HOW HE SEES IT Bush finds U.N. relevant, after all
By JAMES P. PINKERTON
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
President Bush is known for his "straight talk," but he just threw a curve -- a flip-flop, actually.
Exhibit A is the United Nations. It hasn't changed, but Bush has.
In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Oct. 12, 2002, the president said that the world body would be "irrelevant" if it didn't approve a new war resolution. The U.N. Security Council refused and, of course, Bush went to war anyway.
This sequence of events delighted neoconservatives in the administration. For example, Richard Perle, the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, wrote on March 22, 2003, just as the Iraq war was beginning, "Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly, but not alone: in a parting irony he will take the United Nations down with him."
In the minds of these neocons, the United Nations is a hotbed of anti-American and anti-Israeli feeling. And, of course, they're not entirely wrong.
But the right-wing critique of the U.N. went further. It wasn't just the world's opinion that was a problem, these critics said; another problem was the U.N. bureaucracy. And, once again, they had a point. The United Nations' Oil for Food program -- in which the U.N. served as a middleman, overseeing exports of Iraqi oil in return for selected non-embargoed imports -- has long been an ongoing scandal. For two years, The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been digging into the sordid details. An April 7 editorial described the program as "so secretively run that it seemed almost designed to facilitate the corruption that fleeced of billions of dollars in aid."
Wasteful extravagance
But, of course, the Journal's mission went far beyond cleaning up corruption. As the editorial explained, the problem wasn't just crooked bureaucrats, but the international organization as a whole: "The U.N. Secretariat and three of five permanent Security Council members knowingly facilitated ... Saddam's 'Oil for Palaces' program." That is, the money wasn't being used for food, but for Saddam's wasteful extravagance. And so, the Journal concluded, Iraqis should ask if they "can trust the U.N. to play a major role in the future of their country."
So it must've been a Maalox moment for the Journal-ists when Bush put the U.N. at the center of his Iraq policy Tuesday night. In his opening statement, he lauded "international institutions ... for stepping up to their responsibilities." Then he added, "We're working closely with the United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi ... to determine the exact form of the government that will receive sovereignty on June 30th."
And who is Brahimi? He is the former foreign minister of Algeria, also a former undersecretary-general of the League of Arab States, now special adviser to Secretary-General Kofi Annan. In other words, he is the quintessential Third World international-crat -- exactly the sort of person Perle and the neocons wanted to render irrelevant. Indeed, his official U.N. biography cites his participation in "Algeria's independence struggle" against France during 1956-61. So, if Brahimi's background is one of Arab nationalism and anti-colonialism, what does that suggest as to his innermost feelings about the U.S. occupation? Now, in the wake of the worsening violence in Iraq, Brahimi is the man the president is turning to for help.
Indeed, Brahimi isn't just helping the Americans; he is leading them. When a reporter asked, "Mr. President, who will we be handing the Iraqi government over to on June 30th?" Bush answered: "We'll find that out soon. That's what Mr. Brahimi is doing. He's figuring out the nature of the entity we'll be handing sovereignty over."
A year ago, critics of the Iraq war warned that toppling Saddam would lead to his replacement by Islamic fundamentalists. That may still happen, of course. But in the meantime it looks as if America's armed forces will be used after June 30 to defend a deal hammered out by an Arab nationalist working for the U.N. So it looks as if the U.N. is still relevant, after all.
X Pinkerton is a Newsday columnist. Distributed by Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service