"Annan is merely a symptom of the UN's sickness"

JEFF JACOBY (Boston Globe) :

There was no global uproar when the brutal regime in Libya was chosen to chair the UN's Human Rights Commission. Nothing happened to the UN after its troops allowed Serbs to slaughter 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the "safe haven" of Srebrenica. Sex scandals seem to erupt wherever the UN goes -- the latest involves charges of rape, child abuse, and prostitution by UN personnel in the Congo -- but they never cause heads to roll in Turtle Bay. Annan himself became secretary general despite his failure, when he headed the UN's peacekeeping operations, to pay attention to warnings of genocide in Rwanda. Why should anything be different this time? Oil-for-Food may be the greatest international rip-off of modern times, it may have strengthened one of the world's bloodiest dictators, it may have deprived countless Iraqis of food and medicine, but if history is any guide, the scandal headlines will fade from view long before the secretary general does. By week's end, in fact, dozens of governments, including all the permanent members of the Security Council save the United States, had publicly rallied to Annan's support. Scandal or no scandal, he will almost certainly serve out the remaining two years of his term. Which is just as well. Annan is merely a symptom of the UN's sickness, not the cause of it.

The U.N.'s FAILURES are famous, and Jacoby lists some of the worst - (many of which were on Kofi's watch - a few, like the Rwandan Genocide were tright under his nose!). It's a list of infamy: Tiannamen Square; the Darfurian genocide; the southern Sudanese genocide; Somalia; Uganda; Congo - the list goes on and on: the U.N. most often does nothing as member states commit horrific atrocities and crimes against humanity.

But it's worse than that. The U.N. hasn't just failed to stop most of the world's worst crises and acts of genocide; it has actually been on the sidelines when some little good - (and I mean little good) - was actually achieved in some of the world's crisies by mediation. YUP: Most of the peace accords (many of them somewhat dubious) that were reached over the last few decades have largely been achieved WITHOUT the U.N.'s help and outside their auspices. The Vietnam Peace Accords? No - they were bilateral. Dayton Accords? No - the USA brokered it. OSLO? No - Norway and USA, but mostly Israel and Palestinians. Libya disarmament of WMD? No, again - it was ther UK and the USA. The Armistice between Saddam and the UN Coalition that fought the 1991 Gulf War was negotiated by the USA; unfortunately, it was left up to the U.N. to enforce it - and we know what the result of that was: Saddam ignored the terms of the Armistice while bribing ther U.N. and many members of the UNSC.

Other times - when Human Rights and democracy were fighting to become realized - and the U.N. SHOULD have stepped to the fore it did nothing; Did the U.N. help the Ukraine resolve its recent election crisis? No - Kofi said nary a peep. Surely in Georgia the U.N. must have had a role? NO AGAIN. Does the U.N. have a role in defusing and settling the Kashmir crisis? No - the U.N. has done NOTHING.

It's rather startling when you really look at the record, isn't it? The U.N.: its record is pure failure; it has failed to act when the world stood by and did nothing; and it has even been on the sidelines the few times when negotiations were actually able to achieve something. It's record is U.N.believeably pitiful.

Here's The Astute Blogger U.N. Challenge: Can anyone anywhere name one dozen good things the U.N. has achieved since the Korean War? Enter a list in the comments. The contest will remain open until Kofi resigns...