The General Negative Case Against the United Nations

Strategy

This case does not defend the status quo , nor does it refute the claims of any specific Affirmative plan. Instead, it objects to the core assumptions upon which the resolution is based, and upon which the majority of Affirmative cases will be constructed. It rejects the actor (the United Nations) on the grounds that it is not an impartial arbiter of international disputes, and the action (peacekeeping) on the grounds that it is an inefficient and ineffective policy tool. Building on these objections, it rejects the premise – implicit in the resolution – that an increase in support for peacekeeping would serve the U.S. national interest.

A Record of Failure

In the past 56 years, the United Nations has conducted 56 peacekeeping operations in 32 countries. In financial terms, these missions have cost $30 billion -- 32 percent of which came from U.S. taxpayers.1 In human terms, they have resulted in the deaths of 2,000 peacekeepers -- 60 of which were Americans.2 A cursory review of the peacekeeping record shows that these operations have not saved the lives they were intended to save and are not worth the cost in lives and treasure.

Even by conservative estimates, UN missions have been indirectly responsible for the deaths of more than a million innocent civilians.

• In Rwanda, UN peacekeepers stood by while 800,000 Africans were hacked to death with machetes.3

• In Bosnia, they stood by while 7,000 Muslim civilians were raped, tortured, and shot.4

• In the Indian province of Kashmir , peacekeepers have been present ever since the UN’s creation in 1948, but during this period they have failed to prevent two full-scale wars and a regional insurgency that has cost more than 75,000 lives.

• In Lebanon, peacekeepers have been present since 1978, but have failed to prevent the deaths of some 40,000 civilians.

• In Angola, the UN has conducted three separate missions since 1989, but has failed to prevent the deaths of 500,000 civilians.

• In Eritrea, the presence of peacekeepers has failed to end a conflict that has so far claimed 70,000 lives.

• And at the present moment, the UN is turning a blind eye to an 11-year-old conflict in the Sudan that has so far claimed the lives of more than 1 million people. This is a peculiar way to keep the peace.

Sources of Failure: Fundamental Flaws

Rather than simply a good idea that is being poorly executed, peacekeeping is a concept whose flaws are deeply rooted in the nature and composition of the United Nations itself. Four fundamental flaws stand out:

1. Wrong values.

2. Structural Flaws.

3. Corruption.

4. Incompetent management.

I. Wrong Values. The UN is influenced by countries that do not share American values, and UN policies are anti-American and anti-free enterprise.

Anti-American : Overt anti-Americanism in the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) led the U.S. to withdraw its membership for twenty years, and the Senate Appropriations Committee has recommended that U.S. funding for UNESCO ($71.4 million) be withheld until the committee purges itself of this bias. The U.S. was also kicked off the Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) and replaced by Libya, a country ruled by a dictatorship with a history of human rights abuses. The Commission’s membership also includes Sudan, which practices human slavery; Cuba, which has been ranked by Human Rights Watch as one of the world’s most repressive regimes; and Zimbabwe, which practices openly racist policies and political repression.

In addition to its exit from UNESCO and removal from UNHRC, the U.S. was also removed from the UN Narcotics Control Board, whose members include Nigeria – a country that has long been ruled by a “narco-dictatorship” and was recently classified by the State Department as central Africa’s leading transit camp for drug trafficking. In the months since its removal from these committees, the U.S. has faced a stream of public condemnations and anti-American resolutions. UNHRC has repeatedly lectured the U.S. for its “human rights abuses” at home and in Iraq – so much in fact that the U.S. delegation recently walked out of one of its meetings in protest. One recent UN initiative called for member states to pressure the U.S. to remove firearm ownership from the U.S. Constitution, and another singled out the U.S. as the country that should pay the most in reparations for slavery.

Anti-free enterprise: Although it was originally conceived as a facilitator of the spread of free markets, the UN has in recent years become a promoter of global wealth redistribution. Its plan for accomplishing this includes the creation of a global tax commission and international income tax, which would be used to promote income equality between rich and poor member states. The General Secretariat has also called for worldwide tax harmonization, which would require pro-growth countries like the U.S., UK, and Australia to raise their tax rates to match the higher levels in social market states like France and Germany.

II. Structural Flaws.

From its inception, there have been at least three fatal problems in the UN’s internal organization. These problems, inherent to the setup of the organization, have been incubating for sixty years and are getting worse with time as the UN fails to evolve to reflect new international realities.

