An editorial in Kenya's Daily Nation thinks that the international community's response to the pirate crisis has been too focused on a military solution.

[I}nstead of sabre-rattling in a situation as fraught with danger as this, maybe the United Nations should be thinking of employing the services of negotiators skilled in the art of handling hostage situations.

The United Nations has passed two resolutions authorizing countries to use naval force to combat piracy. And NATO is ready to comply, agreeing to send its warships to join those of the United States and Russia off the coast of Somalia. But this does not mean that international organizations are not engaged in negotiations. In fact, it's been negotiations that have resulted in the potential ransom deal with the Ukrainian ship and today's release of a Japanese ship that pirates had seized.

The Daily Nation's broader point, though, is valid; the response to lawless bandits marauding cargo and passenger ships with impunity will require a significant commitment and reorientation of strategy. One key process, as I argued here, is connecting the anarchy at sea to the anarchy on the ground. This means seriously delving into the messy and difficult realities of Somali politics and working to forge a government that enjoys widespread legitimacy and can both protect its civilians and control the terrorist threat on and offshore.

Preparing a military component to an international anti-piracy strategy, in short, by no means precludes other, equally important initiatives. I do believe, though, that dealing with such intransigent law-breakers -- not to mention simply protecting ships and humanitarian aid convoys -- requires the mobilization of naval resources. And plus, the pirates still seem to have eyes for nothing but the money.

(Image from flickr user Ligadier Truffaut using a Creative Commons license)

For the second consecutive debate, John McCain responded to a question about a possible Iranian threat by referring to the shadowy concept of a "league of democracies."

I think, joining with our allies and friends in a league of democracies, that we can effectively abridge [Iran's] behavior, and hopefully they would abandon this quest that they are on for nuclear weapons.

There are two parts to this proposed solution: "joining" the hypothetical league, and "effectively abridg[ing]" Iran's nuclear program. The problem with the first step in this process is that the "League of Democracies" is in fact hypothetical. It does not exist, and, as just about every other proposed member country will tell you, it has very little prospect of actually coming to fruition.

Even if a coalition of "democratic" countries could somehow be cobbled together, proposing this measure as the solution to the Iranian threat would dangerously delay -- and ultimately undermine -- global efforts to "effectively abridge" Iran's nuclear program. Creating a "League of Democracies" to deter Iran's nuclear ambitions is not just a risky endeavor, because of the lack of international enthusiasm for the idea; even if one could muster enough international consensus to begin the process, it would be a time-consuming project, one for which the United States cannot afford to expend its efforts, particularly when Iran's progress toward nuclear weapons is as dangerous as both candidates agree that it is.

Before referencing the League of Democracies last night, Senator McCain stressed the importance of "joining with our allies, imposing significant, tough sanctions to modify [Iran's] behavior." This is absolutely correct. The thing is, it will not require the construction of a new, unpopular, and only hazily sketched out organization to undertake this policy. Working with our allies through the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency -- institutions that our allies have already signed onto and are supportive of -- will prove both more feasible and more immediate than the stepwise process of rounding up select countries into what would very likely end up being a weak mechanism for exerting pressure on Iran.

Supporters of a League of Democracies argue that it would be more effective at halting Iranian nuclear activity for principally two reasons: it would somehow harness the powers of democratic-minded states opposed to a nuclear-armed Iran, and it would avoid the threat of a Russian or Chinese veto on the Security Council. Both of these quickly turn out to be misguided. First, as Mark points out, the group currently taking the lead on the Iran issue is in fact a collection of democracies, and the same countries that, one assumes, would be invited -- and would likely decline -- to join a "League of Democracies" are all already active in these efforts.

As for the threat of a spoiler country vetoing tough action, here the relatively simple maxim of "a country's domestic form of government does not determine its foreign policy" rears its head -- only this time in the form of Manmohan Singh, not Vladimir Putin. China may get much of its oil and natural gas from India, and Russia may be supplying it with its weapons, but, as Nina Hachigian explains, India too has a "strategic partnership" with Iran -- as well as rapidly increasing fuel consumption -- that would, shall we say, influence its position toward imposing strong measures on a large-scale natural gas supplier. Moreover, we have a much better chance of persuading dissenters, whether they be dictatorships or democracies, by engaging them through an established institution rather than by locking them out in the cold.

