The Redhunter

Gold avoids the temptation to simply fill the book with examples of anti-Israel bias, which would have been all too easy to do. If you didn't read on the cover that he had been Israel's ambassador to the UN(1997-1999), you'd never know it. Gold is writing for an American audience, but again, not all of his examples of UN perfidy involved the US, for he spends an entire chapter on the Pakistani-India conflict over Kashmir. Rather, Gold takes us from the formation of the UN in 1945 to the present day, stopping off wherever necessary.

The big problem with the UN can be summed up with one term: Moral Equivalency. the organization knows no difference between tyranny and democracy, between agressor and victim. All nations are simply "member states", regardless of how they treat their people. It ignores the massive crimes of dictators, preferring instead to condemn much smaller offenses (real or imagined) by the leaders of democratic states. An alien from another planet would be excused for thinking that Israel was the most murderous country on the planet, and that the Palestinians were the most peaceful people.

The men who founded the UN, mainly President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, laid out a vision that was good in theory but has not worked out in practice. The founders had moral clarity, those who run it today have anything but. Unfortunately, it did not take long for the organization to get off track.

The current General Secretary of the UN, Kofi Annan, typifies all that is wrong with it. A lifetime UN bureaucrat, he was the Undersecretary General for Peacekeeping Operations when the Rwandan and Bosnian massacres occured. You might think that a man with such failures under his belt would resign in disgrace, but then you don't know the UN. Shortly after overseeing these disasters, he was promoted to General Secretary. But of course.

To top it off, in 1991 he was awared the Nobel Peace Prize, which tells you all you need to know about it (ok, if you really want more go here).

Of all the times the UN has failed the people of this world, and of all the examples that Gold goes through, it's hard to decide which is worst. Two that stand out were the massacre in Rwanda, and the way the UN coddled and pandered to Saddam Hussein. In the first instance the means to avoid a massare were at hand, but a deliberate decision was taken not to use it. In the second, the UN had many chances to hold Saddam accountable and failed each and every time.

Rwanda

The situation in Rwanda was complicated, but essentially during colonial times the country had been ruled by the minority Tutsi tribe(10-15%). When the country gained it's independence in 1962, the minority Hutus started a campaign to purge the Tutsis from government posts. There were also many violent attacks against Tutsis, which led many to flee the country over the next few decades. After much violence and a few wars, the UN eventually brokered a deal in which a new government would be formed. So far so good.

In 1993 the UN deployed 2,500 peacekeeping troops to Rwanda, mostly soldiers from Belgium, Bangladesh, and Ghana. They were under the command of Canadian Major General Romeo Dallaire. His mission was to enforce a peace agreement, part of which specified that he was to demobilize the warring parties, and help to create a new national army.

In early January of 1994 General Dallaire received what he believed was conclusive proof from an informant that an extremist Hutu militia was planning the "extermination" of the Tutsis. He devised a plan whereby his troops would seize arms caches that the informant had told him would be used in the massacre, thus hopefully preventing it. He then sent word of his intentions by coded cable to UN headquarters in New York.

To his astonishment, headquarters cabled back that he was to do nothing. Dallaire's cable had gone to the UN Department of Peacekeeping, which was headed by Kofi Annan. Annan's assistant, Iqbal Riza, received the telegram, and after consultation with his assistants, ordered Dallaire to stand down.

The reasoning behind the refusal to authorize action was that Dallaire's plan "went beyond the mandate entrusted to UNAMIR" (UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda). Further, Iqbal was to later justify his actions by saying that the UN mandate did not authorize peacekeeping forces to actively disarm warring parties, merely to "assist" them in doing so. His mindset can be seein in the cable he sent, which said, in part, "The overriding consideration is the need to avoid entering into a course of action that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated consequences." Even with genocide staring them in the face, the need to maintain neutrality and not take any risks was formost in their minds.

Dallaire sent additional warnings throughout February and March, yet the UN did nothing. By this time, Kofi Annan had been informed, so could not plead ignorance. He also pushed for additional troops, believing that he needed at least 5,000 total. Adding to the problem, no major country, such as the US, did anything to push the UN to act. The Clinton Administration must therefore bear some responsibility in the matter also.

By April the predicted massacres started, and other the next several months some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu sympathizers were killed.

For his incompetence Annan was elevated to Secretary General a few years later. And now the man who could have prevented a massacre goes around telling us "never again", yet again does nothing about Darfur.

