WASHINGTON - Daunted by setbacks in Iraq and the
prospective difficulties in achieving "regime change" in
Iran and North Korea, neo-conservative hawks have joined
the US extreme right in training their sights on a much
weaker target, the United Nations, beginning with its
secretary general, Kofi Annan.
Jumping on
reports that Annan's son remained on the payroll of a
Swiss auditing firm hired by the world body to monitor
the implementation of the "oil for food" program in Iraq
for four years after he left the firm, two prominent
neo-conservative voices - New York Times columnist
William Safire and the editorial page of the Wall Street
Journal - called on Monday for the secretary general's
resignation.
The two columns immediately were
seized on by the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News
television channel, presumably to draw more attention to
the issue. It noted that the New York Sun, another
Murdoch-owned media outlet, had broken the story about
the US$2,500 monthly payments by Cotecna Inspections to
Kojo Annan that followed his departure from the firm
five years ago.
Safire, who has been writing for
months about alleged UN complicity in the skimming by
ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein of billions of
dollars from Iraqi oil sales under the program, declared
that the latest disclosures marked "the end of the
beginning of the scandal".
"Its end will not
begin until Kofi Annan, even if personally innocent,
resigns - having through initial ineptitude and final
obstructionism brought dishonor on the Secretariat of
the United Nations," wrote Safire.
At the same
time, the Journal's editorial page, which, like Safire,
has been playing up the oil-for-food scandal for months,
ran a column by right-wing blogger Glenn Harlan
Reynolds, publisher of InstaPundit.com, calling for
Annan's replacement with the former president of the
Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel.
Conveniently,
Havel now serves as co-chairman of the international
wing of the new Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a
neo-conservative-dominated group that believes President
George W Bush's "war on terrorism" is the equivalent of
"World War IV".
"The UN is losing what shreds of
moral legitimacy remain, even among those who were once
sympathetic, as the extent of its corruption becomes too
obvious to ignore," wrote Reynolds, noting growing
discussion about replacing or supplementing the world
body with a "community of democracies ... that would
draw its support from legitimate governments, not thugs
and kleptocrats".
The two columns appear to be
the latest in a campaign to discredit the United Nations
that has been building steadily in neo-conservative and
far-right circles here since the United States and
Britain invaded Iraq in March 2003 without the Security
Council's blessing.
Indeed, on the day of the
invasion, Richard Perle, a leading neo-conservative and
former chairman of the Pentagon Defense Policy Board
(DPB), wrote a column in London's The Guardian that
celebrated the death of "the fantasy of the UN as the
foundation of a new world order".
Relying on the
Security Council to ensure world order and international
law, Perle wrote, was a "dangerously wrong idea that
leads inexorably to handing great moral and even
existential politico-military decisions to the likes of
Syria, Cameroon, Angola, Russia, China and France".
On just the second day of the invasion, the
Journal, which has long espoused the idea of what it
calls a "league of democratic nations" to replace the
UN, published a column titled "Au revoir, Security
Council" that called for the US to leave the body in
order to "strip [it] of the pretense of legality and
seriousness and remove it as an obstacle to genuine
collective security".
In the same vein,
neo-conservatives and the extreme right continued to
warn against giving the UN any responsibility for
running Iraq during and after the occupation, even as it
became clear that without greater international
participation, the burden on the US military and
Treasury was fast becoming too much.
It was
during Bush's re-election campaign in September,
however, when Annan said in reply to a reporter's
question that the invasion had been "illegal" under the
UN Charter, that the anti-UN campaign became both more
personalized and fiercer.
"Kofi votes Kerry",
ran one column in the Journal by former US defense
secretary Caspar Weinberger, while another, by the
editorial staff, suggested that the secretary general
might have been trying to divert attention from the US
Congress's probes of the oil-for-food program.
Since then, the op-eds and essays in right-wing
and neo-conservative media, such as the Murdoch-owned
Weekly Standard and the National Review, have been
coming fast and furious.
In addition to the
alleged corruption of UN officials in the oil-for-food
program, and the refusal to comply with demands to hand
over documents on the program to congressional
investigators - the UN is conducting its own
investigation headed by former US Federal Reserve
chairman Paul Volcker - these articles have made much of
various issues.
They include the world body's
failure to intervene forcefully to stop what the US
government has called "genocide" in Darfur, Sudan;
Libya's chairmanship of the UN Commission on Human
Rights; continuing Security Council resolutions
censuring Israel's behavior in the Palestinian
territories as evidence of its moral bankruptcy; and
Annan's caution against a major military offensive in
Fallujah, Iraq.
The suggested remedies have been
varied - from leaving the UN altogether, to creating a
community of democracies as an alternative, to
withholding or reducing the US contribution to the UN
budget - as Washington did beginning in the late 1980s
through much of the 1990s - in order to impose certain
changes to its liking. Washington currently is obliged
to contribute 22% of UN financing.
"President
Bush has a mandate to rethink American relations with
the United Nations," Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow at
the Hudson Institute, another neo-conservative
think-tank, wrote in the National Review Online just
after the election.
"The campaign," she went on,
"smoked out something more sinister than impotence or
ineptitude at Turtle Bay; namely, a UN secretariat
dedicated to undermining the president's success."
(Turtle Bay is the New York neighborhood where the UN
headquarters is located.)
Of course, right-wing
hostility to the UN is not new. The extreme right in the
United States has sought Washington's withdrawal from
the world body - and the UN's departure from US
territory - from its very birth, believing it to have
been a plot by communists, socialists, and, in some
versions, Jews and Freemasons, to create a world
government that would destroy US sovereignty and the
freedom of its citizens, beginning with their right to
bear arms.
Neo-conservatives began moving
against the United Nations after the 1967 Arab-Israeli
war and accelerated that after the 1973 October war,
when Israel found itself repeatedly isolated and
assailed in the General Assembly and the Security
Council by the Soviet Bloc and the Third World countries
in the Non-Aligned Movement.
In reaction,
UN-bashing in the late 1960s became a staple of
Commentary magazine, a monthly that has been the major
exponent of neo-conservative thought. Just last month,
for example, it published a seven-page essay by Joshua
Muravchik, a colleague of Richard Perle's at the
American Enterprise Institute, titled "The case against
the UN".
The article, which castigates the
organization above all for its "overweening animus
toward Israel" and "the UN's complicity in legitimizing
terrorism", concluded that the threat or use of US
military power over the past 60 years has been far more
effective at safeguarding "international peace and
security" than the Security Council.
