AJC.com > Opinion > Woman to Woman > Archives > 2008 > October > 03
Friday, October 3, 2008
Is the U.N. becoming irrelevant?
Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
The U.N. isn’t becoming irrelevant — it has already made itself irrelevant. While some divisions involve humanitarian work, its main reason for existence - to be a venue for multi-national diplomacy — has become so biased and broken that “fixing it from the inside” no longer seems possible.
Andy didn’t mention the significance of the new U.N. General Assembly president: none other than Nicaraguan Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann. Viscerally anti-American, he was foreign minister under Sandanista dictator Daniel Ortega. In 2004, D’Escoto referred to the United States as “the greatest enemy of the right of self-determination of peoples,” and Americans as “the most ignorant people around the world.”
Hmm. The fact that an ideologue with a deep, public hatred of America could rise to a position that is supposed to be neutral and diplomatic shows just how broken the U.N. is. As the Heritage Foundation’s Brett Schaefer wryly put it in an interview, “It is not in the U.N.’s best interest for D’Escoto to be the face of the General Assembly.”
Each year, we give $5 billion dollars to the U.N. budget — a budget D’Escoto now essentially controls. The United States shells out more money than any other country and yet, according to the State Department, 95 percent of countries who receive aid from us voted against us most of the time. The way we are perceived in the world is indeed crucial — but the U.N. is helping ensure that perception is one of enmity. For all our aid, we are also being thanked with an investigation by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council into “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance” in America.
To say the United Nations is bungling and appalling does not do it justice. To spend time and money to investigate a country in which an African American may be the next president, while ignoring catastrophic human rights issues in Tibet and Darfur shows just how bizarre and senseless the U.N. has become. Or consider the appointment of Richard Falk as human rights investigator — a professor who has compared Israel to Nazi Germany.
It is the U.N. that has become the “yes-man” organization for corrupt and biased regimes. The world needs a credible multi-national diplomatic organization, and it is tragic that the U.N. has ensured that it can no longer play that role.
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Commentary
By Andrea Cornell Sarvady
During a week that featured the financial markets collapsing like a house of cards, it was easy to overlook the opening of the United Nations’ General Assembly last month. Truthfully, most Americans will only remember the event as Sarah Palin’s world-leader scavenger hunt.
Palin’s lack of foreign policy experience is understandable, if alarming. There was a hint of truth in a recent Saturday Night Live skit that had her comically “disheartened” to learn how many foreigners were at the U.N., promising to “get those jobs back in American hands.”
McCain-Palin and Co. are indeed leading the charge on a foreign policy that is American-centric to a fault. Their proposed “League of Democracies” would be an alliance of like-minded countries with the potential to render the struggling U.N. obsolete, offering a cloak of legitimacy to any military actions we deem necessary.
Yet diluting the power of the United Nations isn’t what most of us want. An international poll from Worldpublicopinon.org shows that 85 percent of all Americans believe that the U.N. should have the right to authorize military force in the case of human rights violations. We value an organization whose nearly 200 members span a vast geographical and ideological range, working together to aid displaced refugees and conduct peacekeeping missions in some of the most treacherous spots on the globe. In addition, a post-9/11 United Nations employed sanctions to halt nuclear proliferation and helped with locating the finances of terrorist organizations. Can a more narrowly defined organization accomplish these same goals? Hard to imagine.
There’s no excuse for the United Nations’ bungling mismanagement and appalling incidences of corruption. Yet we need to fix this troubled organization from the inside, not in spite of its non-democratic members, but because of the opportunities such inclusiveness offers.
Sen. Obama recently noted that “the way we are perceived in the world is going to make a difference in terms of our capacity to get cooperation and root out terrorism.” Putting all our financial and strategic resources into a coalition of “yes-men” countries will not put our country first. By reforming the United Nations— a complex conglomeration of friends, enemies and ever-changing alliances — we will truly make our country safer and stronger.