I'm not sure whether McCain genuinely believes that a "League of Democracies" is a good idea, whether his foreign policy advisors have coached him to keep bringing it up, or whether it registers a smidgen of support from the American population. While some of his top advisors, such as Robert Kagan, are proponents of the League, and McCain does seem enthusiastic about it, talk of the League has been muted in recent months, which only makes it stranger that he would bring it up in both debates thus far.

My speculation is that McCain is mentioning the "League of Democracies" strategically. It sounds nice, it seems promising on the surface level, and many people may not know just how infeasible and counter-productive it would be. Not delving into the details of the proposal -- by simply putting it out there as a means to an end, the link connecting "current situation" and "defeating Iran's nuclear ambitions" -- just serves to further minimize the threat of these looming obstacles, making what will surely be a very difficult process seem much, much too easy.

The debate over a somewhat important financial bailout bill has apparently not plugged the cracks through which uncommonly silly bills from time to time manage to be submitted in the U.S. Congress. In the House of Representatives, Republican legislator -- and former long-shot presidential candidate -- Tom Tancredo has introduced a bill bluntly titled the "United Nations Eviction Act". The purpose of this pressing legislation?

To direct the Attorney General to institute condemnation proceedings to acquire the property in the headquarters district and any other property in the United States ofthe United Nations, and for other purposes.

Trying to kick the UN out of New York has long been a hobby of fringe anti-UN types, but the attempt seems particularly out of place just one week after President Bush attested to the organization's importance in his final speech before the General Assembly. In the words of Republican Representative Chris Shays, speaking at an event last week honoring 60 years of UN peacekeeping, hosting the United Nations should be seen not as an undue burden, but as a real source of pride for Americans.

While it would be nice if everyone appreciated the honor of having UN headquarters of U.S. soil as much as Rep. Shays, I am fairly confident that Rep. Tancreco will have a hard time rounding up enough voices to support the eviction of 191 other countries from Manhattan.

In his latest "Backgrounder" on UN peacekeeping, Heritage Foundation hand Brett Schaefer has some relatively positive things to say about the efficacy and value of supporting the blue helmets.

Multiple Administrations have concluded that it is in America's interest to support U.N. operations as a useful, cost-effective way to influence situations that affect the U.S. national interest but do not require direct U.S. intervention. Although the U.N. peacekeeping record includes significant failures, U.N. peace operations overall have proven to be a convenient, sometimes effective multilateral means for addressing humanitarian concerns in situations where conflict or instability make civilians vulnerable to atrocities, for promoting peace efforts, and for supporting the transition to democracy and post-conflict rebuilding.

This glimpse of the big picture was welcome in a report that focuses much of its attention on criticizing the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) for its alleged "mismanagement, fraud, and corruption." The problem with Schaefer's excessive focus on the latter is not that DPKO, the UN, or any such large organization, is a pristine body void of any transgressions or bureaucratic impediments; it is simply that the existence of such problems does nothing to diminish the value of UN peacekeeping -- particularly when Schaefer himself recognizes it.

While Schaefer -- like the Republican Party platform -- does not sound the call of John Bolton-type conservatives to withhold U.S. dues to the UN as a purported incentive to reform, he does make this somewhat ominous recommendation:

The Bush Administration and Congress need to consider carefully any requests by the United Nations for additional funding for a system in which procurement problems have wasted millions of dollars and sexual abuse by peacekeepers is still occurring.

Yes, procurement and sexual abuse problems are still occurring -- even if the vast majority of the evidence that Schaefer draws from comes from over three years ago, before DPKO instituted certain key reforms that have had a strong effect in reducing instances of sexual exploitation and corruption. Violations that do occur constitute a definite, but remediable, problem. To overcome these obstacles, though, the United States will have to engage more, not less, in UN peacekeeping -- particularly when the end result, a UN peacekeeping system that both achieves U.S. interests and operates up to Schaefer's standards of accountability and management, is in everybody's interests.

I just couldn't let this one go...

Andy McCarthy of The National Review, in the midst of another gross distortion of the Global Poverty Act, describes the funds that the United States could contribute to the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as money that would be "flush[ed] down a UN sink-hole." Mark has already thoroughly debunked the utterly baseless rationale on which McCarthy's attack relies, but let me just emphasize the perversion of so rabidly opposing -- and even mocking -- a bill that will help bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

The Global Poverty Act calls for the United States to increase its contribution to foreign aid, which currently stands at a meager 0.18% of our Gross National Product -- the second-lowest proportion among developed countries. This assistance is geared toward meeting the MDGs that nations -- including the United States -- agreed to in 2000. The MDGs, among other ambitious endeavors, aim to halve the number of people living on less than $1 a day -- currently 1.4 billion -- by 2015.

