|
WORLD
POLICY JOURNAL
| ARTICLE:
Volume XXII, No 5, Spring 2005 |
Print
|
 |
|
|
Friendly
|
Bush V. Annan: Taming the United Nations
Martin Walker*
The wretched regime of Saddam Hussein, having inflicted wars
on its neighbors and gruesome misrule and chemical weapons
on its own citizens, is doing more damage from beyond the
grave. The skill of Saddam Hussein's corrupting oil wealth
and of his smuggling operations has exposed the administration
of the United Nations to its enemies. And in President George
W. Bush's America, the United Nations has enemies in abundance,
and the complex but scandalous nature of the U.N.'s internal
difficulties makes it hard for the U.N.'s friends to defend
it. The United Nations now stands at bay in a confrontation
that is protean in the way it sets the physical power of the
world's only superpower against the moral power of the international
body. This battle may yet have some rounds to be fought, but
there is no doubting its scale, nor its global news value.
Remarkably, not even the awesome devastation of last December's
Asian tsunami could quite put the human rivalries over the
United Nations into their place; the confrontation spilled
over into a diplomatic jostling match to decide who would
take responsibility, and possibly credit, for the reconstruction
effort.
The struggle set the newly reelected president
of the United States against the lame duck secretary general
of the United Nations, although it was their surrogates who
took up the cudgels. Two of the world's most impressive spin
machines then became locked in deadly combat. On the one side
was the mob that Hillary Clinton once called "the vast
right wing conspiracy," a group of conservative U.S.
senators and congressmen, and their intensely ideological
staffs, Rupert Murdoch's Fox News television channel and his
New York Post, the Wall Street Journal's editorial
page, the National Review, and some other organs of
nationalist conservatism, all calling for the head of U.N.
secretary general Kofi Annan.
Kofi must go, they thundered, because Saddam Hussein was
allowed to steal over $20 billion in the U.N.'s oil-for-food
scandal that happened on Annan's watch. This is a shameless
exaggeration, but there were abuses, and the blame spreads
around a large number of people and institutions, including
the U.S. government bureaucracy as well as the U.N. administration
that Annan runs. But what really offends this conservative
coalition is Annan's political effrontery during an American
presidential election season. Annan twice publicly challenged
the Bush administration's foreign policy, first by writing
an appeal to halt the attack on Fallujah, and then by calling
Bush's Iraq war "illegal." (In fact this was the
fault of the BBC, whose reporter badgered poor Annan into
using the word. Annan was asked the same question repeatedly
until he came up with what he thought was the rather less
provocative phrase, "illegal in terms of the U.N. Charter,"
which he now privately regrets.)
Republican senator Norman Coleman, after a committee investigation
claimed to have found evidence that the United Nations had
let Saddam get his crooked hands on $21.3 billion, demanded
that Annan resign. This was accompanied by a resolution before
both houses of Congress demanding Bush v. Annan: Taming the
United Nations that Annan leave office, backed up by a bill
that would enforce the will of Congress by cutting 10 percent
from the U.S. payment next year, 20 percent the year after,
and so on, until the United Nations comes to heel. Some of
the more outspoken local politicians in New York were even
cruder, suggesting that the United Nations should be evicted
to Europe. "Let the French deal with all the U.N. diplomats
and their unpaid parking tickets," said Brooklyn's state
senator Martin J. Golden. "We have a U.N. here that has
a tendency to just ignore us, insult us, be a bad neighbor,
and not do what it should do. This guy Kofi Annan could have
stood with us in Iraq, decided not to. He oversaw $21 billion
being robbed from oil-for-food." This figure is a ridiculous
exaggeration, as we shall see.
On the other side is the great amorphous mass of global liberalism,
all clucking in unison that Kofi Annan is the best U.N. secretary
general since Dag Hammarskjold (although a list that includes
Kurt Waldheim and Boutros Boutros-Ghali is not much competition).
Led by British prime minister Tony Blair and the departing
U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell, and reinforced by the
governments of China, Russia, Germany, and France, the editorial
boards of the New York Times and the Washington
Post, and the news bulletins of National Public Radio
and the BBC, the international establishment has rallied to
Annan as the first African to run the world body, and as the
first secretary general to bring forward thoughtful and even
bold plans for U.N. reform.
