The U.N. at a crossroads in the crosshairs

Claudia Rosett on reform at the United Nations and the possibility that president Bush is going to spoil their party.

It seems at this stage that no one expects managerial competence or integrity from Annan. It is enough that he presides over a global icon, runs programs disbursing billions worth of other people's money, and performs well at parties. It is perhaps pleasing to Russia, France, and China that last October he denounced as "inconceivable" the idea that their positions in the debate over Saddam's Iraq could have been influenced by Saddam's payoffs (and ensuing opportunities for blackmail).

These are not qualifications for overseeing a sweeping reform of the U.N. Nor do Annan's proposals for reform in any way overcome his personal failings. His chief contribution to the future of his imploding institution has been a list of treadworn proposals, a few with merit, but most of them devoted to taking what's wrong with the U.N., making it even bigger, and demanding more money to pay for it.

Having evidently learned nothing from Oil-for-Food, Annan's pet plan these days is that rich nations contribute an automatic 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product for official development aid to poor countries — much of that presumably to be channeled through the U.N. However lofty the intent, the design is perverse, not least in diverting yet more money from the private sector — which is the real source of development — toward some of the world's worst crooks. The U.N. is the leading global clubhouse legitimizing the dictators whose policies produce the world's worst poverty. (Watch for their motorcades on Fifth Avenue this week). And until the U.N. centers its reforms not around shaking down rich donors, but around true transparency and responsible, accountable leadership, sending another flood of money its way is not a recipe for development. It is an invitation for yet more scandal and corruption.

Read it all. She concludes:

When we have a clean, efficient U.N. — if we ever do — there may come a time for pleasant diplomatic fictions on the General Assembly floor. But right now, to the extent we depend on the U.N. for anything of importance in world affairs, it is not only U.S. tax dollars at stake, but U.S. security. If there is anything the U.S. has done to earn the deep disrespect of the U.N. and its more hostile members over the years, it is that America has too long played the chump. American taxpayers foot the lion's share of the bills. The U.S. provides housing for the U.N. atop one of the fanciest patches of real estate in the country, and is now offering to finance the renovation of U.N. headquarters on terms sweeter than most hard-working Americans could dream of. We put up with anti-American resolutions and declarations by a U.N. which, according to a new website — www.EyeontheUN.org — treats the U.S. as a human-rights violator on a scale surpassed only by Sudan, the Congo, and the U.N.'s all-time favorite target, Israel.

Bush's job when he gets up before the General Assembly tomorrow is not to host a party, or coddle Kofi Annan, or paper over another in a long series of made-to-fail U.N. reforms. Bush's job is to talk straight

Yet another reason why the MSM and the Dems have relentlessly slandered FEMA and the Bush administration and his efforts in the last week. The MSM work to cover for inept and corrupt Louisiana Old South politics but the real zeal is to damage our president in advance of just such occasions as the U.N. summit.