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Article Title: "U.N.? No Thanks "
Author:
Section: Issues & Insights Date: 6/1/2004
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Iraq: As the endgame draws near, world leaders have joined to call for more involvement and control by the United Nations. What a mistake that would be.
The maneuvering by the U.N. and its most vocal supporters has grown intense. Not only do they want the global organization to name Iraq's interim government. They also want it to command U.S. troops.
This would be a recipe for disaster - both politically and militarily.
History has shown the U.N. to be ill-equipped and inept when it comes to military operations. And recent events show that humanitarian and other programs are prone to corruption and scandal.
Last week, for instance, U.N. peacekeeping troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo were accused of forcing starving teenage refugees to exchange sex for food. Few doubt the charges are true. In American jurisprudence, we have a word for that: Rape.
Meanwhile, the U.N.'s top official in Kosovo was forced to quit after a series of riots that left 19 people dead and hundreds injured.
Let's see: The U.N. has controlled Kosovo since 1999, and it still hasn't established security or handed over authority to local Kosovars. Yet it now demands the U.S. to do so in Iraq, right away.
That's the way the U.N. works, as its record in the Mideast shows.
For more than 50 years, the U.N. has controlled Palestinian refugee camps. The "camps" - they're in fact towns - have become breeding grounds for terrorists. To live there is to know only despair and misery. Four of five residents live on less than $2.10 a day.
Is that what we want for Iraq? Of course we don't. Nor do Iraqis. Because as unpopular as we keep hearing the U.S. occupation is, handing control to U.N. bureaucrats is even less so.
Iraqis know that U.N. officials - possibly including Secretary General Kofi Annan's top aide, Benon Sevan - have been implicated in the oil-for-food scandal. Saddam Hussein was able to bribe key officials at the U.N. and elsewhere to break U.N. sanctions.
Why aren't we surprised? After all, it was Annan who said of Saddam back in 1998, "I think I can do business with him."
That's the U.N.'s problem. It has 191 members, but just 80 or so are democracies, according to Freedom House. So it will often "do business" with unsavory, abusive regimes as a matter of course.
This won't do. Iraqis deserve better. So does the rest of the world.
President Bush has a sensible, five-step timetable that potentially will bring stability and peace to Iraq. But seeing it through will require political will and military might - both of which the U.N. lacks.