Kofi Annan must stay, they all cry, most of them thrilling
to the symbolism of a clash between President Bush, who proudly
sports a small American flag in his lapel, and Nobel Peace
Prize laureate Annan, whose equally well-tailored lapel sports
a discreet dove, tastefully wrought in white enamel. Annan,
who confided to friends last November that it was "a
bit like a lynching, actually," was not sure how to respond
to these attacks, or whether this kind of media and congressional
assault against the United Nations was just a force of nature
that had to be endured. But some of the more thoughtful of
Annan's supporters, who want to avoid a lasting breach between
the organization and its American host, thought that the best
way to defend Annan was to go on the offensive, both in Washington
and in New York, against the more vulnerable and unreformed
aspects of the world body.
Richard Holbrooke, a former U.S. representative to the United
Nations in the Clinton years, organized a meeting at his New
York apartment on December 4 between Annan and some of the
key figures in the U.S. foreign policy establishment, who
had been asked to join a mission to "save Kofi and rescue
the U.N." From the Council on Foreign Relations came
Holbrooke and the council's former president Leslie Gelb;
from the United Nations Foundation came former U.S. senator
and under secretary of stateTim Wirth and Kathy Bushkin from
Gary Hart's presidential campaign (their presence gilded by
the generosity of CNN founder Ted Turner, whose gifts to the
United Nations have been channeled through the foundation);
and from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard came
John G. Ruggie, a former U.N. assistant secretary general
for policy coordination and strategic planning. Also present
were Robert C. Orr, the current holder of that post, and Nader
Mousavizadeh, Rhodes Scholar and a former editor at the New
Republic, who was Annan's aide for six years before joining
the investment firm of Goldman Sachs.
Annan, who was largely silent, heard the group warn that
the United Nations was on the losing side of a public relations
campaign; that the critique of the oil-for-food affair would
soon be followed by allegations of sexual abuse by U.N. peacekeepers
in Africa; and that he had to address two serious problems
immediately. First, the Republicans who ran the White House
and Congress thought Annan had worked for their electoral
defeat, and these were not the sort of opponents who took
prisoners. So Annan had to mend fences in Washington and learn
to play the lobbying game, with the secretary general becoming
a far more visible presence in the city; the United Nations
might even need to hire professional lobbying help. Second,
even though his reforms of the lumbering U.N. bureaucracy
had not gone nearly far enough, Annan had to restore the morale
of a wretched and miserable U.N. staff, many of whom had little
faith in their seniors. Some were palpably incompetent if
not corrupt; others had become painfully controversial within
the U.N. family, like the High Commissioner for Refugees (and
former Dutch prime minister) Ruud Lubbers, who was accused
of sexual harassment at a time when U.N. peacekeepers in the
Balkans and Congo faced formal inquiries into allegations
of sexual abuse. One key change was already in the works:
Annan's longtime chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, was about to
be replaced by the dynamic former Economist journalist
who had made a striking success of running the United Nations
Development Program, Mark Malloch Brown.
The Oil-for-Food Scandal
The most dangerous part of the U.N.'s problem was the oil-for-food
scandal, a topic of labyrinthine complexity, involving billions
of dollars, appalling mismanagement, and possibly some serious
fraud. Most ominously, because this is at least one part of
the affair that ordinary people could comprehend, Annan's
son Kojo had until last year been taking small sums of money,
$2,500 a month in consulting fees, from a Swiss company that
was meant to be monitoring the oil-for-food deal. Annan did
not know his son was still getting the money until early December,
and then admitted to a press conference that this provoked
"the perception problem for the U.N., or the perception
of conflict of interests and wrongdoing."
All this started 15 years ago, when Saddam Hussein first
invaded Kuwait, and the U.N. Security Council imposed comprehensive
sanctions on Iraq. After Saddam Hussein's defeat in the first
Gulf war, the sanctions were to remain in place until Baghdad
satisfied the terms of various U.N. resolutions. These included
accounting for the Kuwaitis who had disappeared during the
1990-91 invasion and occupation, restoring the loot taken
from Kuwait, and giving international arms inspectors full
rein in order to end Iraq's various weapons of mass destruction
programs. Saddam Hussein was less than forthcoming. But the
sanctions, which were hurting Iraq's civilian population,
became politically very difficult to sustain as Saddam Hussein's
propaganda machine artfully exploited the heartrending images
of starving children and hospitals without drugs.
