      |
|
|
 |
|
« Back to Does the U.N. Work? main page    Transcript for: Does the U.N. Work?The UN was created in 1945 principally to promote peace among nations. But its role in the 21st Century is unclear. Global terrorism, genocide and humanitarian crises have taken center stage. Critics charge internal corruption and attempts by member nations to use the UN to rein in the United States, the world’s sole remaining superpower. Would a stronger UN make for a more peaceful world? Or should America be wary about losing its right to act in its own interest?To find out, Think Tank is joined this week by... Timothy Wirth, President of the United Nations Foundation, former U.S. Senator, and former undersecretary for global affairs at the U.S. Department of State. And... Josh Muravchik, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and author Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America’s Destiny, and, The Imperative of American Leadership: A Challenge to Neoisolationism. The topic before the House: DOES THE U.N WORK? This Week on Think Tank. WATTENBERG: Tim Wirth, welcome to Think Tank. Josh Muravchik, welcome to Think Tank. Josh, this topic, 'Does the U.N. Work' is principally driven by a negative and it’s you who has something of an ax to grind. Why don’t you give us your short take on what your problem is and then we can open it up. MURAVCHIK: Well, Ben the U.N. was conceived as an institution that would be the bulwark of world peace and it never grew into that role. It’s never been able to fulfill that role and most of the structures that were supposed to uphold the peace don’t really exist. And yet, in this post-Cold War era, this unipolar era, when... WATTENBERG: Unipolar meaning one superpower. MURAVCHIK: The U.S. being the sole superpower. MURAVCHIK: When in reality the main structure of peace is the U.S. itself in the use of American power to keep the peace. There’s now an effort that sort of came to fruition on the Iraq debate to use the U.N. as a way to constrain the United States, to counterbalance American power in this one superpower world. And it’s easy to understand why states are nervous about American power, but the fact is that the U.N. can’t keep the peace, has completely failed at that mission and if those who want to succeed at tying down the U.S., the world is going to be a much more dangerous and a much less peaceful place. WATTENBERG: Senator Tim Wirth, what do you think? WIRTH: Well, the purpose of the U.N. came out of World War II and the idea of the U.N. at that point and which I think is still valid was nations ought to get together and make sure that no single country is able to impose its will on others. U.N. is now working very hard with, I think, the people who care about the U.N. which is almost everybody, to modernize itself to the threats of the modern world. WATTENBERG: Does the U.N. now have a role in halting terrorism? WIRTH: The U.N. has a series of conventions that have been agreed to. I think the Secretary General’s new high level panel on the future of the U.N. is going to try to pull those various conventions together into a more effective mechanism so that the U.N. is - the U.N.’s a player now. It could be a stronger player in terrorism and the same thing on weapons of mass destruction. WATTENBERG: The rest of the world or certainly the Europeans or certainly the French or the Germans are very nervous that the U.S. will dominate things. Is that right? WIRTH: Well you know, the U.N., like other things is a political institution. It’s all these countries getting together and in any kind of a process or a political institution like the Congress or anything else, people have their own agendas. Put yourself in the position of understanding some of these members are looking at big Uncle Sam over here and they’re saying 'well maybe there’s some way that we can gain an advantage'; we’re looking at them and saying 'well how can we use the U.N. to advance our interests?' WATTENBERG: There’s a statement you hear if you hang around up there for awhile that some of the critics say that the U.N. has too much authority over the U.S. and others say that the U.S. has too much control over the U.N. WIRTH: That’s about right. You know, it’s about right. WATTENBERG: Well, yes. I mean it’s - I guess the U.S. because it is the sole superpower I mean, probably cares more deeply about these things and is involved in every single issue. MURAVCHIK: Yes, I don’t think the U.S. has too much authority over the U.N. and I don’t know if the U.N. has too much authority over the U.S., but there are people who want to give it more authority over the U.S. which would be very destructive. Destructive above all to the peace. WIRTH: Among some, as Ben said, there is a perception at the