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UN Future in Doubt
By Fred Gedrich
May 29, 2003

In the aftermath of the War on Iraq, the UN stands in near ruin looking for a sense of purpose. It has become the antithesis of peace, human rights and democracy by failing to properly confront Iraq's evil dictator -- and others of his ilk. As a result, the U.S.-led coalition, not the UN, will go down in history as the liberators of millions of oppressed Iraqis and will rebuild and reshape the country with little UN help.

The dramatic loss in prestige is not what UN bureaucrats and global ideologues expected. A little more than a year earlier they wallowed in glory when the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in two equal portions, to the UN and to its Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, for "their work for a better organized and more peaceful world."

Trumpeters of UN hegemony were jubilant. They have long yearned to install a global government with all the trappings of a failed Marxist ideology and borderless and godless worldview -- and they expected the Nobel Peace Prize to greatly enhance the UN's stature and accelerate the deliverance. They boast the UN is the world's only legitimate leader on matters of peace and human rights.

The Nobel award emboldened Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and others to encourage Americans to place decisions of national security in UN, rather than U.S. hands.

Fortunately, President Bush and many other Americans saw through this smokescreen. When challenged by the United States to act or risk irrelevancy, the UN idly watched as the U.S.-led coalition deposed a brutal Iraqi dictator responsible for over a million deaths and posing a serious threat to the region and the world.

The tawdry UN Security Council spectacle masquerading as a debate on Iraq shocked freedom loving people around the globe. They recoiled at the thought of influential UN members like France, Germany and Russia cutting shameful Faustian deals with the Iraqi dictator and others like him.

In reality, the UN is a deeply flawed institution. In its 58 year history, it interceded only twice to deter aggression. It stood idly by as tribal massacres took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans and it botched rebuilding efforts in Cambodia and Kosovo. 102 of 191 members do not have fully free and democratic governments. Their ranks also include 47 of the world's most notorious dictatorships along with 7 terrorist states.

If that is not alarming enough, non-democratic members protect each other by using their majority status to promote brethren like China, Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Zimbabwe to important positions within the UN system.

The fundamental problem is that the UN does not strictly enforce standard of conduct rules. It treats despotic and free governments the same. Although the UN Charter has a protocol for expelling members for failing to live up to the founding principles of the world body, it is loathe to oust any member from the organization. And it can't do it without the approval of the General Assembly -- where fully free and democratic countries are in the minority.

If the UN dared to act against North Korea and Iran for developing nuclear weapons, or for engaging in terrorist activity, the 115 members of the Non-Aligned Movement would quickly come to their colleagues' defense and demand a "peaceful" settlement -- a globalcrat code word for "slap on the wrist."

UN supporters have mounted a major media campaign to undue damage to their beloved institution because it failed to meet the challenge in Iraq. Ted Turner's Better World Campaign -- a frequent critic of the Bush administration's foreign policy and chief UN benefactor -- leads the rehab effort. Its President, Tim Wirth, warned that "we should not ... overvalue cliches about the UN being imperfect."

Americans should be very wary of that advice, particularly when "UN imperfections" may adversely affect U.S. national security.

The UN tried to get back in the good graces of the U.S.-led coalition by lifting economic sanctions on Iraq and agreeing to phase-out the UN's "notoriously corrupt" oil-for-food program. Its action greatly limited UN involvement in post-war Iraq, much to the dismay of UN globalcrats, but very much to the benefit of long suffering Iraqis who can now use proceeds from Iraq's enormous oil resources for the betterment of the country.

If the UN really wants to stand with freedom loving people of the world it must do much more than play meaningless diplomatic wordsmith games. It must effectively foster and promote peace, human rights and democracy, and renounce and eradicate the scoundrels that have taken over the institution. Otherwise, the UN is doomed to suffer the same fate as its predecessor, the League of Nations.

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Fred Gedrich is a senior policy analyst at Freedom Alliance.