There need have been no such suffering. Saddam was smuggling
at least $2 billion of oil a year through Jordan, Turkey,
and Syria. On the Security Council, the United States and
Britain were determined not to open this question, which one
British official privately confided to this reporter was "a
can of worms." The Turks, a NATO ally who had suffered
financially from the closure of the oil pipeline from Iraq,
were judged in Washington to deserve compensation. Jordan
also suffered from the sanctions, but the Clinton administration
judged that its useful role in the Israeli-Palestinian peace
process deserved some form of reward. So the British and the
Americans ignored the smuggling, while the Russians and the
French shrugged and acquiesced, possibly with the assurance
that this favor would someday be repaid. And then the Clinton
administration, focusing intently on the Middle East peace
process and Arab opinion, heard from its friends in the Arab
world that the sanctions against Iraq were inflicting real
hardship on Iraqi civilians. Cunningly exploited by the Saddam
Hussein regime, the sanctions were provoking outrage; Washington
accordingly agreed that something had to be done to stop the
Iraqi propaganda.
Thus in 1995 an oil-for-food scheme was devised, under which
the United Nations would sell Iraq's oil and use the money
to buy food and medical supplies that would be handed over
to Saddam's government for distribution. The program lasted
for eight years, and involved the sale of an average 2 million
barrels a day of Iraqi oil, or roughly 5,840 million barrels
over eight years. At an average price of $20 a barrel, the
total value of this oil amounted to some $116.8 billion. This
is pretty close to the estimate of $111 billion reached by
the U.N.'s own internal investigation, run by the former head
of the U.S Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, who was picked by
Annan as a man whose integrity would be unquestioned
in Washington.
The total sum that went through the United Nations was far
less than that, however. Although a firm total is hard to
deduce from the tangled calculations of the Volcker report,
it seems that the amount was close to $70 billion. The difference
is explained partly by the periodic falls in the oil price,
partly by the transport and pipeline and commission fees,
and partly by smuggling. Between the end of the Gulf War in
1991 and the start of the oil-for-food program in 1995, the
Iraqi regime "earned" over $10 billion, or more
than $2 billion a year, from smuggling, according to Iraqi
defectors and to U.N. estimates. And it may have earned even
more after 1995, judging from the anecdotal and visual evidence
of the boom in Iraq's Kurdish regions, the route for much
of the smuggling trade.
All sorts of figures are being quoted, but many of them are
meaningless. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) estimated
that Saddam Hussein illegally skimmed $10.1 billion during
the period when the $70 billion oil-for-food program was in
force, and many U.S. congressmen appear to assume that this
figure is reliable. It is not. According to the GAO, more
than half of that total—$5.7 billion—was the result
of oil smuggling by Saddam, for which the United Nations was
not responsible. But individual members of the U.N. Security
Council were very much responsible for this. Reconnaissance
satellites and British and American pilots who were enforcing
the no-fly zone that had banned the Iraqi air force from flying
over northern Iraq could see the convoys of tanker trucks
heading for Jordan and Turkey. And reporters for UPI wrote
about the way the Kurds in northern Iraq took their share
of the smuggling proceeds by charging a fee (usually $100,
but often collected twice at roadblocks set up by both the
Talabani and Barzani factions) from every tanker truck heading
for Turkey. Iraq's oil smuggling was the most open "secret"
in the Middle East.
Senator Coleman's subcommittee hit the headlines by claiming
Saddam's real take was $21.3 billion. But that number included
estimates of Saddam's oil proceeds for the five years before
the oil-for-food program was started, most of which came from
smuggling, which took place with U.S. and British acquiescence.
Few critics of the United Nations bothered to cite Iraq Survey
Group head Charles Duelfer's modest estimate of Saddam's take
from the oil-for-food program of $1.74 billion, or $250 million
a year. The Iraqi leader's likely take over eight years from
the U.N. oil-for-food program thus lies somewhere between
Duelfer's $1.74 billion and the GAO's estimated $4.4 billion,
or somewhere between $250 million and $600 million a year—around
3-6 percent of the total sum the United Nations handled.