U.N. that the U.S. has too much power, you know, ’cause we’re involved in everything, we are the superpower, we’re the host country... WATTENBERG: We put in the most money. WIRTH: And if we want something to happen at the U.N. it generally happens and if we don’t want it to happen it generally doesn’t happen. WATTENBERG: In the General Assembly particularly, what was the figure that we came up with? 44% of the votes - of all the votes in the U.N. have been one-sided anti-Israel resolutions, so that’s not the U.S. having control over those kind of votes. WIRTH: Well let’s go to that question, which is the General Assembly, which is generally a debating society. It doesn’t have any power at all. What the General Assembly says is like a Congressional resolution. It’s National Salute to Eisenhower Week. Resolutions on the floor of the House, they occur and people do those resolutions for political purposes. That’s fine, there’s a lot of that in the General Assembly, but that’s not important. What’s important is what happens in the Security Council. MURAVCHIK: We’re getting away from the main point which is this: the U.N. created a theoretical structure to keep the peace, and that is when a nation violated the peace there’d be action by the Security Council to put that nation in its place. The reality is that in the now nearly sixty years of the U.N.’s existence, there have only been two occasions on which the U.N. Security Council has responded to a breach of the peace and taken action to put the aggressor back in its place. And those two occasions were Korea in 1950 and Kuwait in 1990 and ’91. And both times it was a U.S. response under a slight U.N. fig leaf. WATTENBERG: You say it’s a fig leaf. On the other hand having that - I mean I remember Korea, having that U.N. flag up there took a lot of the heat off of us, which we’re seeing now in Iraq because we don’t have it. Maybe we can move on a little bit to the specialized agencies, which I know is something that you’re very much in favor of and concerns you deeply. I mean, you had this situation a couple years ago. What was the meeting in Durban about? MURAVCHIK: It was supposedly a meeting against racism. WATTENBERG: It was a meeting against racism and it turned out that the United States finally pulled its delegation out. It was just unbridled, raw, anti-Semitic sewage. I mean, I read some of the transcript. It was unbelievable stuff, and again, you would say it’s because well yes; it’s politics and they’re vote-trading and the Arabs and so on and so forth, but I’m sure you can see where it gets some people... WIRTH: Oh, Durban was a disaster. Everyone was - we didn’t go to any funding into Durban. We thought it was ill thought through going in and we thought it was terribly executed and some of the stuff that came out was unvarnished garbage, sewage. There’s no question about it; it was terrible. It was terrible. But you know, a lot of things happen that are, you know, you’re embarrassed to watch. I can take you and go through the Congressional record and look at the debates in the record - not like this but some that are so nasty, you know, and so useless. WATTENBERG: Yes, but I mean... that’s an argument we categorize as 'so is your old man'. You know what I mean; saying, well lots of other people are bad also but I mean, we’re talking about the U.N. WIRTH: Let’s go to the broader issue of the other agencies. Let’s remember as we’ve said that of the budget of the U.N.’s 100%; 20% are the issues we talked about before, sort of the military peacekeeping kinds of issues and 80% is everything else. And that’s the U.S. as a global institution, you know, in a global world. Why do airplanes all land going in the same direction, for example? Why are there not overlaps of television and radio frequencies? All of that sort of thing is an economic part of it. The disease, children’s stuff... that’s the 80% of the U.N. And that’s the 80% of the budget and that seems to me is also an invaluable contribution of the United Nations. WATTENBERG: Josh, invaluable? MURAVCHIK: Well it’s certainly valuable. I’m not sure it’s invaluable. Look, you can break the U.N.’s functions down into three broad areas. One is keeping the peace of the world and in that is just you’ve got to write it off. It’s been a complete failure. It just hasn’t done it, hasn’t begun to do it. Second is, even if it was not a powerful agency to keep the peace, it could have been a kind of moral beacon to mankind and that gets back to Durban because Durban was not just one occasion. There’s the whole horrible, disgusting record of the U.N. in the area of human rights. Year in, year out the U.N. Human Rights Commission with countries like Libya under President Qaddafi sitting in the chair in which the most of