If contributing to the goal of improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people in poverty is a "flushing" money down a "sink-hole," then it's certainly the most worthy sink-hole I've encountered. Let's flush away.

The rather eclectic new mayor of London, Boris Johnson, apparently won't stand for any suggestion that he eat less meat -- even if doing so will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Writing in his blog (and in The Daily Telegraph), Johnson takes rather excessive umbrage at the comparatively mild recommendation from the head of the UN's Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that people try to give up meat for one day a week.

Look, I hate to be rude to the UN. I don't want to seem churlish in the face of advice from a body as august and well-meaning as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But if they seriously believe that I am going to give up eating meat - in the hope of reducing the temperature of the planet - then they must be totally barmy.

We are going to have carnivorous festivals of chops and sausages.

No, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, distinguished chairman of the panel, I am not going to have one meat-free day per week. No, I am not going to become a gradual vegetarian. In fact, the whole proposition is so irritating that I am almost minded to eat more meat in response.

The sarcasm and pettiness of Johnson's response aside, there is no need to disparage the scientifically-backed notion that many aspects of our meat-eating practices do indeed contribute to global warming. (Johnson's rather meandering retort, which grows zanier as his post continues, is that livestock human overpopulation is entirely responsible for global warming.) Johnson's over-the-top rejection of the logical conclusion to this fact -- that eating even slightly less meat is one of those conservation measures that, taken together, will help us reduce our greenhouse gas emissions -- is similarly unwarranted, and his mocking of a distinguished UN body rings rather hollow.

So while Mr. Johnson is of course welcome to gorge as carnivorously as he chooses, let's hope calmer heads will recognize that the UN is not in fact trying to take away anyone's "right" to eat meat, and that its agencies' conclusions are backed by science, not an aggressive pro-vegetarian agenda.

(Photos from flickr users adactio and lewishamdreamer, respectively, using a Creative Commons license.)

(cross-posted at On Day One)

FP Passport just released its "top ten" list of John McCain's worst ideas (it follows a similar run-down for Barack Obama last week), and sitting at the top is something we have frequently cautioned against here at Dispatch: the heroic-sounding, but ultimately dangerous, idea to circumvent the UN by investing in a "League of Democracies." Though McCain's foreign policy team -- and some of Obama's as well -- has proposed that such an organization could come to the rescue in places like Georgia, Myanmar, and Darfur, where UN Security Council action is stalled by veto threats, creating a "League of Democracies" would inevitably prove counter-productive.

In addition to the concerns that Passport cites -- it would dangerously weaken the United Nations, no one else in the world seems interested, and a previous iteration has not made much of an impact -- McCain's proposed "League" would provocatively antagonize key emerging powers, such as China and Russia, with which the next president will have to work closely, whether he likes it or not. This would sow unnecessary discord both between supposed "democracies" and "non-democracies" and within the ranks of democracies themselves, thereby accelerating global polarization and making it that much more difficult to tackle thorny issues. Far from being a harmonious squad of like-minded democracies, a "League" of "over 100 democracies" would find themselves bickering amongst each other far more often than taking unified stances against oppression and human rights abuses. The U.S.'s already struggling image in the world would take a further beating, and crises across the world would continue to fester.

The "League of Democracies" is not the only poor foreign policy idea that the folks at Passport have identified -- on both sides of the aisle. McCain has also voiced support for the incredibly harmful "Global Gag Rule," a restriction on U.S. foreign assistance that prevents funding for any group that even discusses the option of abortion. A particularly terrible idea to come out of Obama's camp, on the other hand, was his support -- since renounced -- of the "coal-to-liquid" fuel process. This method is even worse for the environment than oil, would set back even moderate efforts to clean up "dirty coal," and would emit the very greenhouse gases that other planks in Obama's energy platform seek to decrease.

Let's hope the candidates change their minds on some of these less thought-out policies before Day One in the White House.

Over on Delegates Lounge, I just posted a reaction to the GOP Platform's (refreshingly positive) exposition on the United Nations. As I mention, noticeably absent from the platform language on the United Nations is any proposal for a "league of democracies" to supplant the United Nations. In fact, there is only one passing reference.

