There was a time when, if you wrote or spoke out against the United Nations, you would be dismissed as some “right-wing nutcase” who saw conspiracies or was some kind of “isolationist” who didn’t understand the need for an international forum where the problems of the world could be resolved without resort to warfare.
Turns out that the United Nations, founded in 1948, is not simply incapable of stopping wars and genocides, it is so utterly corrupt that it needs to be eliminated entirely in the hope that the many other existing international organizations, treaties, unilateral and bilateral relations can be allowed to do what it will not and cannot.
This is not a new thought to me, but it resurfaced as I read an October 9 news article about “a tough new anti-terrorism resolution aimed at stemming attacks on civilians by denying terrorists safe havens, weapons, financial resources, and freedom of movement.” Introduced by the Russian Federation, it was unanimously passed by the UN Security Council. It was described as strengthening the “essential coordinating role of the United Nations in the international campaign against the terrorist threat.”
This is the same United Nations that did nothing when Red China invaded and occupied Tibet.
This is the same United Nations that stood by while Rwanda went about the business of slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
This is the same United Nations that has been unable to stop the Sudan from conducting genocide against more than a million of its Christian citizens. And Sudan is a member of the UN Human Rights Commission!
This is the same United Nations that has been unable to persuade Syria to withdraw its occupation troops from Lebanon.
This is the same United Nations that has stood by for years as the Palestinians waged a terrorist campaign against the Israelis and then chided the Israelis for building a fence as a means to defend themselves.
This is the same United Nations that needed a coalition led by the United States to force Iraq to withdraw from its invasion of Kuwait and then spent twelve years passing one useless resolution after another to get Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to disarm. After its Oil-for-Food administrators and key members of its Security Council wallowed in corruption, it faintly blessed the US effort to remove an important base for terrorist planning, training, and funding.
This is the same United Nations that needed the United States to intervene when the North Koreans invaded the south in the 1950s and whose atomic energy agency has been unable to stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. Now Iran is thumbing its nose at the UN. It’s not nuclear proliferation that is the problem, it’s which country is led by people who are deemed most likely to use these weapons. The mere prospect of a nuclear exchange drove Pakistan and India to the table to resolve longtime conflicts.
And, yes, this was the United Nations that stood by while the United States pursued an ill-fated war against the North Vietnamese when they invaded the south.
The United Nations has been unable to respond to outbreaks of violence in Haiti, Somalia, Cambodia, and Kosovo, to name just a few places where it has demonstrated its ineptitude.
As the scholar Jeremy A. Rabkin points out, “The Security Council has never authorized outside military intervention solely to protect people from slaughter at the hands of their own government.”
Now, three years since 9-11, an event that changed not just the United States, but alerted the entire world to the threat posed by an organization that is not a nation, but a group dedicated to imposing Islam, the Security Council has passed another useless resolution, vowing to do something about it.
Meanwhile, the United Nations has been largely sustained by the twenty-five percent of its annual budget paid by the United States, plus the $1.4 billion the US gives to United Nations’ programs and agencies. US taxpayers fund more of the UN’s activities than all of the other 177 member nations. At the same time, the vast majority of the recipients of US foreign aid routinely vote against the wishes of the United States. Most of those opposing US initiatives come from Africa and the Middle East.
Since the founding of the United Nations in 1948, there have been 291 wars resulting in 22 million deaths. The US Department of State lists 36 terrorist organizations operating with impunity in at least 60 UN member nations. Some 47 member nations are dictatorships and the UN roster includes six terrorist states.
Please, let us not even discuss its human rights record. At one point, it ejected the United States from membership in its Human Rights Commission and installed Libya to chair its meetings. Libya!
A Gallup poll in September 2003 found that sixty percent of Americans said the UN was doing “a poor job.” It’s not just doing a poor job; it is actively seeking to undermine the concept of sovereignty for every nation in the world. It is actively seeking to become a world government. It wants to impose its own taxes. It wants its own military force. It wants to ban ownership of guns. It wants control of the world’s oceans and seas. Its Kyoto Protocol will seek to impose limits on the use of various forms of energy vital to industrialized nations, while exempting some like China and India.
There are elements of the United Nations that are doing some good work–but all of these good elements could be done by other organizations, both more cheaply and more effectively (case in point, the scandal ridden Oil for Food program). It has helped refugees. Its World Health Organization tries to improve conditions. There are, I’m sure other examples, but overall the UN is a cesspool of corruption and the nexus of evil that blithely ignores its original mandates.
Welcome to the existing and growing majority of Americans who think it’s time to withdraw from the United Nations and find other means to address the world’s problems, unilaterally, bilaterally, and effectively.
