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By Jonah Goldberg
Those of us who believe the United States would be best served by pulling out of the United Nations and starting up a more morally and politically serious clubhouse for morally and politically serious nations are often accused of tilting at windmills.
The phrase “tilting at windmills” was inspired by Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote, and it means to fight something that doesn’t really deserve to be fought. Quixote mistook the windmills of the Spanish countryside for ravenous giants and set out to vanquish them. (“Tilting” is a jousting expression, in case you didn’t know.)
Well, let’s review some recent evidence.
The U.N. has been working hand-in-glove with the Chinese government to make the Chinese one-child policy as efficient and ruthless as possible. “Our conclusion is that the [United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)] is directly responsible for forced abortions and forced sterilizations in China,” Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, recently told Congress in prepared testimony.
Of course, not everyone dislikes the one-child policy. Vice President Biden has supported it, and President Obama restored UNFPA’s funding when he took office. So let’s move on.
Lots of people like the Internet, right? Well, good news! The U.N. wants to take it over. The International Telecommunications Union, a U.N. organization, is secretly debating proposals to claim jurisdiction over the Web and take it out of America’s hands. The major forces behind this push: authoritarian regimes eager to censor their domestic Internet and monitor their citizens. Russia and some Arab countries, reports the Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Crovitz, want the power to read private e-mail. Others want to tax cross-border Web traffic. And countries like China are working hard to bribe, bully, or barter votes in favor of the U.N. takeover.
You see, that’s what dictatorships do at the U.N.: work to make the world safe for dictatorships. The most brutal regimes on the planet are constantly trying to get on or game the Human Rights Council so they can spend all of their time condemning Israel and blocking any attempts to censure their own regimes.
Not everything the U.N. does is evil. Some of it is just incompetent. The whole of what passes for the “international community” has been trying to enforce sanctions on Iran and North Korea. But nobody told the U.N.’s intellectual-property agency, it was revealed earlier this month, so they went ahead and gave North Korea and Iran computers and IT equipment.
A few days later, the invaluable human-rights group U.N. Watch reported that Iran was elected to the U.N. Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty, despite having just been declared guilty — in a U.N. Security Council report! — of illegally shipping guns and bombs to Syria.
Speaking of Syria, which is currently violating agreements to not murder its own people, it recently had a big victory at the Human Rights Council. Syria co-sponsored and passed a resolution pushed by Cuba (and supported by the usual Legion of Doom nations) to establish a “Right to Peace.” The document is a lot of boilerplate until you get to the part where it says “all peoples and individuals have the right to resist and oppose oppressive colonial, foreign occupation.” This is Middle East–speak for “It’s okay to blow up Israelis.”
Now these are all just recent news items. But you can play this game any time you want because the U.N. always provides fresh hells for us to marvel and laugh at.
For example, the United Nations website tells us that there is something called the Open-ended Ad Hoc Working Group of the General Assembly on the Integrated and Coordinated Implementation of and Follow-up to the Major United Nations Conferences and Summits in the Economic and Social Fields. Who among us doesn’t sleep better knowing the OAHWGGAICIFMUNCSESF is working for us?
Alas, the U.N. website notes, “The Ad Hoc Working Group was last active during the 57th session of the General Assembly in 2003.” In other words, the ad hoc open-ended working group is so open-ended it hasn’t met in nearly a decade.
But that’s the great thing about the U.N.: It never fails to surprise us with its predictability.
I’m beginning to think the U.N.’s defenders are the Don Quixotes, only in reverse. Where the critics see the reality of the ravenous giant, the U.N.’s defenders can only see a harmless windmill converting hot air for the good of all mankind.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of The Tyranny of Clichés. You can write to him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Click here to read this on National Review
Showing posts with label national review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label national review. Show all posts
Friday, July 13, 2012
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
National Review: Litle American love for the U.N.
Click here to view this article on National Review
By Brett D. Schaefer
Devotees of the United Nations are upset. The House Appropriations Committee recently approved spending “only” $3.5 billion on the U.N. and other international organizations — substantially less than the nearly $4 billion the White House had requested for FY 2013. Among the arguments raised against the committee’s decision, perhaps the least plausible is that the spending cut is “at odds with voters’ wishes.”