The United States participates in various international organizations which can, at times, serve the cause of peace and prosperity, but those organizations must never serve as a substitute for principled American leadership. Nor should our participation in them prevent our joining with other democracies to protect our vital national interests.

If this is part of McCain's "hidden agenda to kill the UN" then I'd dare say it's very well hidden.

In a Washington Post op-ed the undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs reflects on a recent visit Myanmar, three months after Cyclone Nargis killed an estimated 140,000 people and displaced millions more. He reports that progress is being made.

The international response has helped save lives and reduce suffering. While it is impossible to be sure all survivors have been reached, I am confident that the overwhelming majority have received help, even if many still need a good deal more.

Crucially, a much-feared second wave of deaths from starvation or disease has not happened -- no small achievement, given that 75 percent of hospitals and clinics in the affected areas were destroyed. The people's resilience has been remarkable, as was the degree of help and solidarity from individual citizens and organizations in Myanmar.

So what does this mean? For one, it shows that pundits who said that only forced intervention could help the people of Burma were wrong:

[t]he aid operation in Myanmar -- as is true everywhere we work -- had to be about helping vulnerable people in need, not about politics. In this post-Iraq age, I am concerned that humanitarians are often pressured to choose between the hammer of forced intervention and the anvil of perceived inaction. Was there a realistic alternative to the approach of persistent negotiation and dialogue that we pursued? I do not believe so. Nor have I met anyone engaged in the operations who believes that a different approach would have brought more aid to more people more quickly. (Emphasis added)

John Holmes does not name names. I will. Here in the United States, those who conflated toppling the odious Burmese junta and delivering aid to the vulnerable Burmese people included Robert Kaplan. This Washington Post editorial made basically the same point. Three months later it's clear that they were wrong. We never had to choose between forced intervention and doing nothing. Fortunately, they were ignored. And in the meantime, lives were saved.

I admire Robert Dreyfuss, but he gets the ICC-Bashir situation exactly backward in a post meant to criticize the Bush administration's go along, get along approach to the International Criminal Court's action in Sudan.

It's the first indictment of a sitting head of state since the ICC was founded in 2002. But Bashir will resist the charges, and no one is going to charge into Sudan to arrest him. Meanwhile, UN diplomats and peacekeepers worry that Sudan will react forcefully, making the situation in Darfur in southwestern Sudan worse. The African Union issued a statement over the weekend warning against "the misuse of indictments against African leaders" -- perhaps thinking, too, of Zimbabwe. Both Russia and China (which has close economic ties to Sudan and its oil) were against the indictments, too.Australia is already reconsidering its planned deployment of peacekeepers to Sudan, fearing greater violence. The Arab League is having an emergency meeting over the crisis.

There are two points to make here. First, of course no one is going to march on Khartoum to arrest Bashir. Similarly, there were no prospects of NATO forces marching on Belgrade to arrest Milosevic after his indictment or UN troops to march on Freetown to arrest Charles Taylor. Yet, in both cases, international indictments served to turn those heads of state into international pariahs and organic opposition groups gave them the boot. Bashir is a sufficiently unpopular ruler in Sudan that this kind of action is not without the realm of possibility, particularly as we approach the 2009 national elections.

Second, the ICC action will likely make things more difficult for aid workers and peacekeepers in the short term. But the harassment of peacekeepers was already making troop contributing countries wary of sending peacekeepers to Sudan. Aid workers were already being routinely denied access to refugee camps. The is no "peace process" of which to speak that the ICC action could be undermining.

The ICC action deserves our support because it is the only prospect of justice for Darfur's victims. But perhaps more importantly, if the international community plays its cards right, the threat of indictment--and enticement of suspending an indictment--can be leveraged to force Sudan's compliance with a future peace accord. The point is, supporting the ICC's action on Sudan is not only the right thing to do, but has the potential to break an untenable political status quo.

The New York Times picks up this exchange between Matthew Lee and I from our last UN Plaza segment.

The idea that there is a one-sized fits all approach to rogue states I think is wrong-headed. Just because a particular policy worked for North Korea it does not necessarily follow that such an approach will work for, say, Sudan. I think, however, there is a tendency among hardliners to think that only a hard line approach will work in any given situation. Perhaps the apotheosis of this approach--which I reference in the segment above -- is John Bolton's dictate in Surrender is not an Option that he "doesn't do carrots." Full stop.

