Sullying the UN

Andrew Sullivan takes on the UN in today's Times.

He writes:

I’m not one of those who think the UN should be abolished. We need something like it. We need a forum in which the world can sometimes come together and discuss world problems. Where genuine peace exists it can make sense to send UN peacekeepers to police it. When international disaster strikes the UN can be a useful instrument for delivering aid.

But precisely because it has to represent all nations, it cannot represent justice or even any meaningful definition of the word “peace”. As long as Saudi Arabia is determining what human rights are, it’s a joke. Yes, it can be useful as a mechanism for the great powers to enforce their will in less naked and more consensual a fashion. But without those great powers, it’s useless. Remember Srebrenica? Or Rwanda? If the UN is powerless before genocide and corrupt in the face of dictatorships how can it be relied on to do anything of real significance in the world? That kind of work is left to the despised leaders of the West — the George Bushes and Tony Blairs and Michael Howards. They are accountable to voters, whereas UN
bureaucrats are accountable once in a blue moon to Volcker.

I think that Sullivan is, if anything, overstating the value of the UN as an instrument for delivering aid. The recent tsunami crisis in SE Asia is a case in point. US foreign service officers posting on the Diplomad detailed the grotesque pretensions and inefficiency of the UN as it tried to respond to the disaster [scroll around there are many posts].

Andrew also makes his case for US intervention by imagining the alternative:

Imagine we had followed the UN line and not gone to war. The corrupt oil for food programme would have continued, while pressure to remove sanctions increased. Saddam would have gradually rebuilt the ability to threaten the region and the world. Hundreds of shady businessmen, lobbyists and bureaucrats would have seen their bank accounts padded with lucrative oil contracts.

The Iraqi people would have continued to live in a fast-collapsing police state, kept barely alive by medicine and food supplies from the UN that were also the means to keep them under Saddam’s thumb. How on earth would this have been anything but a disaster and an injustice? Yes, critics of the war are right to say that we now know the WMD threat was greatly exaggerated. But it is equally true that we now know that the status quo the war critics preferred was inefficient, corrupt and deadly to the Iraqi people.

It's interesting to watch Sullivan tack to and fro on these issues. He's really wrestling with difficult choices, not simply jumping to a partisan or rigidly ideological position. How refreshing.