UN's Annan makes losing bet on Kerry

Djaughe · November 28th, 2004, 08:24 PM

UN's Annan makes losing bet on Kerry

By Thomas Bray / The Detroit News

One of the biggest losers in the Nov. 2 election was a man who couldn't cast a ballot but who tried to affect the outcome: Kofi Annan.
In a transparent attempt to lend weight to John Kerry campaign's criticism of Bush administration policies in Iraq, the United Nations' secretary-general denounced the war several weeks before the election as "illegal." It was a direct slap to an incumbent president -- and all the more outrageous because no such judgment was pronounced on Bill Clinton's war in Kosovo, which also lacked UN sanction.

Given the fact that Annan is now presiding over a monumental scandal involving the UN's oil-for-food program in Iraq, he's poorly positioned to prate about legality.

Of course, the problem with the United Nations goes far deeper than Annan's questionable leadership. Annan, who has spent virtually his entire career as a UN bureaucrat, last year appointed a group of elderly statesmen to assess possible reforms in a world much changed since 1945, when the United Nations came into existence.

Their report is due in several months. But even that isn't likely to get at the more fundamental question of why the United Nations should be considered much more than an occasionally convenient place for diplomats to jaw about things.

The United Nations and, before it, the ill-fated League of Nations were predicated on the belief that the chief threat to peace and human decency was nationalism. What was needed, it was thought, was a collective counterbalance to the nation-state, a trans-national agency that would uphold ideals of freedom, peace and prosperity against future Hitlers and Tojos.

But this ignored harsh realities. Few of the 191 member states would recognize true freedom if they stumbled across it. Most are dictatorships or squalid, dysfunctional principalities and kleptocracies with little interest in real human rights. The all-important Security Council might include France, England and the United States, but also the Soviet Union, which was committed to imposing communism on as much of the world as possible.

Just how absurd the United Nations has become is highlighted by Libya's recently serving as head of its Human Rights Commission -- and the U.S. seat on the commission was handed over to that garden spot of liberty, Syria.

While nationalism certainly has a dark side, what reason is there to think a world government of some sort would be better? As the oil-for-food swindle makes abundantly clear, the politics of the UN is pretty much like politics everywhere: a mix of high hopes (feed the Iraqi people), low motives (award the lucrative contracts for oil to Saddam's French and Russian friends) and a self-interested bureaucracy (cover up the crime).

The fact that the world is divided up into nation states has distinct benefits, not least that they allow for social, political and economic experimentation. As Cornell University political scientist Jeremy Rabkin has pointed out, national sovereignty offers the oppressed at least the possibility of refuge. When things get too bad in one country, people can at least try to flee to some other country.

If the United Nations, by contrast, were sovereign, there would be nowhere else to go.

Well, you say, nobody thinks the United Nations is going to become a world government anytime soon. But don't be too sure. The proposed international criminal court would give judges appointed by the United Nations the right to judge individual citizens of nation-states (unlike the so-called World Court in the Hague, which arbitrates differences among states). The UN-backed global warming treaty, meanwhile, in effect would put the world's energy supply in the hands of a bunch of bureaucrats.

Annan lost his bet on Kerry, and the time is long past for a serious clipping of the UN's wings -- starting at the top.