I would argue, however, that in some specific cases carrots work and in some they do not. American concessions clearly helped convince North Korea to destroy its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon two weeks ago. Yet, at the same time I do not think that the international community has done enough to pressure Khartoum into lifting its obstruction of the joint AU-UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur. Different situations call for different approaches.

Asha-Rose Migro is not a deputy secretary general. She is the deputy secretary general in the grammatically similar way that Dick Cheney is the Vice President. She deserves a definite article. The United Nations, in turn, deserves fair treatment from a Washington Post editorial board looking for a scapegoat in Zimbabwe.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, boldly predicted that some action will be taken, despite the predictable resistance of China and South Africa. "If there is no response," he asked, "what does that say about the council?" Answer: It would say that the United Nations is no more prepared than the African Union is to protect a suffering nation from a criminal government.

I don't think it would say so at all. Rather, it would say that the country which sponsored the resolution did not make shepherding it through the Security Council enough of a diplomatic priority in its relations with other council members. Blaming the UN when a specific Security Council resolution fails to pass is just a convenient way to excuse countries from their own diplomatic failings.

(Tat tip, reader KP)

TNR's Marty Peretz has never been the most avid supporter of the United Nations, to say the least. Now, however, contemplating the international response to the crisis in Zimbabwe, he reaches perhaps a new low:

And let's face facts: the most aggressive response to the calamity of Mugabe's rule has been that of the United States. Which is to say, the response of George Bush. See the New York Times article headlined, "Zimbabwe Faces Wider Sanctions Under Bush Plan." The problem is that the U.S. is taking the plan to the Security Council where it will surely fail.

Which raises the fundamental question about the United Nations: is it worth anything? My answer is "no."

Even without discussing what the UN can in fact do in Zimbabwe -- see, for example, The Economist's sober but cautiously optimistic take on that question -- Peretz's claim that the UN is worth nothing, based solely on insufficient action on one issue, is exceedingly myopic. Even if the UN were to roll out the red carpet for Mugabe in New York -- something that Secretary-General Ban, who has condemned Zimbabwe's election as "illegitimate," is far from doing -- that would not invalidate the myriad benefits the UN brings to the hundreds of millions of others in the scope of its work: people all over the world whom the UN and UN agencies feed and vaccinate from diseases, protect from violence, help out of poverty, and bring into democracies, just to name a few.

If the United States is poised to take strong action on Zimbabwe -- and here too, as in the Security Council, words will have to be backed up with concrete follow-through -- then this is a reason to commend and support the U.S., not excoriate the body through which it intends to work.

Peretz would be wise to consider how effective unilateral American action on Zimbabwe could possibly be. As with Sudan, the U.S. wields much less significant influence on Zimbabwe's junta than do other significant players like South Africa and China. The weight of Security Council action will surely create greater obstacles for Zimbabwe's "sham government" than would a quixotic American attempt to isolate Mugabe on its own.

Pressure from African countries, particularly, can have a greater impact than rhetoric from the West, as one Mugabe spokesman unwittingly revealed when he collectively told the West to "go hang a thousand times." The U.S. should not comply, of course, but neither should it deprive itself of using all possible channels of influence -- and hopefully exposing such strident defiance as the desperate words of a regime backed into a corner, not those of one confident that the world will not even attempt to mount a unified response.

Over at his blog, On the Ground, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is incensed that the Bush administration has, for the seventh consecutive year, decided to withhold any funding for the United Nations Population Fund. He's not alone, as voices on the Hill are already registering their outcry. Why would the U.S. object to helping fund an organization that provides reproductive health services for women across the world (not to mention assistance in development, human rights, and gender equality initiatives as well)? Kristof explains:

The reason given for withholding the U.S. funds is that the Population Fund (universally called UNFPA, after its old acronym) supports forced abortions in China. Even if that were true, it would be ridiculous to withhold funds for UNFPA activities against maternal mortality in Africa because of its work in China. But in any case, UNFPA has been a major force against compulsion of any kind in China, as the U.S. blue-ribbon committee that investigated the charges found. In the areas in China where UNFPA set up a model program, there is no compulsion and the abortion rate is lower than in the U.S.