That’s the claim advanced by the United Nations Foundation, an independent U.N. “partner” that lobbies Congress and the president to support U.N.-backed positions and to maintain or increase U.S. funding for the U.N. American voters want Congress to fully fund the administration’s budget request for the U.N., the foundation insists. Its evidence? A poll in which more than eight in ten voters said the United States should maintain an “active role within the United Nations.”
It is hardly shocking that the U.N. Foundation would spin, to the U.N.’s advantage, a poll they commissioned to benefit the U.N. But why should U.S. policymakers pay attention to that poll rather than other, more impartial polls that show quite different results?
Gallup, for instance, which has tracked American opinion on the U.N. since 1953, notes that “Americans have never held the United Nations in particularly high esteem, with a historical average of 40% saying it is doing a good job.” In 2012 Gallup asked its standard question, “Do you think the United Nations is doing a good job or a poor job in trying to solve the problems it has to face?” Only 32 percent of Americans answered that the U.N. is doing a “good job,” compared with 61 percent who said it’s doing a “poor job.”
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This is not news. In the 34 Gallup polls that posed the question over the past 40 years, respondents who answered that the U.N. was doing a poor job outnumbered those who thought it was doing a good job, by an aggregate score of 50 to 39 percent. And a Rasmussen poll conducted this month found that 49 percent of likely U.S. voters view the U.N. “at least somewhat unfavorably” versus 42 percent who view it “at least somewhat favorably.”
The U.N. Foundation reports that over 60 percent of Americans think the U.S. should pay its U.N. “dues” in full and on time. Is this outcome really surprising, though? Most Americans are taught to honor their commitments and be personally responsible.
But what about context? The poll never explains the reasoning behind the proposal that the U.S. withhold its dues until the U.N. demonstrates improved performance, better oversight, holding peacekeepers to account for their crimes, or other reforms.
The poll does, however, “push.” In asking whether U.S. membership in UNESCO is important, it supplies the following description of the agency:
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, also known as UNESCO, focuses on education, science and culture around the world. UNESCO helps prevent conflict and build peace around the world by promoting democracy, works to eradicate poverty, and supports education for all. They promote new and innovative ways to educate children in the developing world and help people learn how to provide for themselves.
The wording includes no mention of UNESCO undermining U.S. and Israeli interests by admitting the Palestinian Authority as a member state last year — and after the U.S. told them such action would trigger a suspension of U.S. funding. There is no mention that UNESCO is largely a facilitator, rather than an implementing agency, and that many of its functions could be performed by others. Could anyone doubt that the poll results would have been very different if that information had been presented?
Moreover, Americans might be happy to express support for the U.N. or a U.N. agency in the abstract, especially when told it performs a laudable-sounding mission, but they are much less pleased with other U.N. priorities. A recent Rasmussen poll found that just 5 percent of likely U.S. voters support a proposal that a U.N. agency regulate the Internet. Fully 80 percent oppose the idea.
Since the U.N.’s founding, the U.S. has been its largest financial supporter. Americans are currently charged with paying 22 percent of the regular budget and more than 27 percent of the peacekeeping budget, although they are often disappointed by the U.N.’s inability to live up to its mission. The body’s inaction regarding Syria is but the latest example.
Fraud and mismanagement remain troublingly common. The organization’s oversight mechanisms remain inadequate, as a recent report by the U.N.’s own Joint Inspection Unit explains. Its efforts to address global problems such as terrorism, human trafficking, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction have been weak, ineffectual, or counterproductive. Indeed, the U.N. cannot even agree on a definition of terrorism.
Many Americans support the founding principles of the U.N. Who doesn’t want to prevent war, promote fundamental human rights, or contribute to higher living standards? But Americans understand as well the bitterly disappointing reality of the U.N. and how far it falls short of those ideals.
American voters expect Congress to be responsible stewards of taxpayer money, not a rubber stamp for the U.N. Our politicians should be vigilant, guarding against impropriety and waste at the U.N., and insisting that U.S. contributions to the U.N. advance U.S. interests.
— Brett D. Schaefer is the Jay Kingham Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs at the Heritage Foundation.
By Brett D. Schaefer
Devotees of the United Nations are upset. The House Appropriations Committee recently approved spending “only” $3.5 billion on the U.N. and other international organizations — substantially less than the nearly $4 billion the White House had requested for FY 2013. Among the arguments raised against the committee’s decision, perhaps the least plausible is that the spending cut is “at odds with voters’ wishes.”