1. First, the UN treats democratic and non-democratic states as equals. Why is this a problem? On a practical level, it is a problem because failing to make membership contingent on good governance only gives a de facto endorsement to authoritarianism and removes whatever incentives might have existed for non-democracies to adopt representative forms of government. It is also a problem on a moral level:

• Why should Myanmar – a military dictatorship that practices forced labor and has massacred more than 10,000 students since 1990 – have the same vote in the General Assembly as Switzerland?

• Why should Uganda – a single-party state where the political opposition is tortured and where the former king practiced ritualized cannibalism – get the same vote as Britain?

• Why should Sudan – which has a thriving slave trade and whose unelected government is conducting a policy of genocide – get the same vote as the U.S.?

• And why should North Korea – a state whose economy is built on slave labor – get the same vote as Canada?

2. A second problem with the UN system is the ease and frequency with which it is ignored by the members of the Security Council, who use it as a forum for containing American influence and expanding their own. Russia has repeatedly used the UN to block U.S. initiatives in the Balkans and Iraq, while ignoring protests against its own heavy-handed policies in Chechnya. China has used the UN as a platform for denouncing the U.S. and has vetoed U.S.-led peacekeeping missions in Macedonia and Kosovo. At the same time, Beijing undertook its own unilateralist invasion of Tibet and has pledged to retake Taiwan by force without any regard for the UN’s objections. And then there is France – the country that led the UN crusade against the U.S. in the Iraq War. Since 1960, France has conducted 48 separate military interventions in Africa – very few of which had Security Council approval.5

For all three countries, using the UN is an attractive option when it offers an opportunity to constrain the U.S., but obstructive and easy to shunt aside when it threatens to constrain their own aspirations.

III. Corruption.

In addition to its structural flaws and virulent anti-Americanism, the United Nations is also profoundly corrupt. Like so many public sector enterprises, the UN is marked by “routine fraud, waste, and abuse of resources.”6 At the root of the problem is the organization’s lack of transparency and accountability.

• For decades, UN budgetary procedures have been “covered by a shroud of obfuscation and secrecy,” without any avenue for U.S. taxpayer oversight.7

• For more than 20 years, the committee that controls the budget (the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions) has been run by Conrad Mselle – a Tanzanian who has no formal training in finance, convenes committee meetings behind closed doors, and routinely diverts large sums of money into his own discretionary accounts.

• The UN lacks, and refuses to accept, an external auditor to ensure that its funds are allocated fairly and efficiently.

• Once the UN budget has been adopted, there is no system in place to determine whether the various and often competing agencies (including two dozen for food and agricultural policy alone) are adhering to it.

Predictably, the UN’s lack of accountability leads to waste – some of which is an unintentional by-product of bureaucratic inefficiency and some of which is deliberately generated for the profit of UN leaders. An independent inspector found examples of waste and abuse in multiple UN offices, including:8

• $10 million embezzled from the UN Children's Fund.
• $15 million generated in unnecessary UN purchase orders.
• $4 million embezzled from UN offices in Mogadishu.

• $360,000 paid for peacekeeping supplies (fuel) that were never delivered.9

• $100,000 embezzled by a UN director in the West Bank.

• $100,000 awarded in illegal loans that were never repaid.

In addition to skimming off the top of the budget, UN officials and outside parties also profit indirectly from UN programs. The most egregious example is the Iraqi Oil-for-Food program. Under this program, the UN controlled all Iraqi oil contracts – the revenues from which it was supposed to use to buy much-needed humanitarian supplies like medicine and food for Iraqi civilians. However, a large percentage of the proceeds from the program went into the wrong hands:

• Ten percent of the program’s funds – about $10 billion – went directly into the personal bank accounts of Saddam Hussein and his family.10

• Three high-ranking UN officials – including undersecretary Benon Sevanake – accepted multi-million-dollar bribes from the Iraqi government.11

• Through the program, some 270 individuals, companies, and institutions received lucrative oil contracts from Hussein in return for backing Iraq against the U.S. in the UN.12

• UN administrators rewarded personal friends and political allies with oil contracts (allocated through vouchers) on favorable terms, including:13

• The head of the Russian Presidential Cabinet: $90 million worth of contracts.

• The Companies of the Russian Communist Party: $137 million.

• The Russian Orthodox Church: $5 million.

• Bernard Merimee, former French ambassador to the United Nations: $3 million.

• Charles Pasqua, former French Interior Minister: $12 million.

• Father Benjamin, a French Catholic priest who arranged a meeting between the Pope and Tariq Aziz: $4.5 million.

• Firas Mostafa Tlass, son of Syria's Defense Minister: $6 million.

• The son of Lebanon’s President Lahoud: $5.5 million.

• The Palestinian Liberation Organization: $4 million.

• Libyan Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem: $1 million.

• The Minister of the Forests of Myanmar: $5 million.