It was long known that Saddam was trying to skim some money
from the oil-for-food system, demanding that tanker owners
pay in cash for the right to load the U.N.-sponsored crude
oil, and trying to shake down the banks and oil trading companies
that were handling the sales for the United Nations. Saddam
could do so because the United Nations had to accept that
Iraq was still a sovereign nation and could thus choose to
whom it sold the oil and from whom it bought food and drugs.
The money was paid into a U.N. escrow account—but there
were constant rumors that favored companies had to pay discreet
commissions to Saddam. The United Nations itself took a total
of $1.4 billion in administrative fees, and 30 percent of
all the money received went to reparations for Kuwaitis and
other victims of Iraq, as demanded by the U.N. resolutions.
When Baghdad fell in April 2003, the regime's own paperwork
became available and a list emerged of 265 beneficiaries of
Saddam Hussein's generosity in handing out oil vouchers to
potentially useful friends. These vouchers were legal titles
of ownership in barrels of oil, and some of the bundles of
vouchers given to favored friends of the regime were worth
millions. Among those listed were Indonesia's then president
Megawati Sukarnoputri; Russia's Vlad "The Mad" Zhirinovsky;
Charles Pasqua, a former French interior minister; and Benon
V. Sevan, a Cypriot who ran the U.N.'s oil-for-food program
and is listed as having been granted 13 million barrels of
oil. If so, Sevan's share could have been worth around $250
million. All the above deny any wrongdoing, and these allegations
must be treated with great caution. Britain's Daily Telegraph
lost a libel case to the leftist member of Parliament George
Galloway, and had to pay nearly $400,000 in costs and damages
after relying on these questionable Baghdad documents.
Moreover, the list itself and the supporting documentation
came from sources close to a man with no reason to like the
United Nations-Ahmed Chalabi, once Washington's favorite Iraqi
exile and the Bush administration's initial nominee to run
Iraq's interim government. Chalabi, who was quick to seize
the files of the Mukhabarat secret police and other important
government agencies after Baghdad fell, called the oil-for-food
affair "the biggest political bribery scandal in history."
Chalabi and his neoconservative allies in Washington might
have a political interest in discrediting the French and Russian
politicians who had helped sustain Saddam's regime, and also
in undermining the United Nations, which had firmly opposed
any gesture of recognition, far less legitimacy, to the interim
Iraqi authority of which Chalabi was a key member. Last April,
a British financial adviser to Chalabi, Claude Hankes-Drielsma
testified to a congressional committee of inquiry in Washington
that the U.N.'s oil-for-food program had become Saddam's "convenient
vehicle through which he bought support internationally by
bribing political parties, companies, journalists and other
individuals of influence."
The talk then was of some $10 billion being siphoned off
by Saddam Hussein, and four congressional committees began
investigations, which continued throughout last year. In December,
the publicity race was won by Senator Coleman, who rushed
to judgment by claiming that the staff of his intriguingly
named Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations had established
that Saddam Hussein had accumulated at least $21.3 billion
by fooling the U.N. sanctions operation and its oil-for-food
program. Senator Coleman accordingly demanded that Kofi Annan
resign. The leading Democrat on the same committee, Sen. Carl
Levin of Michigan, said that wrongdoing had clearly taken
place, but he had yet to see evidence that Annan was personally
responsible. Indeed, an analysis by Michael Pan, a researcher
at the Center for American Progress, notes that all the trades
in the oil-for-food program had to be approved by a committee
of the U.N. Security Council, known as the 661 Committee,
on which U.S., British, French, Russian, and Chinese officials
sat. They raised no objections, even when U.N. staff flagged
70 separate transactions as potentially suspicious.
"The United States and Britain, along with the other
members of the UN Security Council, designed and oversaw the
oil-for-food program," wrote Harvard's John G. Ruggie
in the International Herald Tribune ("What About
the Log in Your Eye, Congress?" December 8, 2004). "The
United States alone had 60 professionals review each of the
36,000 contracts awarded—more than twice the size of
the UN oil-for-food office's professional staff. America and
Britain held up 5,000 contracts, sometimes for months, to
ensure that no technology was getting through that Saddam
could use for weapons purposes. But they held up none—not
a single solitary one—on the grounds of pricing irregularities,
even when alerted by UN staff."
Some of these U.N. alerts became public. The New York
Times reported Iraqi demands for "kickbacks and illegal
contributions" on March 7, 2001, adding that Annan's
office had submitted a report to the U.N. Security Council.
