BOOKS
The United Nations: Neutrality or Ideology?
In fact the UN was responsible for some of the worst disasters of the 1990s.
By Nan Goldberg
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Dore Gold
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If you are of any of the generations born before, during, or just after World War II, you’ve probably regarded as a minor miracle the founding and continued existence of the United Nations, which was created in the aftermath of that war to adjudicate international conflicts and ensure that atrocities like the extermination of the Jews of Europe would never again occur.
But the United Nations has come under increasing fire in recent years, amid charges of corruption, incompetence, and anti-American bias. Its bias against Israel has been well-documented, and was recently acknowledged by the UN itself. With the revelation of the oil-for-food scandal over the past year, questions have been raised about the UN’s ability to effectively fulfill its mandate; whether the United States should continue to support the organization and in what form; and even whether the United Nations should be disbanded or replaced.
The essential question is whether the organization actually does more harm than good, and at least two books published recently address that question: The UN Gang: A Memoir of Incompetence, Corruption, Espionage, Anti-Semitism, and Islamic Extremism at the UN Secretariat, by Pedro A. Sanjuan (Doubleday, 202 pp., $24.95); and Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos, by Dore Gold. The latter book, published by Crown in 2004, has just come out in paperback (Three Rivers Press, 336 pp., $14.95), with an epilogue that covers the past year’s developments at the UN.
Gold, who served as Israel’s ambassador to the UN from 1997 through 1999, was born in 1953 in Connecticut and emigrated to Israel in the 1970s. After a successful career as an academic, Gold served in several positions in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration. Currently he heads the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
But the futility of his years at the UN seems to have marked him. This latest book (of many, including the best-selling Hatred’s Kingdom, about the Saudi Arabian roots of terrorism against the United States) makes a strong argument that the UN, far from pursuing its original goal of working to advance international peace and stability, has in fact supported terrorism and offered moral legitimacy to those who violate human rights.
Over coffee recently at the Hotel Carlyle in Manhattan, Gold spoke with me about these apparent contradictions.
NG: In the book’s introduction you said the UN “was born at a moment of extraordinary moral clarity.” Can you talk about that? What was the moral vision that the UN has failed to live up to?
DG: The UN was born in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when there was a clear sense of who was an aggressor and who was a victim of aggression, which were the countries that were defending peace and freedom and which were seeking to spread dictatorship around the world. It was an era when things were black and white. The original mission of the UN was to nip aggression in the bud, so you wouldn’t get a replay of World War II.
I think the fundamental flaw was that the UN lost its ability to discern between the aggressor and the victims of aggression. And if you can’t make that distinction, you can’t possibly contribute to world order. On the contrary, if you fail to make that distinction, then you contribute to disorder and chaos, which the UN does.
Almost immediately after its founding, during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, and the India-Pakistan war in the late ’40s, the UN took a so-called neutral stance, refusing to differentiate between the aggressor and the victim of aggression. So it appears that the founding nations believed they could preserve international peace while preserving neutrality. Was neutrality a principle of the UN from the beginning, or did it creep into the ideology at some later point?
I think neutrality crept into the ideology. I think what happened was you had conflicting [national] interests, and you had an inability of the organization to separate out the interests of the member states and discern when aggression occurred. In fact, “aggression” was not even defined until 1974 – and then there were a hundred loopholes.
Now the Security Council can be self-neutralizing, because the member countries have different interests. And there is no arm in the UN to give, let’s say, the secretary general or his office the capability to say: “Look, we have information, this is what occurred,” and to label some country an aggressor. Sometimes the secretary-general will say that, and I have cases in my book where they have. But the secretary-general has to be an individual who can walk into the Security Council, bang his fist on the table, and say, “Something horrible is occurring. Maybe you, the permanent members, don’t want to do anything, but I’m telling you that this is the record, this is what we are recording, and it’s on your conscience.”
The issue of neutrality also has another source, and that has to do with peacekeepers. The UN learned very quickly that the best way to protect its peacekeeping force’s place between two armies was to say the peacekeeping force must be seen as neutral, impartial, not taking sides in the conflict. Otherwise, the moment the peacekeeping force is seen as identifying with one side or the other, it will get shot at.