• The Foreign Minister of Chad: $3 million.

Of the countries involved in this scam, companies from two – Russia and France – profited disproportionately, while companies from the U.S. are conspicuously underrepresented.

IV. Incompetent Management.

In light of the waste and corruption that prevail in the UN budget and Oil for Food program, it should come as no surprise that UN peacekeeping missions also have a similar record of incompetence.

• Under the current system, there are no criteria for determining when military intervention and peacekeeping will be used. As a result, the UN sends troops to countries like Georgia, where they aren’t needed, but fails to send troops to Sudan, where they are.

• Because the UN rewards countries for contributions to peacekeeping ($1,000 per soldier per month + costs of the mission) but lacks a s ystem for verifying the credentials of troops, countries often send second-rank personnel. For example, in 1993 the government of Bulgaria – starved for hard currency – cut a deal with inmates from prisons and psychiatric wards, offering them pardons if they participated as peacekeepers on a UN mission to Cambodia. Hundreds of mental health inmates put on uniforms, were shipped to Cambodia, and went on a six-month rampage across the country. The Bulgarian government got $1,000 a head, the inmates got their freedom, and Cambodia got bedlam.14

• During the same mission in Cambodia, peacekeepers became famous for producing a drug/alcohol cocktail called the “Space Shuttle” – a combination of marijuana, cocaine, and liquor that was distilled over a six-week period and sold to the local populace.15

• On a mission in Somalia, the peacekeeping forces operated a weekend brothel at a local villa and used girls from the nearby refugee camp to make pornographic videos.16

• A report by the UN Development Program for Women (UNIFEM) found that peacekeeping missions often fuel booms in local prostitution, frequently involving “women abducted or duped by criminal trafficking gangs to be forced into brothels.”17

V. Because the terrorist threats facing the U.S. are infinite, but the resources for combating these threats are finite, the U.S. government must only invest in military operations that are competently managed, cost-efficient, and have a reasonable chance of success. UN peacekeeping is none of these things.

VI. The U.S. should therefore reduce, rather than increase, its substantial support for peacekeeping.

Between 1996 and 2001, the U.S. Department of Defense gave the UN $3.45 billion in direct contributions for peacekeeping operations and an additional $24.2 billion in indirect contributions.18

Rather than increasing these funds, the U.S. should redirect them towards:

• Military operations in the War on Terror – where U.S. forces are already overstretched and under-funded, with 250,000 troops on 130 missions worldwide.

• The creation of a “Freedom Caucus,” which would consist of a group of pro-free market, pro-democracy states within or parallel to the UN.

1 $30 billion is the figure given for the official UN peacekeeping budget. However, the total costs of all peacekeeping missions are much higher. In the period 1996-2001 alone, the U.S. gave $24 billion in indirect contributions to peacekeeping missions over and above the $3.5 billion in direct contributions. See Nile Gardiner and Baker Spring, “Reform the United Nations,” Heritage Foundation, October 27, 2003, p. 4.

2 UN Peacekeeping Statistics, “ Fatalities by Nationality and Mission as of 31 May 2004,” (http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/fatalities/totals.htm).

3 “ UN Admits Failure in Rwanda,” BBC News Online, December 16, 1999.

4 Colum Lynch, “UN 'Appeased' and Unwittingly Aided Genocide,” Washington Post, November 15, 1999.

5 For example, in the Congo alone, the French intervened 17 times between 1961 and 1996 – mainly to prop up the notorious dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, in the process destroying one of Africa’s richest economies. The French have also intervened in the Central African Republic (where they propped up another dictator, Jean-Bedel Bokassa), Rwanda (where they watched the pro-French central government conduct its campaign of genocide against the Tutsi in the mid-1990s), Burundi, Djibouti and Chad. In most of these cases, the purpose of the missions was to maintain French access to African uranium deposits – vital ingredients in the French nuclear weapons program.

6 Stefan Halper, “A Miasma of Corruption: The United Nations at 50,” Cato.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 William Safire, “Follow-Up to Kofigate,” New York Times , March 29, 2004.

11 Brian Ross, “ Monumental Rip-Off?” ABC News Investigation, April 20, 2004.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Stewart Stogel, “UN Missions Painted as Booze-Soaked Orgies,” Washington Times, May 27, 2004.

15 Ibid.

16 Barbara Crossette, “Peacekeeping’s Unsavory Side,” UN Wire, June 10, 2003.

17 Ibid.

18 The GAO defines indirect contributions as “ U.S. programs and activities that (1) are located in the same area as an ongoing UN peacekeeping operation and (2) have objectives that help the peacekeeping operation achieve its mandated objectives.