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Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Annan’s Plea

In today’s Journal, Kofi Annan has an op-ed titled: Our Mission Remains Vital.

The title bugged me right off the bat. No one disputes how vital the UN’s mission is. Everyone with half a brain disputes that organization’s abilitity to accomplish said mission.

The U.N. cannot expect to survive into the 21st century unless ordinary people throughout the world feel that it does something for them — helping to protect them against conflict (both civil and international), but also against poverty, hunger, disease and the erosion of their natural environment. And in recent years, bitter experience has taught us that a world in which whole countries are left prey to misgovernment and destitution is not safe for anyone. We must turn the tide against disease and hunger, as well as against terrorism, the proliferation of deadly weapons and crime — starting, urgently, with decisions from the Security Council to end the abominable crimes in Darfur and bring war criminals to international justice.

This September, we have a real opportunity to make the U.N. more useful to all its members. Leaders from all over the world are coming to a U.N. summit in New York. I shall put before them an agenda of bold but achievable proposals for making the U.N. work better, and the world fairer and safer.

I know that Americans want to do that as much as any people on earth. More than any other people, they have the power to do it — if they listen to and work with others, and take the lead in a concerted effort. I believe that they will give us that lead. I look forward to September with hope and excitement.

Some of this is good. The UN indeed cannot survive unless people feel it does good for them. Yet, we never hear stories of large-scale good works from the UN that aren’t marred by overspending and ineptitude if not by outright scamming. And I’ve yet to see a UN project that the US Army and our many non-profit organizations couldn’t do better. Of course, that isn’t to say that the US should handle everything that goes on in the world. It is to say that it shouldn’t be the UN: an organization capable of bringing very little to physical account. As evinced by Annan’s stated solution: the upcoming summit in New York. Meetings solve nothing if the only thing they rear is another meeting and a 8.5x11 proclamation.

What Annan should realize is that his time of monkeying around with billions of US dollars is coming to an end. As we showed in Indonesia, a single US aircraft carrier does more immediate good in a disaster than the collected offerings from the UN’s 190 other members. Although it sounds like a good idea to communalize international aid and peace-making, history tends to bear out the success of compartmentalized giving. We saw it small scale on Amazon.com. We saw it large scale in promised donations from nations; until the UN’s political maneuverings put it in charge of all of that promised cash.

Annan’s article didn’t do much for me. Even forgetting the lies and corruption, the United Nations just doesn’t do its job very well. I suspect people around the world who are in a position to receive aid think the same thing. (Especially if they are being sexually abused by UN soldiers.) NATO, the US Army, Peace Corps, Doctors Without Borders, Red Cross, &c do their specialized jobs quite well. Annan, in this op-ed at least, has failed to make the case for his little demesne in Manhattan.

Posted on February 22, 2005 09:34 AM. Permalink