But then, what happens when you put in a peacekeeping force and one side is the aggressor?
Then the UN becomes a party negotiating to protect its own, doesn’t it? It’s as if the police in a city were making deals to protect the police instead of protect the citizenry.
Exactly, very good point.
But in fact the UN peacekeepers often get shot at anyway. In Rwanda, they were murdered anyway.
Right, being impartial didn’t protect them. To the contrary, they were accessories to genocide.
The other example is Israel, where you have Kofi Annan leaning over backwards for [the terrorist organization] Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, because he needs to have [Hezbollah’s] cooperation to help protect his own UN forces in southern Lebanon. And therefore what he ends up doing is legitimizing one of the worst international terrorist organizations.
How did the UN Human Rights Commission evolve to the point where it elected members like Libya and even allowed them to chair the commission? Where was the point at which the moral compass broke down inside the commission?
This is a fundamental problem of the UN, whether you’re talking about the Human Rights Commission or the Security Council. There is no bar that you have to reach before you go upward in the UN system. There is the famous case of Libya chairing the Human Rights Commission, and of Syria joining the Security Council. And Sudan, more recently, on the Human Rights Commission.
I remember meeting with high-level officials in Kofi Annan’s office who were saying that if Syria joined the Security Council, which is supposed to safeguard international peace and security, then Syria would modify its behavior because it wouldn’t want to be embarrassed by supporting terrorism – because how can you safeguard international peace and security if you are promoting international terrorism? But they were wrong. I did a check of their behavior vis-à-vis southern Lebanon and northern Israel, and it actually got worse. I have the numbers in my book.
People are surprised that insurgencies against the United States are coming out of Syria, and there are more and more indications of that. But if Syria managed to get on the Security Council while continuing to support international terrorism against Israel, then why should they be surprised that Syria continues to support the insurgency against the United States? Because they learned that you can do these things, you can maintain a policy of supporting militancy, without paying a price.
You say in your book that by inviting Yasir Arafat to speak before the General Assembly in 1974, the UN promoted terrorism. Explain that.
Number one, Yasir Arafat was not asked to alter his behavior in any way before he was invited to address the UN General Assembly. If you remember, in 1970 the PLO was heavily involved in airplane hijackings. In 1972 you have the attack on the Israeli team of the Munich Olympics. In 1973, Black September, which was part of Fatah, murders the U.S. ambassador to the Sudan. And in ’74, Arafat is invited to the UN, which he attends with a gun on his hip.
The second way was that the UN General Assembly adopted a series of anti-colonial resolutions from the 1960s to 1970, the last of which explicitly stated that the UN “reaffirms its recognition of the legitimacy of the struggle of the colonial peoples and peoples under alien domination to exercise their right to self-determination and independence by all the necessary means at their disposal.”
That would be Resolution 2708?
Yes. Now, Yasir Arafat in 1970 was interviewed by an American correspondent who asked: “You know, many people see these airplane hijackings as acts of terrorism. What do you say about that?” And Arafat said: “You are missing the crux of the matter. When you speak about the hijackings you have to look at the UN charter and the UN resolutions, which allow for resistance to occupation.” So he saw the UN resolutions as legitimizing his adoption of terrorism as an instrument of policy.
He cited the UN . . .
Absolutely. Right after he died, CNN kept rebroadcasting this show called “People in the News,” and they had this little excerpt of a 1970 interview with Arafat where he says, “Yeah, I rely on UN resolutions.”
So it isn’t that Resolution 2708 is a development that’s of no interest to anybody unless you have to write a paper for Columbia Law School.
What your book illustrates is that the UN’s so-called neutrality was there from the start, even though you say it crept into the ideology rather than being a stated goal. In the late 1940s, in the India-Pakistan wars, it was already there.
It was already there. Even though the evidence was in their hands, they refused to say that Pakistan had invaded India. So there was already a moral equivalence between aggressor and victim. And maybe that’s inevitable with a multilateral organization like this.
And if that’s the case . . .
Then it doesn’t work. The concept doesn’t work. That’s what the evidence points to, as much as I wish it wasn’t true.
