Is the United Nations in a League of Nations mode after the attacks and humiliations it has suffered since Sept. 11, 2001? Could we be seeing the actual demise of the second major world organization, which for a half-century has offered the planet so much hope?
That possibility is not dismissed here. But, in fact, there is some fascinating potential for turnaround.
In the weeks and months after Sept. 11, the world body essentially suffered a nervous breakdown. The disdain of the Bush administration left UN officials insulted and angry–and also guilty that they had brought much of the derision upon themselves because of the organization’s failures during the ’90s. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan felt insulted by Washington even as he was being derided by the Third World for being too pro-American.
Even today, when you walk into the UN’s august headquarters on the East River, you can feel the mood of sadness and loss. The long corridors are strangely silent (where did all the bustle of the world suddenly go?), and most people look exhausted as they are pounded day after day for becoming (W’s favorite word) “irrelevant.”
So is this last best hope for world government doomed to fail? As a matter of fact, no.
For one thing, as part of the deal to give the United States and Great Britain total control in Iraq, the UN has sent to Baghdad a respected and active Brazilian diplomat, Sergio Vieira de Mello, as Kofi Annan’s special representative.
Here’s the curiosity: De Mello has no mandate, nothing really to do in the autocratic mission the Bushies have set up for themselves. His role is, in polite language, “undefined.” He has a staff of about 20. And being a man of action with broad experience in Cambodia and Bosnia, officials who know him say he is impatient with the inaction.
But as the inexplicable (read arrogant) failure of Pentagon civilian zealots to plan for the reconstruction of a destroyed Iraq becomes more shocking, one hears that Americans in the office of reconstruction in Baghdad are listening more and more to the experienced de Mello and his people.
In fact, it seems de Mello is becoming a voice of warning, whispering in Americans’ ears of the lost lessons of the past.
On another level, one can gradually see Washington going back to the UN and tasking it for very specific jobs, as with recent administration moves to work through the UN to thwart Iran’s nuclear program.
Then there is the little matter of policing the streets of Baghdad, Tikrit, Kut and other potential centers of Periclean democracy in Iraq. Somehow, in the dream world they inhabit, the zealots around the vice president and the secretary of defense never thought that the most savage country on Earth would 1) hate invaders and 2) need immediate law and order.
And now? In this less-than-happy aftermath of the war, with American troops deep in self-protection mode and the streets not unexpectedly running wild, the U.S. cannot get the numbers of police recruits from other nations it desperately needs. Many governments doubt the legitimacy of the war and, says the respected Brookings Institution scholar Ivo Daalder, “A lot of countries don’t feel any responsibility for making the U.S. succeed or even to contribute to that success, because of the manner in which we went to war.”
Iraq may be America’s invasion du jour, but it is not the rest of the world’s. And the French, who actually do a good job of peacekeeping, were not asked to contribute.
The Bush administration is beginning to realize that it is going to need the world, as distasteful as that is. The U.S. is becoming so overextended that this new assessment is likely to grow in intensity.
And while American support for the United Nations has dropped in the polls, Ambassador William Luers, head of the UN Association of the USA, sees what might at first appear to be a contradiction, but which really is not.
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“For the first time in polling memory, American support for the Security Council dropped to under 50 percent,” he told me. “Yet at the same time, in the same polls, when you ask them to think in the long run, support is still up to 70 percent. Americans can distinguish, as others can’t, the difference between the Security Council and the UN. What we know from American attitudes on foreign affairs is that Americans don’t want to do things alone.”
The greatest irony of all is that there has never been a better time for reform in the world body, particularly with an excellent secretary general and other officers. Yet at this precise historical moment, the U.S. appears to be charting a totally different course, scorning the world body. Is there still hope? Yes, but only with a lot of work on both sides.
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