Iraq

On the surface, one might think that Iraq was a success story for the UN; Security Council resolutions leading up to the Gulf War and the inspections afterwards that destroyed most of Saddam Hussein's WMD. Wasn't it only the bad old USA that spoiled a largely successful inspections program with an unnecessary invasion?

The reality was that UN involvement with Saddam Hussein's Iraq from the 1980s through the 2003 invasion was mostly characterized by coddling the dictator and an overriding concern to "respect" the regime. Had the UN acted decisively during that time, Operation Iraqi Freedom would not have been necessary. The United States and the United Kingdom pushed the UN to do more, but the two nations alone could not change ingrained attitudes.

The problems started well before the Gulf War. The UN Security Council should have condemned Iraq for it's invasion of Iran, but did not, mostly because the US and USSR wanted to remain neutral, mainly because they did not want to jeapordize oil shipments. The inspections that were carried out by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) proved a failure, when Hans Blix admitted after finding out the truth after the Gulf War that "It is correct to say that the IAEA was fooled by the Iraqis. Blix had led IAEA inspections in Iraq during the 1980s.

After the Gulf War Iraq did destroy vast quantities of WMD, mainly because it feared a US invasion. The UN agency created to oversee the destruction of the WMD was called UNSCOM (UN Special Commission). UNSCOM did a good job at first, but as time went on found itself stymed by UN bureaucrats, Kofi Annan in particular.

Annan obstructed UNSCOM leader Richard Butler in many ways, not the least of which was by creating what became known as the Oil-for-Food program. Oil-for-Food proved a disaster because Saddam was easily able to circumvent it and use the money for arms purchases (and to build palaces, not exactly what the designers of the program had in mind).

Worse was Annan's attitude. During a 1998 trip to Baghdad, Annan announced a Memorandum of Understanding with Iraq. Annan had negotiated a relaxing of inspection requirements that was nothing short of ridiculous. Vast areas of Iraq were to be off-limits to inspectors under the guise that the were "presidential sites". Further, UN diplomats would now be required to be present at what visits were allowed to these sites. Obviously, friendly diplomats could tip off the Iraqis as to what sites were to be visited.

Annan told the BBC that it was important "not to insist on humiliating Saddam Hussein." He "made a priority of treating the Iraqi regime with respect and sensitivity." After the February 1998 visit, Annan's senior staff "described the UN weapons insptecotrs as a bunch of out-of-control "cowboys" who had ignored Iraq's nationals sensitivities." On and on it went.

Gold lays all this out in excruciating detail, and it makes for painful reading. The bottom line is that the UN "could verify that Iraq had fulfilled it's original obligation to turn over its most deadly weapons." And Gold reminds us that "the UN put the burden of proof squarely on Iraq for disclosing what had happened to its weapons of mass destruction - not on the inspectors."

Recommendations

Many UN supporters treat any criticism as an endorsement of a “go it alone” strategy. They cannot imagine anything else. But the reality is that between reliance on the UN and unilateralism there is a third option; working with other states that share your values and/or objectives.

The biggest problem with the UN is moral equivalency because its members have no shared values. The very term “international community” is nonsensical, because to have a community you need to have shared values and interests. The simple fact is that the UN is broke, and nothing will fix it. It’s time for new ideas.

As such, we need to bypass the UN entirely and form our own alliances. They may be temporary ad hoc coalitions established to meet specific goals, or they may be more or less permanent. An example of the former would be the PSI (Proliferation Security Initiative), established to identify and sometimes intercept shipments of WMD and related materials. An example of the latter would be NATO, or more recently, the Community of Democracies, established by the Clinton Administration in 2000.

While it is not necessary that all members of each coalition meet our level of democracy and commitment to human rights to be a member, they should meet some basic minimum standard. For example, while we can and must work with Pakistan in the War on Terror, they don’t qualify for membership in any organization we would want to form. But we can use these organizations to incent countries to change their ways so that they do qualify.

Happily, Gold’s recommendations coincide with ones that I have made. As a practical matter we’re not going to completely get out of the UN. Besides, it would be useful to retain our seat on the Security Council, if for no other reason than to veto resolutions that might harm us or our allies. Rather, we should work to marginalize the UN and work to establish alternative institutions. Gold’s book is one step farther towards this laudable goal.