I attended a talk by former Israeli Ambassador, Dore Gold, last night. He's on tour promoting his new book, Tower of Babble : How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos. Unlike last time I went to see him, he actually showed up this time - although a half hour tardy.

It took place in a lecture hall at Harvard Yard. Attendance was around 250 and mostly students. Everyone was well-behaved. No pies thrown. There was a touch of speechifying during the question and answer session, but nothing too bad. It's interesting how much the MC's of these events have to emphasize, "Please ask a question, and stay on topic..." That's been true at every event I've attended, although there hasn't been any trouble at the stuff I've been to, it's an obvious recurring problem.

I'm not going to do one of my in-depth reports. I did record the event, but I didn't take much in the way of written notes. I'll just give a few thoughts and impressions I took away with me.

The book addresses the many weaknesses of the UN and how it got that way, concluding with some recommendations. None of the arguments and issues will be of any surprise to blog readers, but I'm looking forward to reading it. Gold is someone with personal UN experience, and I'm sure it will be interesting.

One of his opening anecdotes was of the time he was called to give a last-minute speech at an emergency session of the United Nations in Geneva. In 1999, for the first time in decades, an emergency session of the signatories of the 4th Geneva Convention had been called. It had never happened before. Not with all the invasions, conflicts and ethnic battles in all the years since. What was the big emergency now? As Gold put it, "We were building some condos in Jerusalem."

He used this as an example of how off-kilter and often bizarre the UN's priorities have become. Manipulated by regional and religious group interests, the UN's activities have fallen far out of line from where the average moral Westerner would expect them to proceed.

It wasn't always like that.

When the UN was born in the aftermath of the Second World War, made up of nations who had opposed the Axis, it's membership was smaller and more focused. Most of the nations in question had only recently been united in some sort of common purpose.

Not so as the years went by, more and more countries joined with few standards as to the character and motivations of the membership. What this has done is create a huge pool of nations - dictatorships, terror and torture states, expansionist nations and banana republics - who have far different values and standards from the Western democracies - particularly the United States - and others of the original membership.

This pool has, in effect, created a market for a new commodity - the UN vote. Particularly now in a world without a Communist threat, and an Islamist threat unrecognized by many, the nations of the West that formerly shared a common purpose are now more free than ever to buy and trade in this new market of States.

What has occurred as a result is the utter corruption of the old order. Now influence is bought, sold and peddled while the old standards of global responsibility take a distant back seat.

The UN was founded to prevent aggression by one state upon another. It worked somewhat in the old days, but since then the UN has had a decidedly difficult time in sorting out aggressor from aggressed. As examples, Gold offered the example of Rwanda, where the UN (under head of Peacekeeping Operations Kofi Anan) refused to allow its commander on the scene to remove Hutu ammo dumps even though there was an advance indication of the upcoming genocide - it would have violated the UN's neutrality to have done so - or the International Court of Justice's finding on Israel's Security Fence which did not take into account the reason for the fence's existence - Palestinian-Arab terrorism. And how can be expected to sort out such issues, being as they are, influenced by so many conflicting interests, trying to satisfy them all. Instead, they end up providing cover for aggression and formaldehyde for dictator-regimes which should have been shoved over the cliff long ago.

Name any number of global flash points where a united effort on the part of an interest and world-view sharing group would be necessary and make possible to achieve some objective - North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Sudan...the list could go on and on and in each case there is some influential party who see's themselves with contrary interests in the UN power structure standing by to prevent unified action.

And there's no end in sight. Structural reforms like increasing the size of the Security Council and adding extra permanent members certainly wouldn't fill any of the deep moral vacuums the body suffers from. It would just add more bidders into the commodity market, and more interests to the paralysis pool. It would do nothing to un-isolate underpowered democracies who can't join regional groups such as Israel or any other up-and-comer who chooses to buck the usual system of dictatorship pandering. Who can they rely on for support when the cards are against them? The United States is one of the only countries militarily and economically powerful to even occasionally vote even against their most obvious immediate self-interest.

Gold offers a solution we've been hearing more and more about - start relying less on the United Nations and more on "Coalitions of the Willing" - temporary groupings put together for common causes and who share interests. This is reminiscent of the proposals floating about to replace the UN outright, or supplant it with some sort of body composed of democratic nations, with some sort of meaningful standards for admission.

I love the concept, but I'm a skeptic. The first thing that needs to happen, or at least simultaneously with, is the de-valuing of that commodity market I discussed above, and in order to do that, the UN itself will have to be de-valued. I have no expertise on International Law to know how that can happen from a legal standpoint - making decisions of the United Nations matter less in courts of international jurisprudence - and I can tell you from a layman's perspective that from a world-wide popular-opinion standpoint, whoever wants to start undermining the credibility of the UN has a massive row to hoe.

Without that happening, the rewards for nations to eschew the UN debating society - thus giving up one of their own bases of influence (think France here as a for-instance) are slim as they would be were the same efforts pursued within the UN structure itself.

I'll have to read Gold's book to see if he comes up with any actual solutions to breaking nations who should know better of their corrupt and corrupting habit of influence-peddling, and the addicting narcotic of participating in a resolution-passing debating society and fantasizing that the world is a better place therefore. Sadly, I didn't hear it last night.

Posted by Solomon at 2:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
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