the world’s worst human rights violators get themselves on the commission. WATTENBERG: For example, who were the other ones? MURAVCHIK: Well, Syria, Saudi Arabia, China, Sudan, Cuba. The third function of the U.N. is the work of specialized agencies, the humanitarian work that helps refugees, it helps sick people, it helps poor people. Much of that work or most of that work is very commendable and is indeed very valuable; whether it might be done by someone else if the U.N. wasn’t there is another question. WATTENBERG: I had not really thought that through that it could only be done by the U.N. but you have organizations like the International Red Cross. I’m not saying I’m against the U.N. and you’re not for pulling out of the U.N. or anything like that, no. MURAVCHIK: No, I’m not. WIRTH: Presumably you could upgrade, you could change the Red Cross and make it truly an international organization, but - the World Health Organization for example, sets the standard, does the work and SARS is a perfect example of this. The number one world healthcare agency was the Center for Disease Control, in Atlanta, our own, U.S. Best healthcare agency in the world, but extremely difficult for the CDC to go into China and to do a variety of things in China. So WHO, the World Health Organization, the U.N. organization, became the umbrella. WATTENBERG: Which is stationed - headquartered in Geneva. WIRTH: In Geneva. WATTENBERG: Yes, we shot a show there on AIDS, actually. WIRTH: And they became then the way in which the whole international community, led by the Center for Disease Control, got into China, worked on the problem, everybody could do it and do it in a very - in a very acceptable way. It wasn’t like people were coming from the... polio’s another example of what’s going on... WATTENBERG: Again as in the case with peacekeeping, if you can get that U.N. flag to travel under you... you’ve really made things easier. WIRTH: Josh has talked about - the second point that Josh made you know, which is about the moral standard - I mean, there would be a lot of debate. I mean, I think Kofi Annan is one of the great moral leaders of the world and stands up to be so. But I think what Josh points out in terms of some of the institutions like the International Human Rights Organization within the U.N., you know, has been a disgrace and it’s very true that a lot of countries run to that commission and use it to hide. WATTENBERG: Tim, what do you think of this idea that no war can be legitimate unless it is sanctioned by the U.N.? WIRTH: I don’t know who’s saying that. WATTENBERG: I think President Chirac has said it a number of times. WIRTH: If Chirac is saying that, it’s not in the U.N. charter and I don’t think that that’s the case. If our interests are threatened, you know, in the United States, and we feel that there is very clear evidence for what we do - I mean this is what we did on going to Iraq - and we thought there was evidence apparently and we acted in our own self-defense. WATTENBERG: And you have no problem with that? WIRTH: Absolutely. You know, the problem is when you are making it up and you know; that’s a totally different set of issues. WATTENBERG: Who’s making up what? WIRTH: Well, it’s a problem is when this administration makes up a case for this because it made up its mind for what it wanted to do and it does not do its politics very carefully. WATTENBERG: Are you talking about the weapons of mass destruction? Is that what you’re talking about? WIRTH: There are a whole variety of things that are involved. MURAVCHIK: Well, but are you talking about WMD? WIRTH: Of course the WMD. We had... MURAVCHIK: That we made it up? WIRTH: We made it up. We had inspectors - we had the inspections that were working - this goes to a function of the U.N., by the way. We had inspectors on the ground from the U.N. that were doing an incredibly good job up until 1998 when for a lot of complicated reasons they were taken out. The U.N. inspection process worked really well. They went back in 2002 or 2003 with David Kay... WATTENBERG: Five years later of letting the Iraqis alone. WIRTH: Yes. But then they went back in and they had found and destroyed a lot of things between ’92 and ’98, then went back in and that’s when, you know, there was a lot of discussion in which many people, myself included, said we’re not finding anything. The inspectors haven’t found anything. What’s wrong with letting the inspectors continue on the ground? They have a very good record. And they were right. The inspectors were right. WATTENBERG: Do you think there’s a distinction here? I guess President Bush has said that they had bad information about the WMD, but there are a lot of other people who say he lied. Where would you come out on that? WIRTH: I think