Catch-43

This Just In: UN #2 is Out of Control

Well, Mark Malloch Brown (deputy secreretary-general of the United Nations) has struck again. Apparently Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization per se:

"It's not helpful to couch this war in the language of international terrorism.
Hezbollah employs terrorist tactics; it is an organization, however, whose roots
historically are completely separate and different from Al Qaeda."

So what? Its goals are similar to Al Qaeda's (only on a slightly smaller scale). Its tactics are roughly the same. In addition, this is an organization which has carried out attacks throughout the Middle East, but also in Argentina and London. I might add that a number of their attacks in the Middle East killed (and specifically targeted) American, French, and British citizens and military personnel - adding a certain... international flavor? See the Wikipedia entry on Hezbollah here. For dinosaurs like Brown, the fact that Hezbollah has a political wing makes reconciliation possible, and makes US and Israeli actions unacceptable and immoral. One shudders to think what he would say about Al Qaeda if they got some nutjob apologist elected in south Waziristan - but of course that would never happen because the people of Pakistan don't have the right to choose their leadership anyway.

Here is the full transcript of the interview.

On June 6 of this year, he spoke out against the US again:

Multilateral compromise has always been difficult to justify in the American
political debate: too many speeches, too many constraints, too few
results. Yet it was not meant to be so.

A summary dismissal of our culture. Upside down because our entire political system is built on the principal that slow slow compromise will frustrate bad legislation, and that a government that moves too rapidly is probably a dictatorship.

Today, we are coming to the end of the 10-year term of arguably the UN’s
best-ever Secretary-General, Kofi Annan. But some of his very successes --
promoting human rights and a responsibility to protect people from abuse by
their own Governments; creating a new status for civil society and business at
the UN -- are either not recognized or have come under steady attacks from
anti-UN groups.

Kofi Annan is the best ever? Ever heard of the multibillion dolllar Oil For Food scandal? Surely you remember - it's the one that made Enron look like child's play? Kofi was the head of the organization at the time of his scandal, and his son Kojo appears to have profited from it directly.

More broadly, Americans complain about the UN’s bureaucracy, weak
decision-making, the lack of accountable modern management structures and the
political divisions of the General Assembly here in New York. And my response
is, “guilty on all counts”.

But why?

In significant part because
the US has not stuck with its project -- its professed wish to have a strong,
effective United Nations -- in a systematic way. Secretary Albright and others
here today have played extraordinary leadership roles in US-UN relations, for
which I salute them. But in the eyes of the rest of the world, US commitment
tends to ebb much more than it flows. And in recent years, the enormously
divisive issue of Iraq and the big stick of financial withholding have come to
define an unhappy marriage.

So of course it is America's fault that the UN is a ridiculous, corrupt, and ineffective organization. Well Mark - the UN is about as multilateral as things can get on this lonely old planet of ours - so if it's a failure... maybe that speaks to the inadequacies of multilateralism? The inadequacies of treating all nations equally no matter what they do to their own populations and how they deal with their neighbors? The inadequacies of giving veto power to tyrannies, not to mention prominent roles on the Human Rights Commission?

As someone who deals with Washington almost daily, I know this is unfair to the
very real effort all three Secretaries of State I have worked with –- Secretary
Albright, Secretary Powell and Secretary Rice -– put into UN issues. And today,
on a very wide number of areas, from Lebanon and Afghanistan to Syria, Iran and
the Palestinian issue, the US is constructively engaged with the UN. But that is
not well known or understood, in part because much of the public discourse that
reaches the US heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest
detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. That is
what I mean by “stealth” diplomacy: the UN’s role is in effect a secret in
Middle America even as it is highlighted in the Middle East and other parts of
the world.

Of course it is the conservative media's fault that the UN is not highly esteemed in America - not its repeated ineptitude and pervasive corruption. I see.

Exacerbating matters is the widely held perception, even among many US allies,
that the US tends to hold on to maximalist positions when it could be finding
middle ground.

But the French never do that though, do they Mark? The US is the only country on the face of planet earth that holds on to "maximalist" positions - everyone else is happy to subordinate their interests to the UN, is that it? A much truer statement would be that there is a widely held disagreement with the US on matters of global interest. Followed by cry-baby tactics when these other countries don't get their way. Followed by Mark Malloch Brown's obnoxious antics.

In summary, Americans are stupid (for not accepting the founding principles of the UN), selfish (for advancing their own interests), easily fooled (by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News), and have caused the UN to fail from a lack of commitment and leadership. Oh, and don't forget that we're stupid for calling Israel's war on Hezbollah a part of the international war on terror, because Hezbollah is not really a terrorist group. They're legit.

For a much better and more in-depth analysis of the June 6 speech, see the Belmont Club.

posted by JM @ 5:03 AM