John Bolton is right about the UN
IN 1994, John Bolton said that if the UN Secretariat building in New York “lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference”. The quote makes an appearance nearly every time Bolton’s critics compile a hit parade of his alleged infamies.
My question is: Why is the remark even controversial?
The UN is a never-ending scandal disguised as an everlasting hope. The hope is that dialogue can overcome distrust and collective security can be made to work in the interests of humanity. Reality says otherwise. Just ask the people of Aleppo.
As for the scandals – where to start? UN peacekeepers caused a cholera epidemic in Haiti that so far has taken 10,000 lives. Yet it took UN headquarters six years to acknowledge responsibility. An AP investigation found “nearly 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and other personnel around the world” over a 12-year period, including 300 allegations involving children. “But only a fraction of the alleged perpetrators served jail time.”
In Rwanda in 1994, UN peacekeepers all but abandoned the country at the outset of genocide that took at least 500,000 lives. In Bosnia in 1995, UN peacekeepers stepped aside in Srebrenica and allowed more than 7,000 men and boys to be killed and countless women raped.
And then there are comparatively lesser scandals. Like Oil for Food, the multibillion-dollar program intended to feed hungry Iraqi children and used by Saddam Hussein in a kickback scheme. Or the use of UN schools in Gaza to store weapons aimed at Israel.
Confronted with the record of failure, UN defenders typically deflect and demand: the former, by pointing to the bad behaviour of individual states as the cause of UN failures; the latter, by insisting that the UN’s core problem is a dearth of financial resources and legal authorities.
They’re also misleading. Contrary to the belief that the UN runs on a shoestring, the total expenditure for the UN system in 2016 was around $49 billion. That’s up 22 percent since 2010. And the abuse of the UN system by states such as Russia to protect clients like Bashar Assad is a feature of the system, not a bug.
So is the chronic mismanagement. Two years ago, Anthony Banbury, a former assistant UN secretary-general, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times explaining why he resigned from his job. “I was unprepared for the blur of Orwellian admonitions and Carrollian logic that govern” the UN headquarters.
“If you locked a team of evil geniuses in a laboratory, they could not design a bureaucracy so maddeningly complex, requiring so much effort but in the end incapable of delivering the intended result. The system is a black hole into which disappear countless tax dollars and human aspirations, never to be seen again.”
And that’s from a self-described believer in the UN’s ideals and mission. But the truth of the UN is probably worse, since fixes to the system never seem to work.
The UN adopted what were supposed to be landmark reforms more than decade ago. Yet the mismanage- ment, corruption, abuses and moral perversities remain. Iran sits on the executive board of the Commission on the Status of Women. In October, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe was named a goodwill ambassador by the World Health Organization, until an outcry forced the director-general to think better of it.
It is, of course, possible to dismiss all this as trivial. If so, it attests to the truth of Bolton’s quip about the UN losing 10 floors. Fifteen might be better.
Except it isn’t trivial. “Imagine if the UN was going to the United States and raping children and bringing cholera,” Mario Joseph, a Haitian lawyer seeking compensation for the UN’s victims, told the AP. “Human rights aren’t just for rich white people.” That point ought to resonate with the UN’s usual defenders.
In the meantime, we’ll all have a collective freak-out over the next national security adviser. I agree with Bolton about some things and disagree about others. But on the UN he’s been right all along. If his presence in the White House helps to scare the organisation into real reform, so much the better.