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Henry Hyde's Nigerian Email Scam and Oil for Food...Why there should not be any more Permanent Members
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Judith Miller, of The New York Times, who helped bring us the war in Iraq by writing a huge number of articles dealing with the presence of Weapons for Mass Destruction, is now covering the United Nations. |
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Judith Miller of the New York Times.
When was it leaked?
Just before the Mitchell/Gingrich task force report on the UN, and before Henry Hyde’s own loony tunes bill halving US contributions to the organization.
The Volcker Inquiry was supposedly wrapping up its Annan file, and looking at the behavior of governments on the Security Council Sanctions Committee, maybe even at the fate of the eight billion unaccounted for dollars that the US occupation took over from the Oil For Food surplus.
This is painting by numbers!
Let’s put some color in it.
Annan’s office says that no one there, entourage or otherwise, has any record or memory of the alleged meeting.
Michael Wilson himself, who had nothing to do with the Oil For Food contract but dealt with the African end of their operations, denies that they met the Secretary General.
Sources in both the UN and the company hypothesize that he was trying to boost his importance with the company.
Henry Hyde, one of the few Congressmen to find himself in the dock over the Savings and Loans scandal – which really was the biggest financial scandal in history – has a long record of being an inveterate hater of the United Nations. He does not want to reform it.
He wants to kill it and he is trying to get his bill through in the face of White House Opposition.
Judith Miller is of course the mother of all leak conduits.
Throughout the Iraq war, any leak from political motivated sources that suggested that weapons of mass destruction had been found, was guaranteed unverified amplification in the New York Times.
Jayson Blair invented inconsequential interviews and was fired.
Miller practically invented a war and was promoted to the Oil For Food desk.
The connection between the two beats is, of course, that she seems to be relying on similar “privileged” sources, who have a deep and hardly impartial interest in both stories.
The Volcker Inquiry press release uncritically fanned the flames by announcing that it had the new “information,” and would be looking anew at Annan.
Not an “allegation” or anything so conditional, but “information.”
Perhaps it is understandable that since the previous, perfectly competent press officer, Anna Di Lellio was hounded out by the Heritage Foundation for having said unflattering things about Bush, and for having once briefly worked for the UN, her replacement should be eager to make amends by implicitly validating the highly motivated leak.
But this was not “information.”
It was a memo that the Hyde Committee had not bothered to share with Volcker until after it had been leaked.
And it adds little or nothing to the music, except to show who is conducting this cacophonous orchestra.
Henry Hyde and his pals.
Time For Plan B
In the days of yore, some noble Lords of the Manor allegedly had the right to sleep with serfs’ brides on their wedding night.
If you thought this was wrong, would you have argued that the solution was to extend that that right to more landlords? Especially if you were not a landlord yourself.
Well that is how increasing the number of permanent members on the Security Council looks to me.
There is no moral argument for having permanent members at all; except that we are stuck with the facts were created in 1945.
In the real world, any attempt to rewrite the Charter in a way that excludes the American veto power is doomed to failure.
The UN could limp along without any of the other four, but it would be broken-backed completely without the US.
It was typically distressing that the Japan, Brazil, Germany and India coalition of aspirants magnanimously offered in their latest proposal to waive the question of their getting a veto for fifteen years.
If they had any principles they should have proposed discussion of removal of the existing vetoes!
Real reformers should be arguing for restraints on the existing permanent five members, not trying to add more of the same.
China demonstrated that recently with its perennial petulance over UN operations in Haiti while it has relations with Taiwan, and the US’s peevishness over the ICC in Sudan reinforces the point.
Principled UN members should be arguing for a restatement and reassertion of the rights of the General Assembly to over-ride a veto under the Uniting For Peace procedure that a more foresightful and principled American administration moved and passed half a century ago.
The reason usually adduced for increasing the size of the Council is that it needs to be more “representative.”
How making India a permanent member enhances the representation of Pakistan or Indonesia is a question that no one has satisfactorily answered, certainly not to Islamabad or Jakarta!
One only has to look at the less then ecstatic reactions of the Italians and Spanish to the prospect of being “represented” by Germany, or to what extent the Poles and Ukrainians at being “represented” by Russia.
Sadly, some of the candidates for the position have already proven that they are unworthy of it. Germany and Japan’s wooing of China and the US to avert a veto of their candidacies is shameless enough for them to be disqualified on ethical grounds.
In particular Germany’s behavior in the recent Human Rights Commission over Cherif Bassiouni and Afghanistan lends support to the principle that no one should get a permanent seat that so desperately wants it.
There is something inherently corrupting about it: just look at Nigeria’s attempt to get the US off the hook over Sudan and the International Criminal Court.
Contrast Germany’s principled stand over Iraq, with its present human rights votes.
The authority of the Council is at its strongest when it has the support of the world community behind it – and at its weakest when vetoes stop it acting sensibly.
Little could weaken the moral authority of the Council much more than adding six new irremovable states – except perhaps the most recent US proposal to add only a couple of members whose subservience to Washington would make them permanent puppets.
Even so, the US is right, (I presume this is the stopped clock syndrome) about the size of the Council. Twenty four members is not a committee, it is on its way to being a mass meeting.
The Economic and Social Committee has trebled in size over the years, and become inversely effective with each expansion.
The only justification for taking it up to twenty four members was to ensure that the elected members outnumber the newly reinforced permanent members and if there is no increase there then such a large increase is organizationally and managerially unjustifiable.
It is true that many diplomats at the UN are bored because all the important issues take place in the Security Council and they are not on it.
But the answer is not to include more wannabe great powers. Aspirant permanent members are mistaking the symbol for the reality.
No one thought that Taiwan was a “great power” because it held the Chinese seat on the Council all those years.
It was an embarrassing anomaly that people worked around. Nations grow into greatness; they do not have greatness thrust upon them by the blessing of the Bush administration.
Hence my inclination to suggest a version of Kofi Annan’s Plan B, adding at most half a dozen new semi-permanent members with renewable four year terms.
However the crucial element is to make the General Assembly more effective.
One way to do that would be by closely monitoring in open session the behavior of the elected members of the Council, and particularly of the “semi-permanent” members who should prove every four years that they have been satisfactorily representative of the membership,
If the General Assembly is really concerned about the efficiency and representativeness of the Council, it should be ensuring that existing members have a mandate from the Assembly and the diplomatic ability to represent them.
In the recent run up to the Iraq War, the real heroes were not Russia China and France.
At any time, a clever White House only had to offer to honor their oil contracts with Sudan to win their vote.
It was smaller countries like Ireland, Chile, Jamaica, Mauritius and Mexico who at various times stood for principles and legality in a disinterested way.
Each of them is more representative and indeed “great” than much richer countries whose main qualification is meeting Washington’s criteria of creepiness.
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