Let’s Get Out of the U.N.

The oil-for-food scandal has finally got lots of people talking about reforming the United Nations.  What’s really outrageous is that it took this long.  There has been plenty of fodder for criticism in the past. 

For instance in November, 2003 a senior official at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna resigned, alleging that management ignored "a pattern of misappropriation of funds" and "clear acts of corruption and mismanagement" by employees at the agency whose duty, ironically, is to fight crime and corruption. 

While few incidents compare in size to the $10 billion that appears to have been misappropriated in oil-for-food, embezzlement has accounted for the disappearance of some fairly hefty sums:  $20 million from the Cambodian relief effort, $8 million from Angola, $10 million from the UN Children’s Fund in Kenya and $4 million from UN headquarters in Somalia.

Embezzlement aside, the sheer waste of money at the UN is also shocking.  A 1995 Cato Institute report described the salary and benefit packages of UN employees in New York as “incredibly lucrative”.  Accountants and computer analysts employed by the UN were earning virtually twice as much as the average professional employed in comparable positions elsewhere in New York.  And because UN salaries are tax-free, the discrepancy is actually greater. 

Maybe this sort of thing could be tolerated if the United Nations were doing a first-rate job in carrying out its mission statement, but here too, disappointment is rife.  Founded in 1945, one of the UN’s foremost purposes was to maintain international peace and security.  How many wars do you think the world has witnessed since then?  A dozen?  A hundred?  The consensus among people who study these issues seems to be somewhere in the neighbourhood of 300, with deaths in the order of 22 million.

What about human rights, another important UN mission?   The 2003 selection of Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi to chair the Human Rights Commission made any previous pretense of respecting human rights into an open joke.  With countries such as Sudan, Libya, Syria, China, Cuba and Vietnam sitting on the commission, it has become apparent that many members use their voting power to deflect inspection or criticism of their own countries’ sorry human rights records. 

What strikes me as odd is that anybody ever expected things to be otherwise.  The UN is not simply a wonderful idea that has gone bad because of a few rotten apples.  It’s an idea that was doomed to failure in the first place, because there is no mechanism for accountability in a one-world uber-government. 

Contrast the UN with other forms of organization.  The power of business enterprises is kept in check because if they’re not doing a good job, people will stop buying their products and buy from their competitors instead.  Even the power of national governments is kept in check because every few years voters get the chance to throw the bums out and elect the opposition.  But what negative consequences befall UN officials or bureaucrats if a little genocide breaks out somewhere, or if money is squandered or misappropriated?  None.  Life rolls on as before.  There’s no opposition party to install, no other world peacekeeping organization for war-torn countries to resort to. 

Furthermore, the voting structure of the UN is guaranteed to produce incompetence, waste and mismanagement.  The top 15 contributor countries account for almost 85 percent of the UN’s budget,  yet they get only one vote each.  There are 176 poor countries who contribute next to nothing, but who can easily outvote the contributing countries every time.  For diplomats from these poor countries, the UN represents a source of wealth, power and prestige far better than anything available at home.  They’ll always vote for a bigger UN, with more spending, more duties and more powers.  Why not?  They have nothing to lose and everything to gain. 

Many, if not the majority, of these virtually non-contributing countries are outright dictatorships or riddled with internal corruption.  The 15 paying countries, with the exception of China, are among the world’s most democratic and least corrupt.  The spectacle of these assembled tyrannies dictating global policy to those who are at least semi-civilized is sickening.  As the UN’s seventh largest contributor, Canada needs to ask itself what it is doing among such company. 

Many Americans have already started asking that question of the U.S. government.  Petitions to get the United States to withdraw from the UN have been circulating for several years.  In 2003, Texas congressman Ron Paul introduced H.R. 1146, the American Sovereignty Restoration Act, into Congress.  If passed, the bill would terminate U.S. participation in every UN agency, commission or affiliated body and end the funding of the UN by American taxpayers.  The bill was re-introduced to Congress in 2005 and has been referred to the House Committee on International Relations.  Meanwhile, two state legislatures—Arizona and Utah—have passed formal resolutions urging the U.S. Congress to pass the bill. 

Reforming the UN is not enough.  The flaws are too integral to the organization’s entire structure.   As the momentum gathers for a U.S. withdrawal, Canada should start making its preparations to join its neighbour in abandoning this lost cause.