In particular, Annan's staff told the 661 Committee that "prices
in a proposed contract between the Al Wasel and Babel General
Trading Company and Iraq appeared suspiciously high."
Nonetheless, the contract was unanimously approved by the
Security Council. According to a U.N. press office statement
dated January 30, 2005, "It was only in April 2004 that
the U.S. Treasury Department identified this company as a
front for the regime. This example demonstrates that U.N.
staff did report suspicious cases andthat while they were
not mandated or equipped to check the backgrounds of all suppliers,
even those who could, such as the U.S. Government, did not
have all of thisinformation until after the Oil-for-Food program
ceased to operate."
Turning a Blind Eye to "Irregularities"
U.N. officials, speaking off the record because there are
risks in leveling accusations at powerful members of the Security
Council, suggest that the U.S. and British governments turned
a blind eye to "pricing irregularities" that benefited
French and Russian banks, companies, and individuals. It was
important to keep France and Russia on the side of the increasingly
unpopular sanctions regime against Iraq. If the price was
a certain laxity in standards, or a deliberately relaxed oversight
when a French bank or Russian politician seemed to be doing
rather well out of the system, then so be it. This may be
squalid, but the squalor is not the fault of Kofi Annan or
the United Nations. And if U.S. congressional investigators
seek a focus for their outrage, they might inquire into the
way some $8 billion was taken from the U.N.'s remaining escrow
accounts for the "Iraq Development Fund" run by
the U.S. proconsul in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer. American promises
(to the Security Council) that the fund would be independently
audited have yet to be fulfilled, and U.N. sources suspect
that much of the money went to Halliburton on noncompetitive
contracts. Indeed, broad hints have been dropped in the corridors
of the Security Council that if the U.S. congressional inquiries
start pursuing the French bank Paribas, French and German
authorities will have their own inquiries to pursue into the
degree to which Halliburton's subsidiaries in Europe ignored
U.N. sanctions while Saddam Hussein was still in power.
These concerns were being voiced somewhere above the competence
of Senator Coleman who thought it a good idea to demand Kofi
Annan's head. "Good old Norm—it appears there's
nothing he won't do for a headline," commented Senator
Coleman's hometown newspaper. The paper had a point. Senator
Coleman is "outraged" that the United Nations would
not hand over all the evidence that its own internal inquiry
into the matter had uncovered, and would not make its staff
available for the U.S. Senate committee to interrogate, despite
the convention that U.N. officials have diplomatic immunity.
But the Americans are equally guilty. The man assigned by
Kofi Annan to run the U.N.'s own inquiry, Paul Volcker, complains
that the U.S. government is not helping him in his inquiries.
Volcker's final report is expected in July, but in January
he published an interim report, based on some 50 internal
U.N. audits, which found that in the first batch of oil-for-food
contracts in 1996 "in each case, the procurement process
was tainted, failed to follow established rules designed to
ensure fairness and accountability...and political considerations
intruded." Volcker's report found considerable mismanagement
by the United Nations, an extraordinary lack of oversight
by the U.N.'s Benon Sevan, and a number of questions that
Sevan must answer. His current explanation, that his wealth
comes from the generosity of an aunt in Cyprus, a woman of
visibly modest means, is less than satisfactory. "The
evidence is conclusive that Mr. Sevan, in effectively participating
in the selection of purchasers of oil under the Program, placed
himself in an irreconcilable conflict of interest," Volcker
concluded.
Perhaps even more serious is the question Volcker has raised
over the involvement of Annan's predecessor as U.N. secretary
general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a French-speaking Egyptian
Copt whose reappointment the Clinton administration vetoed
in the belief that he was anti-American and had been demonstrably
incompetent in Bosnia. The oil-for-food program was launched
during Boutros-Ghali's term, and he appears to have been instrumental
in placing France's BNP (Banque Nationale de Paris) on the
U.N.'s approved list to handle oil-for-food transactions,
after he made what the Volcker report called "a confidential
approach" to the French ambassador to the United Nations.
Moreover, the Volcker inquiry suggests that Benon Sevan assigned
contracts to a Swiss-based company, African Middle East Petroleum,
which is run by Fakhri Abdelnour, Boutros-Ghali's cousin.
Telephone logs suggest that Abdelnour and Sevan had a go-between,
Fred Nadler, whose sister Leia is Boutros-Ghali's wife.