It seems that the administration is assuming that, simply because China has a one-child policy -- and because yes, like everywhere else in the world, some women in China do get abortions -- that abortions there must be non-voluntary, and that the UNFPA, merely by operating in the country, is guilty by association. This logic is clearly flawed, its assertions are wholly unsubstantiated by the evidence, and, perhaps worst of all, it contradicts the findings of the U.S. government's own investigative panel. Moreover, as Kristof suggests, depriving UNFPA of support for any of its work -- even in places like Africa, where President Bush has trumpeted his development efforts, such as PEPFAR, as a staple of his legacy -- out of either political or ideological posturing makes for nonsensical policy.

Cross-posted on On Day One.

UPDATE: Tamara Kreinin, the Executive Director of the Women and Population program at the United Nations Foundation, issues a strong statement on UNFPA funding (read it below the fold).

UPDATE II: As commenter Tyler LePard notes, the news only gets worse. Check out Craig Lasher's post over at RH Reality Check for more.

"The United Nations Foundation joins the international community in expressing its deep disappointment that the administration has decided--for the seventh straight year--to withhold the $39.7 million authorized by Congress to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the world's leading voice on sexual and reproductive health and rights.

"In a statement notifying Congress of the administration's decision to withhold funds from UNFPA, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte once again cited UNFPA's program in China as a violation of the Kemp-Kasten Amendment, which bars funding for programming that "supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive or involuntary sterilization."

"UNFPA does not--and has never--supported coercive or involuntary sterilization. In fact, the decision to withhold funds from UNFPA is inconsistent with the reports from the State Department and several other blue-ribbon investigative teams, which included descriptions of UNFPA's work as "a force for good" in China.

"Working in 150 countries, UNFPA is on the front lines reducing maternal and infant mortality, decreasing HIV/AIDS rates, and protecting women and girls from rape and violence, particularly during conflict situations. The $34 million that the United States has withheld each year is close to 10 percent of UNFPA's regular income. The amount withheld every year could have helped UNFPA prevent 2 million unintended pregnancies, 800,000 abortions, 4,700 mothers' deaths, and more than 77,000 infant and child deaths. Approximately 181 industrialized and developing countries, including all the countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, contribute to UNFPA. The United States is the only country to withhold funding for political reasons.

"The UN Foundation is looking forward to working with the next administration to restore funding for UNFPA and to strengthen the U.S.'s role as a global health leader. During the 2000 UN Millennium Summit, the United States pledged to work to respond to the world's most pressing development challenges, including poverty, gender inequality and disease. It is past time that the administration acknowledges how fundamental UNFPA is to addressing these global challenges and that the U.S. funds UNFPA's work.

Flashback: It's January 2007, and Melanie Kirkpatrick pens an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal accusing the United Nations Development Program of funneling "upward of $100 million" to the coffers of North Korean leader Kim Jong Ill. The accusation stems from allegations made by the United States Representative for UN Management and Reform, Mark Wallace. The WSJ quickly dubbed this the "Cash for Kim" scandal. The echo chamber grows louder, claiming this is a new "Oil For Food" scandal. The UNDP suspends its operations in North Korea pending an investigation.

Present Day: An internal UNDP investigation, an investigation by the United States Senate, and just last week an external audit lead by the former Prime Minister of Hungary (and including the former head of the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund) cleared the UNDP of wrongdoing. This later report was the most exhaustive--and the most damning toward those who have been trying to make this scandal stick. There was no scandal. It found the the UNDP followed normal diplomatic procedures in its financial dealings with North Korea.

As The Atlantic's James Gibney pointed out, this was "The UN Scandal that Wasn't...More broadly, as the New York Times observed, "the dense 353-page report appeared to concur with what the [UNDP] had maintained all along, that the American allegations were baseless."

But Kilpatrick--now with egg all over her face--refuses to acknowledge her mistake and move on. Rather, she takes to the op-ed page again today to claim that a report which exoneratesthe UNDP actually implicates it further! Ugh.

In Slate on Tuesday, Anne Applebaum offered the bold proposition that Robert Mugabe's attendance at this week's emergency meeting of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization proves that the UN is useless. As she put it:

With an unerring sense of timing, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe arrived in Rome this weekend, thereby demonstrating the profound limitations of international diplomacy. Indeed, it's hard to think of any other single gesture that would so effectively reveal the ineffectiveness of international institutions in the conduct of both human rights and food-aid policy. Even someone standing atop the dome of St. Peter's, megaphone in hand, shouting, 'The U.N. is useless! The E.U. is useless!' couldn't have clarified the matter more plainly.