That’s the claim advanced by the United Nations Foundation, an independent U.N. “partner” that lobbies Congress and the president to support U.N.-backed positions and to maintain or increase U.S. funding for the U.N. American voters want Congress to fully fund the administration’s budget request for the U.N., the foundation insists. Its evidence? A poll in which more than eight in ten voters said the United States should maintain an “active role within the United Nations.”
It is hardly shocking that the U.N. Foundation would spin, to the U.N.’s advantage, a poll they commissioned to benefit the U.N. But why should U.S. policymakers pay attention to that poll rather than other, more impartial polls that show quite different results?
Gallup, for instance, which has tracked American opinion on the U.N. since 1953, notes that “Americans have never held the United Nations in particularly high esteem, with a historical average of 40% saying it is doing a good job.” In 2012 Gallup asked its standard question, “Do you think the United Nations is doing a good job or a poor job in trying to solve the problems it has to face?” Only 32 percent of Americans answered that the U.N. is doing a “good job,” compared with 61 percent who said it’s doing a “poor job.”
Advertisement
This is not news. In the 34 Gallup polls that posed the question over the past 40 years, respondents who answered that the U.N. was doing a poor job outnumbered those who thought it was doing a good job, by an aggregate score of 50 to 39 percent. And a Rasmussen poll conducted this month found that 49 percent of likely U.S. voters view the U.N. “at least somewhat unfavorably” versus 42 percent who view it “at least somewhat favorably.”
The U.N. Foundation reports that over 60 percent of Americans think the U.S. should pay its U.N. “dues” in full and on time. Is this outcome really surprising, though? Most Americans are taught to honor their commitments and be personally responsible.
But what about context? The poll never explains the reasoning behind the proposal that the U.S. withhold its dues until the U.N. demonstrates improved performance, better oversight, holding peacekeepers to account for their crimes, or other reforms.
The poll does, however, “push.” In asking whether U.S. membership in UNESCO is important, it supplies the following description of the agency:
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, also known as UNESCO, focuses on education, science and culture around the world. UNESCO helps prevent conflict and build peace around the world by promoting democracy, works to eradicate poverty, and supports education for all. They promote new and innovative ways to educate children in the developing world and help people learn how to provide for themselves.
The wording includes no mention of UNESCO undermining U.S. and Israeli interests by admitting the Palestinian Authority as a member state last year — and after the U.S. told them such action would trigger a suspension of U.S. funding. There is no mention that UNESCO is largely a facilitator, rather than an implementing agency, and that many of its functions could be performed by others. Could anyone doubt that the poll results would have been very different if that information had been presented?
Moreover, Americans might be happy to express support for the U.N. or a U.N. agency in the abstract, especially when told it performs a laudable-sounding mission, but they are much less pleased with other U.N. priorities. A recent Rasmussen poll found that just 5 percent of likely U.S. voters support a proposal that a U.N. agency regulate the Internet. Fully 80 percent oppose the idea.
Since the U.N.’s founding, the U.S. has been its largest financial supporter. Americans are currently charged with paying 22 percent of the regular budget and more than 27 percent of the peacekeeping budget, although they are often disappointed by the U.N.’s inability to live up to its mission. The body’s inaction regarding Syria is but the latest example.
Fraud and mismanagement remain troublingly common. The organization’s oversight mechanisms remain inadequate, as a recent report by the U.N.’s own Joint Inspection Unit explains. Its efforts to address global problems such as terrorism, human trafficking, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction have been weak, ineffectual, or counterproductive. Indeed, the U.N. cannot even agree on a definition of terrorism.
Many Americans support the founding principles of the U.N. Who doesn’t want to prevent war, promote fundamental human rights, or contribute to higher living standards? But Americans understand as well the bitterly disappointing reality of the U.N. and how far it falls short of those ideals.
American voters expect Congress to be responsible stewards of taxpayer money, not a rubber stamp for the U.N. Our politicians should be vigilant, guarding against impropriety and waste at the U.N., and insisting that U.S. contributions to the U.N. advance U.S. interests.
— Brett D. Schaefer is the Jay Kingham Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs at the Heritage Foundation.
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