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Throw the U.N. on the Ash Heap of History The League of Nations came into being after its constitution was adopted at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The Peace Conference, as it turned out, was little more than a prelude to World War II, punishing Germany for having started World War I and divvying up the Ottoman Empire under the assumption that the West could do whatever it wanted with the rest of the world.
It had taken a scant 27 years for it to die of its own ineptitude. The United States never joined because it did not want to cede its sovereignty to an international body whose actions might conflict with our Constitution. Having learned nothing from Woodrow Wilson’s failure, Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed hard to create the United Nations, a legacy taken up upon his death by Harry Truman. Other than some successes dealing with aid to refugees and famine relief, the League of Nations was most notably unable to stop nations from going to war with one another. Its most potent weapon was the use of boycotts. Today’s United Nations depends mostly on "sanctions" or "resolutions" issued by the Security Council. These days the Security Council includes the United States and three other permanent members with veto powers, France, China and Russia, each of which is intent on thwarting the ambitions of the Bush administration to expand democracy throughout the world. It was this same Security Council that issued seventeen resolutions warning Saddam Hussein of dire consequences if he did not heed their demands to stop trying to stockpile weapons of mass destruction. Through the humanitarian Oil for Food program, Saddam managed to bribe France and Russia, with China going along, to ignore his massive looting of the program in order to build more luxurious palaces and give grants to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, among a long list of criminal acts that were finally ended when the United States military drove into downtown Baghdad. We killed both his evil sons and hauled him out of a hole in the ground. In his book, "The U.N. Exposed: How the United Nations Sabotages America’s Security", Eric Shawn, a senior correspondent and anchor for the Fox News Channel, takes the reader behind the scenes to reveal an utterly corrupt international institution. Like its predecessor, the League of Nations, the U.N. has demonstrated the maniacal insanity of expecting nations to cooperate with one another for any other reason than self-interest. "The United Nations has proven that it does not have the backbone to stand against tyrants, that its members abuse its systems for short-term gain, that it is careless with the money it’s given, that its employees and contractors cannot be wholly trusted to execute its lofty ambitions, and that even its humanitarian efforts are undermined and shortchanged as a result," says Shawn. If it were a private corporation, it would be deemed a criminal enterprise. Moreover, since all 191 member-nations have a vote in the General Assembly equal to the U.S., there is a farcical aspect to the fact that it is the money provided by U.S. taxpayers that largely keeps the institution functioning. "The 2005 U.N. assessment for the United States stood at $2.2 billion, and that figure is pushed skyward by funding for U.N.-related development banks, resulting in a total of $3.7 billion," notes Shawn. The poorest member-nation can buy in for a mere $17,795 in annual dues. What does the United Nations want today? More money! "The major financial goal of the millennium plan is the requirement that wealthy nations commit to spending 0.7 percent of their gross national product for development in the third world by channeling the billions through the U.N. system." Shawn notes that, "Over years, the potential for graft and abuse could dwarf what Saddam achieved by perverting the Oil for Food program." Not only has the United Nations proved itself to be incapable of mediating the avoidance of armed conflicts throughout the world, it has also distinguished itself by becoming the most corrupt and criminal organization on the face of the Earth. It is time to end U.S. participation, i.e., funding, in the United Nations, and time, at the very least, to invite it to relocate somewhere else. Anywhere else will do. It is time to formally withdraw from the vast matrix of U.N. treaties and protocols that already impose themselves on U.S. sovereignty. It is time to take the lead in the creation of an international organization of exclusively democratic nations. It is time to toss the U.N. on the ash heap of history where it can join the League of Nations. In 1899, when England had a great empire, Rudyard Kipling penned a poem in which he called on the West to "Take up the White Man’s burden" to seek peace in the world, end famine, and vanquish disease. Kipling assumed that the millions living in Africa, the Middle East or India where he had spent many years were never going to achieve these lofty goals on their own. In January 2005 Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, was still trying to make Kipling’s dream come true, lamenting the tragedy of extreme poverty and the millions of deaths from easily preventable diseases. The cure, of course, was massive foreign aid. In a refreshing, albeit exhausting book, William Easterly, a world-weary and world-wise professor of economics, long experienced in the great game of foreign aid, suggests that a real tragedy is one in which the West has spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last fifty years "and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths." The name of Easterly’s book is "The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good." One of the reasons is found in a headline of a mid-May Associated Press article. "Zimbabwe crumbling as inflation tops 1,000%." At that point a loaf of bread would have cost you 100,000 Zimbabwe dollars. You can use their currency as toilet paper. Zimbabwe’s problem can be summed up in two words: Robert Mugabe. In power since 1980, Mugabe has destroyed the nation, in large part by seizing the white-owned farms and giving them to his partners in crime. Since 2000, agriculture has collapsed along with the economy that was already in free-fall. Mugabe is just one example of much of Africa’s most enduring problem, the utter corruption of its governments, despite the end of European colonization in the 1960s. The problem of criminal and failed governments, however, is not just Africa’s problem. The major aid institutions are forever bailing out countries all over the world. A recent example is Mexico, as badly governed as any you will find throughout South America. In a recent Stratfor public policy intelligence report, Bart Mongoven, put forth the view that "The American public broadly is beginning to view poverty—whether that in affluent countries or in highly indebted, poor countries—as almost impossible to solve." With a remarkably refreshing clarity, Americans now view poverty in developing countries "as the result of a combination of failed states, corruption and cultural problems." Mongovern warns that advocates for poverty reduction "have set about attempting to change how they talk about poverty, and to change the way people, particularly in affluent societies, think about it." Governments are no longer going to be identified as the agents to end poverty. They have failed. Instead, poverty is going to be recast as "a human rights violation." This, of course, raises the question of whether a job is a human right. From a socialist point of view, it is. Guess who a liberal amalgam of do-good organizations are going to call upon to end poverty? The answer is quintessentially capitalist multinational and other large, successful corporations. What organizations such as Oxfam, Evangelicals for Social Justice, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have realized is that corporations can be pressured in ways that governments cannot. This kind of pressure is already at work by various environmental organizations that use boycotts, smear campaigns, and other tactics to hijack and divert corporate profits to their own agendas. Just how big is the problem of poverty in the world? Citing a variety of sources, Easterly provides the following statistics:
As far back as I can remember these kinds of statistics have been the bread-and-butter of every aid organization seeking funds to end these problems. Easterly, though, drawing on some sixteen years experience with the World Bank, has seen it all and seen through it. In sum, foreign aid hasn’t solved any of these problems or provided a framework in which many nations will ever achieve a sensible economy, integrated with the rest of the world. Meanwhile, there is a huge matrix of aid organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development, and countless others in the wealthy nations that still presume they have the answers to the widespread corruption that breeds poverty. Indeed, billions have been given to nations whose leadership is famous for corruption. The United Nations, whose depths of corruption and failure defy the imagination, has its own panoply of agencies whose main function, it would seem, is to hold endless conferences in plush settings without ever solving anything. The issues involved in foreign aid are hugely complex. However, one comes away from Easterly’s book with the distinct impression that it is all a massive charade pursued for the self-interest of the West and exploited by what Easterly calls "the Rest." One warning, however, emerges that should be heeded. "Military intervention is too perfect an example of what this book argues you should not do—have the West operate on other societies with virtually no feedback or accountability. The military is even more insulated from the interests of the poor than aid agencies are. People don’t give reliable feedback at gunpoint." "Military intervention to overthrow evil dictators and remake other societies into some reflection of Western democratic capitalism is the extreme of contemporary utopian social engineering," warns Easterly. "The plan to end world poverty shows all the pretensions of utopian social engineering." It is not that nothing should be done, but rather what needs to be done should concentrate on good monetary policies, providing and maintaining roads, clean water projects, medicines and sanitation. Accomplishing this when foreign aid providers are more in love with the "Big Plan" or ignoring the long history of its failures defies any hope of actually achieving any real change. The Center needs money, too, to continue its work. We don’t have a huge bureaucracy, but we do dedicate ourselves to exposing the truth about the major issues facing our readers, our nation, and the world. If you would like to make a donation or, if you prefer, you can send a check to The Caruba Organization, 28 West Third Street, Suite 1321, South Orange, NJ 07079. Thank you.
©
2006 Alan Caruba. |
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By 1939, a resentful Germany started WWII and these days the world’s attention is fixed on a block of Middle East nations that were the literal invention of those demented diplomats who put together nations like Iraq and Jordan by drawing lines on a map. The League of Nations stopped holding meetings during WWII and, on April 18, 1946, transferred its assets to the newly minted United Nations.