First things first, I think the millions of children around the world who didn't die of polio this year because they received a vaccination through the UN World Health Organization may dispute that. But I digress.

Mugabe's attendance at the meeting of the Food and Agricultural Organization does not show that the UN is useless. It does, however, show that sovereignty is still a driving force of international relations--which means that sometimes heads of state we don't like are invited to forums in which more responsible leaders also participate. It's not like Mugabe has a veto over what can or cannot be discussed at the meeting. He's there. He's a gadfly. Get over it.

But she can't. Instead, Applebaum uses Mugabe-in-Rome to bludgeon the UN as a whole.

So should we scrap the UN-sponsored war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone because Mugabe attended a meeting? Should we pull the 4,000 (mostly Brazilian and Jordanian Peacekeepers) out of Haiti because Mugabe attended a meeting? Should we stop providing food, shelter, and educational services to the millions displaced in Darfur because Mugabe attended a meeting? Should we halt anti-malarial campaigns by the World Health Organization because Mugabe attended a meeting?

To call the whole edifice of the United Nations "useless" because a tin-pot dictator attends a meeting or two is deeply irresponsible. Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize winning author and regular columnist in one of the world's most prestigious publications. Her words and arguments matter. Yet she is dabbling in an argument of which the logical extension is to deny the millions of people food, shelter, medicine, and security--all because Mugabe attended a meeting.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, in case you missed it yesterday, The New York Times has reported on an independent panel's finding that the UN Development Program was not involved in any financial mismanagement in North Korea. Bluntly,

American allegations that North Korea duped the United Nations Development Program by diverting aid money for its own needs are not supported by any evidence, according to a lengthy external review released Monday.

There was no sign that millions of dollars were mismanaged, diverted elsewhere or unaccounted for, the report said, countering accusations made in early 2007 by the United States Mission to the United Nations. Although the report acknowledged that some information the panel had sought was unavailable, the review's conclusion was that the money had been "used for the purposes of the projects."

This conclusion is by now well-established, and has been corroborated by reports from multiple other major news outlets, so it is somewhat disturbing that Reuters chose a misleading phrase for its headline, describing the Nemeth report's findings as an "escape" from "major censure."

Let's be clear here. UNDP did not "escape" accusations of wrongdoing, because there was no wrongdoing to escape from. The allegations have been found to be without any substance whatsoever by not one, not two, but three investigative panels -- a point of which The Wall Street Journal apparently needs reminding -- and emanate nearly entirely from a thoroughly-debunked source, one whom the latest report characterizes as an "evasive witness," about whose "credibility and trustworthiness" the panel expressed "serious reservations." This was the shaky foundation on which the accusations of UNDP wrongdoing were built, and, after a series of thorough investigations, this foundation seems to have quite thoroughly collapsed.

What Mark earlier called the "scandal that never was" -- the U.S.'s accusation that the UN Development Program (UNDP) had illegally funneled millions of dollars in cash to the North Korean government -- can finally perhaps be put to bed. Already, a Senate investigative committee, as well as the UN's own auditing board, has exposed this charge as largely groundless, and now, the just-released report of an independent panel chaired by former Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth, confirms the extent to which this issue has been blown out of promotion by scandalmongers and UN-bashers.

The UNDP's operations with North Korea are difficult, but they are also vital to millions of North Koreans who benefit from the organization's services. Everywhere UNDP works, it must work with and under the rules of the host country's government. In North Korea's case, this entailed UNDP adopting sub-optimal policies on local staffing, the use of hard currency (as distinct from cash), and project oversight -- policies that had long been accepted by the U.S. government and are still being practiced by embassies and NGOs in the country. Nonetheless, when UNDP came under attack in March of 2007 for having operated under the policies that North Korea required, and recognizing the importance of ensuring that its funds were not being mismanaged, UNDP suspended its operations in North Korea.

Some of the accusations then leveled against UNDP came from a former employee who later claimed that he was being punished for having "blown the whistle" on the organization's supposedly irregular policies. The new Nemeth report, however, clarifies how well-established UNDP's operating procedures were in North Korea among U.S., NGO, and UN agencies and finds no UNDP complicity in North Korea's attempts to avoid sanctions. It also casts serious doubts on the credibility of the purported "whistleblower" who broke these accusations.

