CSM column on the US and the UN

I have a column in the CSM today about the importance of the UN to the US. It decries the bullying tactics that John Bolton has used since his arrival there in Mid-August.
My timing is perhaps not optimal, given that Paul Volcker released his fourth– and I think penultimate– report into the oil-for-food scandal of the 1990s, just yesterday.
However, even given the evidence of serious mismanagement and corruption that Vocker has released, it is still important to underline to the CSM’s mainly US readership the importance of having a UN– and most preferably, a well-functioning one.
Kofi Annan has never been known as a great manager. (That’s an under-statement, huh?) He was installed, you’ll remember, at the strong urging of Madeleine Albright, who couldn’t stand his Egyptian predecessor, Boutros Ghali.
One could argue that you deal with the world with the UN you have, rather than the UN you want… And the UN that we women and men of the world have today is flawed, and is also almost completely the creature of the nations that dominate the U.N. Security Council.
But I know that the release of the latest Volcker report will increase the torrent of fundamnetally anti-UN feeling that is always roiling just under the surface of much of the public discourse inside the US. So yes, it is important to re-state the importance of having a UN– and also, of having the very best-managed and most accountable UN we can build.
In my column, I write that the UN is “based on principles of national sovereignty, national equality, and human solidarity.” I wish I’d had more space to flesh that out and write about the stress that the writers of the UN charter put on finding nonviolent ways to resolve international conflicts, and on the slow trend the UN has seen in recent decades toward focusing more on human equality than on national equality…
Anyway, this looks like a good short news piece about the impact of the Volcker report– also in today’s CSM. In it, Howard LaFranchi writes,

the report, which contains five parts and totals more than 1,000 pages, lays partial blame on Secretary-General Annan for poor management of the program. Perhaps his shortcoming – and one reflective of the UN’s overall problems – is that he didn’t understand the depth of need for management reform, UN analysts say.
“One more time, the secretary-general is out to lunch. He doesn’t seem to understand the process,” says Edward Luck, a longtime UN expert at Columbia University in New York. Noting that it was Annan who “loaded up” the reform process with a long list of issues unrelated to the management problem, Mr. Luck says, “There are real questions about whether or not he remains in office.”
But the report has criticism for others, too. It cites past UN officials and Security Council members, including Russia and France, for allowing conditions that permitted corruption to deepen over the program’s seven-year life span.
While critical of those directly involved in corruption, the report does not let the United States off the hook. It faults the US for overlooking the smuggling of Iraqi oil into Iraq’s neighboring countries, including Jordan.
Still, the report does not link Annan to a contract awarded to a Swiss company that employed his son Kojo – one of the key unanswered elements that critics have been watching.
The inquiry has also yielded positive findings. It concludes that the oil-for-food program largely achieved its two goals: to feed the Iraqi people with Iraq’s own oil money and to prevent Mr. Hussein from rebuilding a military that could threaten the region.
“The fact is that the US government and others were well aware the program had these weaknesses, yet [they] retained it because it continued to serve its basic purpose,” says James Dobbins, an international security expert at the RAND Corp. in Arlington, Va., who has served in both the Bush and Clinton administrations.
Mr. Dobbins says there is “definitely room for improvement in UN management.” But he also says that the virulent American criticism of the UN incited by the oil-for-food problems overlooks the fact that neither US nor UN money was lost in the fraud.
“It’s important we remember it was all Iraqi money,” Dobbins says. He also maintains that the extent of fraud and corruption was relatively limited, given the mammoth size of the program.
Still, some members of Congress have already called on Annan to resign. And the House of Representatives has voted to cut US funding for the UN in half if certain management reforms are not accomplished.
The Bush administration has not favored either Annan’s resignation or the funding cut, but most analysts see US pressure on the UN rising – with uncertain consequences for the international institution.