This line of inquiry is potentially devastating for the United
Nations, in suggesting that the mud from this scandal is already
splashing into the office of not just one but two secretaries
general. Volcker has already pledged to pursue the Boutros-Ghali
matter "as far as the documents take us" and also
to give a full accounting of the role of Kofi Annan's son
in helping to secure other contracts. One corrupt secretary
general can be explained as a bad apple; two would be a systematic
problem. Three—let us not forget the earlier scandal
over the wartime record of Kurt Waldheim in Adolf Hitler's
Wehrmacht—is an institutional disaster. And it does not
much matter that the sums from the pillaging of the oil-for-food
contracts were peanuts in comparison with the billions each
year that came from Iraq's permitted smuggling operations
to Turkey and Jordan.
The Volcker inquiry has also revealed two glaring U.N. administrative
problems that had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein. The first
was serious mismanagement of humanitarian programs in Kurdish-controlled
northern Iraq, and the second was more than $5 billion in
overpayments by the U.N. Compensation Commission, a separate
body from the oil-for-food program, which hands out compensation
for Iraqi depredations in the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The
audit also suggests that Saybolt International BV, a Dutch
company engaged to monitor Iraqi oil exports, overcharged
the United Nations by inflating invoices, billing for accommodation
of workers provided by the Iraqi government and exaggerating
staffing and other expenses. The chairman of the International
Relations Committee of the House of Representatives, Henry
Hyde, an Illinois Republican, correctly said the audits appear
to "show a systemic failure on the part of the U.N. to
responsibly administer the oil-for-food program." But
this was not the proof of connivance in Saddam's loot that
the U.N.'s foes had expected.
A Visibly Weakened U.N.
But this whole affair is not entirely about getting the facts,
nor even about Kofi Annan or Boutros Boutros-Ghali. For some
American nationalists, it is about taming the United Nations
as the only international institution with even the moral
authority to make the United States pay a price for unilateral
decisions like going to war against Iraq. For the internationalists
and the international establishment, it is about restraining
the White House and promoting the one institution with the
prestige to do it—witness the way that Bush's usually
reliable Tony Blair rushed to Annan's defense. Senator Coleman's
Minneapolis Star Tribune put it succinctly: "For
months before the election, the right-wing constellation of
blogs and talk radio was alive with incendiary rhetoric about
Annan and the oil-for-food scandal.... This is really all
about Annan's refusal to toe the Bush line on Iraq and the
administration's generally unilateral approach to foreign
affairs. The right-wingers hate Annan and saw in the food-for-oil
program a possible chink in his armor. They went after it
with a venomous fury."
Not all did so. President Bush himself remained carefully
above the fray, saying in public only that the United Nations
must "get to the bottom of the matter." In effect,
the president was content for Annan to twist slowly in the
wind while the conservative attack went on. There was little
point in Bush wasting political capital in demanding the resignation
of a secretary general with just two years left of his term
when the rest of the Security Council (and at least the 53
African member states) was likely to fight to keep him. But
a Kofi Annan thus savaged with accusations of corruption,
fraud, and mismanagement was a United Nations visibly weakened.
Still, the outspoken support of Annan by over 120 of the 191
member states, including published letters from Blair, France's
president Jacques Chirac, and Russia's president Vladimir
Putin, and the standing ovation Annan received from the General
Assembly in the first week of December inspired a graceless
American gesture. While President Bush kept his silence, his
representative to the United Nations, former U.S. senator
John Danforth, told reporters he was speaking for the president
when he declared: "We are expressing confidence in the
secretary general and his continuing in office. Our view of
the performance of the secretary general is that he has done
a good job, that he is doing a good job."
But the White House's lack of confidence in Annan and the
United Nations was evident when the tsunami hit the shorelines
of the Indian Ocean on December 26. President Bush's first
public reaction to the disaster was to announce the creation
of a "humanitarian coalition" to coordinate relief
to the stricken area. What he called the "core group,"
consisted of the United States, Australia, India, and Japan,
although the president invited other nations to join, under
the leadership of a U.S. official, Under Secretary of State
Mark Grossman. Suspicions at the United Nations were so sharp
that this was immediately seen as an attempt by the Bush administration
to dominate global relief in the biggest natural disaster
in memory, thus marginalizing the United Nations in one of
its major roles of coordinating international aid.