Meanwhile, and even though this particular individual's case did not prove to be substantiated, UNDP strengthened its whistleblower protection policy and beefed up accountability systems worldwide. As for whether or not UNDP should resume its programs helping the citizens of North Korea, that will be up to Member States to decide, when they discuss the Nemeth report later this month.

"Who will watch the peacekeepers?" asks a former UN internal investigator in a New York Times op-ed today. The issue at hand are allegations that a contingent of Pakistani peacekeepers in eastern DRC trafficked in arms for gold with a local militia. The allegations are serious, and at least one prominent human rights organization has taken issue with the way the United Nations has handled the situation.

But the op-ed today drives at a deeper question: what to do about miscreant peacekeepers in general? Right now, there are over 100,000 peacekeepers in 19 missions around the world. The vast majority are putting their lives on the line every day to help bring peace to the most troubled places on earth. But by the laws of averages, a certain percentage is going to be bad apples. The challenge, therefore, is to reduce the percentage of bad apples through strengthening procedures that ensure individual criminal accountability.

This is much easier said than done. One of the main hurdles is jurisdiction; where should Pakistani soldiers who commit crimes in DRC be held accountable? Principals of justice would demand that the crimes be tried locally, but most places where peacekeepers are deployed don't have functioning judiciaries.

The other option is to send them home. As of June 2007, there is a new "Model Memorandum of Understanding" between a troop contributing country and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations which obliges countries to forward allegations of improprieties to national authorities. In practice, though, once a peacekeeper is repatriated there is no way for the DPKO to force prosecutors of his home country to actually take on the case. To further complicate things, the growing demand for peacekeepers around the world means there would be grave consequences for missions around the world should the DPKO refuse troop contributions from a country that does not adequately punish its miscreant peacekeepers. With demand for peacekeepers so high, punishing a major troop contributing country for reneging on its agreement with the DPKO may simply not be feasible.

One possible solution to the jurisdiction problem may be the use of on-site courts-martial. In a landmark report on peacekeeper accountability, Jordanian UN Ambassador asked Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al-Hussein, (a former civilian peacekeeper) recommended this option because of its potential to demonstrate to the local population that peacekeepers do not enjoy immunity and do not go unpunished. (And because troops would still fall under national jurisdiction.) Member states and troop contributing countries have yet to fully get behind this idea. But to the extent that scandals like the current one in eastern DRC raise questions about the legitimacy of UN peacekeeping operations in the minds of locals, there must be stronger accountability mechanisms for miscreant peacekeepers.

(Image: Peacekeeping forces at a ceremony in East Timor. From Britannica. )

In his Washington Post op-ed this week, Jackson Diehl contends that John McCain's proposal to create a "League of Nations" does not actually originate with McCain himself:

In fact, a league of democracies is not a new but a very old idea. In the past decade it has been promoted mostly by Democrats, including several of Barack Obama's top foreign policy advisers.

Diehl then cites a number of various liberal thinkers who have proposed a "concert," a "community," an "alliance," or any other sort of coalition of democratic nations. The problem, however, is that Diehl does not fully consider the nuances of each of these particular ideas, specifically failing to distinguish between initiatives meant to be an association of democracies under the umbrella of the UN and those that merely mouth adherence to the UN system, but are more likely than not intended to supplant the global body. Senator McCain's proposal, it seems, falls under the latter category, and this, for reasons we've articulated before, is a very unproductive idea.

More broadly, though, the origins of the idea are ultimately moot. Whether Republicans or Democrats have endorsed a version of the concept will not matter much in the eyes of the rest of the world--and it is the 6.3 billion non-Americans who will likely be most affected by the creation of a new global body. Simply because an idea enjoys supposed bipartisan support (which McCain's "League of Democracies" is far from able to claim) does not mean that it should be taken up by both parties. Any idea should be assessed based not on those who support it, but on the merits of the idea itself. And in the case of an idea with so much potential to harm the global order, both parties would be wiser to abandon it entirely.

Robert Kaplan's NYT op-ed today is infuriating on a number of levels. Kaplan argues that the United States and a number of our European allies should consider mounting an invasion of Burma. He concedes that once such an an operation is mounted, the regime might fall so we should also be prepared to impose security afterward. Kaplan acknowledges that a Security Council resolution authorizing an invasion would likely be shot down by the recalcitrant Chinese, but proposes we send a coalitio