys are now on record as having no objection to the leading international body on human rights being headed by a one-man police state that practises torture and assassination and has committed mass murder within your own jurisdiction.

That's a microcosm of everything that's wrong with UN-style multilateralism. There aren't a lot of Gaddafis, but their voice is amplified because of the democratic world's investment in UN proceduralism. Some of those abstainers are just Chiraquiste cynics: any time the Americans don't get their way is a victory for everybody else. Others believe the world would be a genuinely better place if it was run through global committees staffed by a transnational mandarin elite of urbane charmers: that's an undemocratic concept, and one shouldn't be surprised that it finds itself in the same voting lobby as the dictatorships. In an ideal world, you'd like the joint run by Mary Robinson and Chris Patten, but at a pinch Gaddafi and Assad will do: transnationalism is its own raison d'être. If the postwar UN was a reflection of hard power, the present-day UN is a substitute for it.

Posted by Miguel at 12:51 PM

Comments

thanx for another interesting, stimulating article. I was facinated, back in September when Bush made his first appeal to the UN- in very coded language he basically told them that if they did not back the war; and the US took care of things anyway, then the UN would become irrelevant. If the UN specially vetoes the war and the US goes it more or less alone- then their irrelevancy is more greatly assured.
This said; I am not particuarly in favor of a completely diminished UN, and such an event would probably go on the "costs" side of the war debate.

Posted by: bil at February 8, 2003 04:13 AM

Frankly, I think the idea of the UN is great, though idealistic. Unfortunately, it's a hold-over of the post-war era. And some of the bureaucratic tape is irrelevant. The US gets only one vote in the Generaly Assembly, just like Fiji or Seychelles. And lately the UN has become a bully pulpit for tyrants and dictators. To be honest, any UN that allows Lybia to head its human rights body and Iraq to head its disarmament body is ridiculous. I'm starting to lean for scraping the UN. We should outright just plain leave. Let the house of cards fold like the irrelevant League of Nations that did nothing to prevent war (it never sanctioned Italy for its invasion of Ethiopia, it never intervened in the Spanish Civil War, and it took no position on Japan's invasion of China). Let France and Germany talk and talk while the world burns down around them. Let's see if platitudes about diplomacy protect them from militant Islamo-fascists.

Posted by: Miguel at February 8, 2003 04:26 AM