the intelligence commission is going to show that there was a tremendous amount of pressure placed on the CIA and the intelligence agencies in 2003 to change what they were saying. Now, when they were talking about weapons of mass destruction, the evidence was no different about Iraq in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004. Now, somehow... WATTENBERG: And that evidence was that they had them. WIRTH: No. No. No. It was that... wait a minute... there was not that evidence. And then somehow, they in 2003 changed their mind. Now why did the CIA, with no other new information change their mind? I think there was a huge amount of political pressure placed on them. MURAVCHIK: I don’t know what tale you’re making up here, Tim. We’ve already had - you’re saying some commission will report in the future what you think, but we’ve already had a variety of investigations and commissions; we’ve had testimony from the leading figures of the intelligence community as well as the political leaders, and everybody says the same thing and has no relationship to what you’ve just said, which was that the consensus view within the intelligence community and among the leadership was that they had these weapons. President Clinton has said that it was his conviction at the time he left office that they had these weapons. This was also the view of the French government, the German government, the Russian government, the Israeli government, everyone thought that. So, perhaps they were all wrong. We really don’t know that for sure yet, but maybe very likely they were all wrong. But for you to say this was because of the political pressure of the Bush administration, the Bush administration’s political pressure on Chirac? On Schroeder? On Putin? Come on, Tim. What are you talking about? WIRTH: I don’t remember that Chirac and Schroeder and Putin voted for this venture in Iraq, Josh, they said no. MURAVCHIK: No, but their intelligence agencies... WIRTH: They said no. I don’t remember that we were able... MURAVCHIK: They disagreed about the policy, Tim. But they all agreed about the WMD. WIRTH: I don’t remember that we were able to make the case. WATTENBERG: Hold it. Let’s just go sequentially now. You go, you go, you go, you go. WIRTH: Well I just - I remember that we had to get nine out of fifteen votes from the Security Council. We were able to get, I believe, one. And that was the U.K. WATTENBERG: The Brits, right. WIRTH: We were not even able to get... We were not even able to get the support of Mexico our... one of our two closest friends, Canada and Mexico. WATTENBERG: Well, yes... WIRTH: Or Chile. WATTENBERG: Both of whom enjoy snapping us in the nose, I mean, you know. WIRTH: Well, you know, we really put a huge amount of pressure on them and the Chileans, whom of all Latin American countries we’ve had the closest relationship with. Now, you know, I find that... where were we? Now, how were we so out of sync with everybody else in the world and everybody else’s information and what everybody else thought ought to be done? WATTENBERG: All right. Okay. Hold on. We’re drifting a little bit off topic of the U.N., although it’s a very interesting discussion. Getting back to this issue of sovereignty, there has been talk about a U.N. tax on people. That’s what scares people is that you’re going to - that this is leading toward world government and while you might have some very good things in that kind of a world government like the World Health Organization fighting AIDS and fighting smallpox and I guess that’s the golden poster child, but the idea that the U.N. will gradually lead us down a road toward world government and that is not in America’s best interest. Would either of you care to comment on that? Is that the nub of this issue, really? WIRTH: I think we already have world cooperation in lots of different ways. We have a global economic environment. Now is that some kind of global government? Of course it is, for we have rules of trade; we have rules of behavior... WATTENBERG: WTO. WIRTH: We have lots of things going on. So is that feared global governance, or is that feared sort of, you know, I think that’s a good thing. And I think that having that kind of economic activity globally is a good thing and I think that the U.N. is very helpful in facilitating that. Should the U.N. have a police force? I think not. I think the U.N. should not have an army of its own. It should have a command structure and it should have, in waiting that capability but that’s it. Should the U.N. have its own major taxing authority? I don’t think so. WATTENBERG: Josh, do you have a concern over us drifting toward world government and that this would be injurious to the United States? MURAVCHIK: I think there is some danger. I think