May 11, 2006--Right On Ambassador Bolton!
I find myself in surprising agreement with John Bolton, our walrus-mustached, still unconfirmed ambassador to the United Nations—Shut it down!
As further evidence of the UN’s drift toward ineffectiveness and self-mockery, six nations with horrendous human rights records were recently elected to the Human Rights Council—China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, Azerbaijan, and--how-could-they-leave-them-off—Saudi Arabia! (See NY Times article linked below.)
This is a continuation of a long tradition—in the past the Council included Libya and Zimbabwe who, as members, thwarted investigations of their own human rights records. No wonder so many equally repressive countries lobbied to be elected to the new Council. And succeeded.
Forget the corrupt Oil-for-Food program, the bloated budgets and bureaucracies, and the rampant sexism. I could almost live with that if the U.N. would somehow still get its basic job done—preventing holocausts, starvation, and gross human rights abuses, while fostering diplomacy to prevent warfare. Yes, there are a few, too few, examples of effective effort; but the record of the U.N. during the past few decades is one of abject failure.
If you’re tracking with me thus far (and I suspect many of you have already hit “delete”), allow me to suggest that embracing this position, shut it down, could be a good thing for political progressives and maybe even for the world.
Rather than cede this anti-U.N. ground to the John Boltons of the world, claiming it is a part of the Great Right Wing Conspiracy, we should seize the issue as our own and say something like the following—
The world desperately needs an effective organization that has the same basic goals as the U.N. and its predecessor, the League of Nations. But what we now have is not what the founders intended. It has failed for all the obvious reasons. We therefore call for its disestablishment and the creation of an effective replacement that will build from the lessons of these two 20th century institutions—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
To symbolize that this new organization will not be an institution of the West or of the hegemonic, it needs to decentralized and thus physically located on all continents—with its Human Rights Division in South Africa; its Diplomacy Division in Sweden; its Children’s Program in Costa Rica; its Enforcement Division in Thailand; and so on.
Political progressives in the US should take the lead in this critique of the U.N. while also acknowledging that the US has lost its way in the world and turned to military and diplomatic preemption in part because the U.N. wasn’t capable of carrying out its own charter. To gain domestic political credibility as well as to speak the truth, we also need to say that the US participated in undermining the work of the U.N.
With our troops where they shouldn’t be, while not abandoning them while looking for a way to extricate them, we need to make the case for diplomacy as the alternative to warfare. But Democrat/progressives always look weak when claiming that the U.N is the venue where this must happen. Frankly, there has been no other place to turn to, and thus we need an entirely new organization.
As further evidence of the UN’s drift toward ineffectiveness and self-mockery, six nations with horrendous human rights records were recently elected to the Human Rights Council—China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, Azerbaijan, and--how-could-they-leave-them-off—Saudi Arabia! (See NY Times article linked below.)
This is a continuation of a long tradition—in the past the Council included Libya and Zimbabwe who, as members, thwarted investigations of their own human rights records. No wonder so many equally repressive countries lobbied to be elected to the new Council. And succeeded.
Forget the corrupt Oil-for-Food program, the bloated budgets and bureaucracies, and the rampant sexism. I could almost live with that if the U.N. would somehow still get its basic job done—preventing holocausts, starvation, and gross human rights abuses, while fostering diplomacy to prevent warfare. Yes, there are a few, too few, examples of effective effort; but the record of the U.N. during the past few decades is one of abject failure.
If you’re tracking with me thus far (and I suspect many of you have already hit “delete”), allow me to suggest that embracing this position, shut it down, could be a good thing for political progressives and maybe even for the world.
Rather than cede this anti-U.N. ground to the John Boltons of the world, claiming it is a part of the Great Right Wing Conspiracy, we should seize the issue as our own and say something like the following—
The world desperately needs an effective organization that has the same basic goals as the U.N. and its predecessor, the League of Nations. But what we now have is not what the founders intended. It has failed for all the obvious reasons. We therefore call for its disestablishment and the creation of an effective replacement that will build from the lessons of these two 20th century institutions—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
To symbolize that this new organization will not be an institution of the West or of the hegemonic, it needs to decentralized and thus physically located on all continents—with its Human Rights Division in South Africa; its Diplomacy Division in Sweden; its Children’s Program in Costa Rica; its Enforcement Division in Thailand; and so on.
Political progressives in the US should take the lead in this critique of the U.N. while also acknowledging that the US has lost its way in the world and turned to military and diplomatic preemption in part because the U.N. wasn’t capable of carrying out its own charter. To gain domestic political credibility as well as to speak the truth, we also need to say that the US participated in undermining the work of the U.N.
With our troops where they shouldn’t be, while not abandoning them while looking for a way to extricate them, we need to make the case for diplomacy as the alternative to warfare. But Democrat/progressives always look weak when claiming that the U.N is the venue where this must happen. Frankly, there has been no other place to turn to, and thus we need an entirely new organization.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
10:35 AM
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