There was some logic to the president's move. Only the United
States had the aircraft carriers and the instantly available
military logistics and communications systems that would prove
crucial to the relief effort. But then Norwegian diplomat
Jan Egeland reminded the world of the "stingy" lack
of generosity of many richer nations, provoking an egregiously
harsh reaction from the Bush administration. And Secretary
of State Colin Powell was perhaps making the religious politics
of American aid rather too obvious when he said at a press
conference with the president of Indonesia: "I think
it does give to the Muslim world and the rest of the world
an opportunity to see American generosity, American values
in action."
If the Bush administration had sought to seize the leadership
of the aid effort, it failed. After several days of canvassing
by Secretary Powell and other administration officials only
two other countries had come on board—New Zealand and
Canada. When the Bush administration approached Britain and
Italy—whose leaders Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi
are both staunch Bush allies—they replied that the U.S.
plan was widely seen as "divisive" at a time when
the entire world wanted to display a united front. Accordingly,
at the tsunami disaster donors' conference in Jakarta in January,
Colin Powell announced that the U.S.-led coalition had been
disbanded, and relief would be supervised solely by the United
Nations. This announcement was greeted with cheers, and was
seen by many as a moral victory for Kofi Annan, who responded
gracefully, saying, "We have seen the world come together.
We have witnessed a response founded not on differences, but
on that which unites us."
So is it now over, and has Annan won? Possibly; the irony
is that Kofi Annan was installed at the United Nations by
the Americans as their trusty when the Clinton administration
determined to ditch Boutros Boutros-Ghali. On the whole, Annan
has performed to American satisfaction, getting some initial
financial reforms through the United Nations and ditching
350 years of international law on national sovereignty to
assert that genocide or extreme wickedness toward one's own
people can on occasion justify international intervention.
At the end of last year, Annan issued a historic report of
a group of "wise men" which retrospectively endorsed
the Bush's administration's principal argument—lthat the
combination of rogue states, superterrorists, and nuclear
weapons is so new and so dangerous that preemptive military
strikes might be needed and justified under international
law.
But Annan and the wise men insisted that some fig leaf of
a U.N. mandate from the Security Council must first be obtained—which
famously did not happen over Iraq. (But note that Annan, in
an earlier attempt to accommodate the realities of American
policy and its whims, went along with the 1999 Kosovo war,
which had only a NATO mandate, when it became clear that Russia
would use its veto to block a U.N. mandate for an attack on
Serbia.) American nationalists reject this as giving France,
Russia, and China a veto over America's right to defend itself
and its allies against nuclear 9/11s. That is the core of
the problem, not Saddam's looted billions, and that is why
there is no guarantee that Annan will serve out the remaining
two years of his term of office, or that his successor will
not come under similar American pressure, or that the United
Nations, as the custodian of the multilateral principle, will
ever be entirely at ease with an impatient American superpower
that can be so easily tempted to operate unilaterally.
At least Annan still has a sense of humor. At a gala evening
for the U.N. Correspondents Association at the height of the
stormy demands in the U.S. Congress for his head, Annan began
his speech by saying, "I have resigned." A stunned
silence fell over the assembly. Then Annan grinned and continued,
"resigned myself to having a good time this evening."
This was greeted by cheers and cries of relief, and lots of
suddenly gripped cell phones were slipped unobtrusively back
into pockets by the assembled correspondents. But it may be
Annan's last agreeable evening for quite some time; Volcker's
final report is not expected until June or July, and the moral
authority of Annan and the United Nations will be at best
clouded until then. And for the next six months, which could
see some momentous decisions by the Bush administration on
the nuclear weapons programs of Iran and North Korea, and
on the nuisance value of Syria in the Middle East, Kofi Annan
will not be strongly placed to warn, to mobilize or even to
comment. This is quite sufficient for the American nationalists
and unilateralists. Even when they fail to take down their
chosen target, Annan's critics are determined to wound the
institution and weaken its ability to affect U.S. policy.
For the moment, the U.N. secretary general's office and the
broader administration is scrambling to defend itself, and
the United Nations as a whole is effectively neutralized.
*Martin Walker is editor in chief of United Press International.
[Go
to interactive
discussion forum]
You will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader installed
on your computer to access WPJ's full
text PDF articles.
 back
|