it would be injurious to the United States and to the whole world. We have two areas in which this is happening. One is in the security area, which is really important with this mantra that has been raised - the no use of force without the authorization of the Security Council. That was raised in Iraq and it’s been raised on other occasions. WATTENBERG: It was raised by Chirac, by President Chirac... MURAVCHIK: By Chirac and by Chancellor Schroeder of Germany and by President Putin of Russia. It’s the mantra of those who want to constrain U.S. power but then we also have these pseudo-legal institutions. The creation of this International Criminal Court, the attacks on the U.S. for not joining this court and yet this is a court that would presumably be able to try and punish individuals but not embedded in any... political system where those individuals would have rights or would have a vote or would be able to make the laws. A court that’s part of a whole system of government, like our courts, is an element of democracy. The people who are subject to the court also help to make the laws that the court enforces. But in international criminal court, no one who is likely to be hauled before that court gets any voice in determining what are the laws that the court will enforce and act on. WATTENBERG: The topic of our discussion was 'Does the U.N. Work?' Let me rephrase that a little bit and ask you to look out into the future ten or twenty years, which is can the U.N. work substantially better than it is now working? We’ll go Tim first and Josh second. WIRTH: I think the U.N. today does some things pretty darn well - humanitarian ventures. I think it has a ways to go to make its peacekeeping effective and better and there’s going to be a greater need for that. I think it’s going to take on some new challenges for example, a global energy climate change challenge is a huge one. The U.N. is not yet equipped to figure out how to really move that agenda. I think that’s one where there’s going to need for you know, some real strengthening. Finally, the Security Council has to understand, as in the human rights area, that what it does has real consequence and you can’t just make these votes and have these discussions and then they’re going to go away. If you’re going to vote for something you have to follow it up and do it seriously. WATTENBERG: Okay. All right. Josh, can the U.N. work better? You’re the skeptic here. Do you have some hope for it? MURAVCHIK: I do in some limited areas. I think that aside from the areas in which it fails, that generally it’s kind of large, disconnected bureaucracy so it will never work really well. But the one area in which I can see there’s a serious effort to make it work better is in peacekeeping. And I think some - some progress has been made in that. It’s important to distinguish peacekeeping from keeping the peace, ironically. That is, peacekeeping has become a very specialized term meaning in a country where you once had a civil war or some kind of battle where the sides have now agreed on both sides to stop fighting and to have a settlement, but they distrust each other and you need a kind of neutral party in the middle to tell each side the other side’s not cheating. The U.N. has shown it can do that and I think there were some earlier failures that people learned from and that we can expect and hope that the U.N. will get even better at doing that. The danger is if the U.N. is projected into what was supposed to be its original mission, which is keeping the peace. That is, being an instrument of real force that could send out a perpetual warning. WATTENBERG: And that gets into nation-building and all kinds of other things. MURAVCHIK: Well, it also above all gets into deterring aggression. MURAVCHIK: That if you have sort of aggressive, ambitious dictators who are dreaming about taking over the country next to them, they are warned off. They know that if they do it they’ll get in trouble. And that kind of keeping the peace really is a function of U.S. power. The thing that will deter dictators is thinking that the U.S. will get into the act against them. There’s really very little prospect that the U.N. will play that 'keeping the peace' role. WATTENBERG: Okay. WIRTH: I largely agree with everything that Josh just said. How about that? WATTENBERG: Well, then that’s a good note to go out on. Josh Muravchik, Tim Wirth, thank you both very much for... WIRTH: Thank you, Ben. It was a pleasure. WATTENBERG: ... joining us on Think Tank. And thank you. Please, remember to send us your comments via email. It helps us make the program better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. 2 Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
  Web development by Bean Creative. |