What do you think the world thinks of the UN today?
I think people come to the UN with enormous expectations of it being a moral beacon, but in fact the UN was responsible for some of the worst disasters of the 1990s, from Rwanda to Srebenica and others, and I think that has begun to tarnish the UN’s image, and since the oil-for-food scandal that has become deeper.
I think many in the world have the mistaken impression that the UN and its specialized agencies represent some kind of determination of what is internationally just. In other words, if the UN’s Human Rights Commission says Israel is guilty of jaywalking and doesn’t say a word about somebody who commits mass murder, then somehow jaywalking is objectively worse than mass murder. I’m putting it in facetious terms, but there is a tendency to see the UN as a kind of guiding light for how international justice is defined. The voting patterns in the UN are not a reading of international justice but a reading of the summation of international interests at any given time. And what happens is that they create such a distorted reading of international morality that they undermine the very foundations of the UN itself.
It’s not just that the UN fingers Israel. It’s that the UN ignores human rights violations by countries like China or Syria or Saudi Arabia, and therefore the UN fails to live up to its original mission. And so I think that the story of the UN harassment of Israel is not an indicator of Israel’s problem, it’s an indicator of a broken UN moral compass, which is far graver and a much larger problem than Israel alone.
What do you see as an effective way to promote international justice and security?
There have been [successful] multilateral efforts to improve the behavior of states. You had the Helsinki Act of 1975, which actually was an effort by the United States to impose on the Soviet Union standards of behavior in human rights and military affairs – and [to reward them with] better economic relations and détente with the West – which for all I know eventually might have led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a tremendous achievement in the use of multilateral diplomacy to change international behavior. I don’t see that happening with the UN at all. In fact the whole Helsinki process was outside the UN.
My hope is that the U.S. can lead a coalition of countries that have a common strategic goal, like fighting terrorism, and common domestic agenda in supporting democracy. That’ll lead to much better results than trying to go to the Security Council.
RECOMMENDED GIFT BOOKS
It’s holiday season, and in the book industry that means the proliferation of volumes of an odd genre known as “coffee-table books.” Here are a few from this year’s crop that look either beautiful or interesting or both:
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE AMERICAN WOMAN, by Sharon J. Wohlmuth, Carol Saline, and Dawn Sheggeby; Bulfinch Press, 176 pp., $35. With approximately 200 photographs.
ATLAS OF THE WORLD: Deluxe Edition; Oxford University Press, 560 pp., $150. With 278 illustrations.
THE BOB DYLAN SCRAPBOOK, 1956-1966; Simon & Schuster, 64 pp., $45. A companion to Martin Scorsese’s PBS documentary No Direction Home. With approximately 100 illustrations.
BUILDING NEW YORK: The Rise and Rise of the Greatest City on Earth, by Bruce Marshall; Universe Publishing, 304 pp., $49.95. With numerous photographs.
THE DOWNTOWN BOOK: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984, edited by Marvin J. Taylor; Princeton University Press, 192 pp., $29.95. With approximately 150 photographs.
THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE ILLUSTRATED, by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, illustrated by Maira Kalman; Penguin Press, 176 pp., $24.95. With numerous illustrations.
GRANDMOTHERS, photos by Jayne Wexler, text by Lauren Cowen; Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 128 pp., $24.95. With numerous photographs.
JOHN LENNON: The New York Years, by Bob Gruen; Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 176 pp.,, $29.95. With approximately 150 photographs.
THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES: The Novels, edited by Leslie S. Klinger; W.W. Norton, 992 pp., $49.95. In slipcover, with approximately 400 illustrations.
WALKING THE BIBLE: A Photographic Journal, by Bruce Feiler; William Morrow, 160 pp., $32.50. With 150 photographs and maps.
WIDE ANGLE: National Geographic Greatest Places; National Geographic Press, 504 pp., $30. With 260 photographs.
WOMEN IN THE MIRROR, by Richard Avedon; Abrams, 256 pp., $65. With 125 photographs.
THE WORLD ON SUNDAY: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper (1898-1911), by Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano; Bulfinch Press, 144 pp., $50. With 144 illustrations.
