Matthew Lee, the UN blogger and author of Innercity Press, and I square off on Blogging Heads TV. We discuss Kurt Waldheim's legacy, the so-called "Cash for Kim" brouhaha, Darfur, UN Peacekeeping and the prospects of United Nations reform. Enjoy.

The Citizens for Global Solutions blog points me to this recent speech by State Department Legal Advisor John Bellinger III on the United States and International Law. In one portion, Bellinger discusses his government's relationship with the International Criminal Court.

Over the past couple of years we have worked hard to demonstrate that we share the main goals and values of the Court. We did not oppose the Security Council's referral of the Darfur situation to the ICC, and have expressed our willingness to consider assisting the ICC Prosecutor's Darfur work should we receive an appropriate request. We supported the use of ICC facilities for the trial of Charles Taylor, which began this week here in The Hague. These steps reflect our desire to find practical ways to work with ICC supporters to advance our shared goals of promoting international criminal justice.

The ICC's three open war crimes investigations—Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congos—are all in places that the united states has played a leading role in peace, justice, and reconciliation efforts. Bellinger's speech suggests that at least some in the US government may be finding that the ICC is, in fact, complimenting American foreign policy objectives in these places.

Earlier this week, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced that his office will open an investigation into suspected war crimes in the Central African Republic, where a civil war peaked in 2002 and 2003. The war was marked by terrible sexual violence, and according to the Prosecutor this is the first ICC investigation in which the number of rape victims exceeds the number of murders.

With the new investigation in CAR, says The Economist, the International Criminal Court is hitting its stride:

"This is the fourth formal investigation launched by the court since it was set up in The Hague five years ago. Many, including some of its original backers, have complained about the slowness of its procedures. But it has passed some notable milestones. It has issued international arrest warrants against its first two suspects in Sudan and five rebel leaders in Uganda. Its first trial--of Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese rebel leader--is due later this year. Many a highly placed thug, it is hoped, is beginning to sleep less easily at night."

The Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs and WorldPublicOpinion.org released a new poll affirming public support of the United Nations in the United States and around the world. Like similar polls in recent years, the new poll challenges the conventional wisdom about how one thinks the American public views the United Nations. For example, the poll asked respondents in 14 countries whether they would support "giving the UN the power to regulate the international arms trade." By a large majority (60%), Americans were in favor. Also, when asked whether publics believe there should be a standing peacekeeping force "selected, trained, and commanded" by the United Nations, a whopping 72% of Americans agreed. Publics in other countries, such as France, South Korea and Peru gauged equally strong sentiment for these proposals, as well as giving the UN the authority to investigate violations of human rights.

Contrary to how one might assume Americans regard their country's relationship with the United Nations, it would seem that even in relatively controversial areas like regulating the arms trade and establishing a standing "international" army, Americans are remarkably pro-UN.

Last week BBC news ran a five part special report, "Keeping the Peace," exploring various aspects of UN peacekeeping. The final installment contains and interesting Q and A with John Bolton and the head of UN peacekeeping Jean-Marie Geuhenno, who discuss the political utility of peacekeeping missions. In a second installment, reporter Patrick Jackson speaks with a number of South Asian soliders about their experiences overseas. Collectively, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, make up 40% of all UN peacekeepers deployed around the globe. As Jackson points out, UN missions are highly sought after assignments for these soldiers. (Not surprisingly, however, the soldiers tend to prefer deployments to Cyprus over Sudan.)

Yet another installment explores changing peacekeeping tactics forged in Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti. In the last couple of years, these missions saw a new a new assertiveness in UN peacekeeping strategies that the Dutch General commanding peacekeepers in Eastern Congo described as the difference between being neutral and being impartial. "Being neutral means that you stand there and you say 'Well, I have nothing to do with it,'" Maj Gen Patrick Cammaert explained to Patrick Jackson. "While being impartial means that you stand there, you judge the situation as it is and you take charge." The whole series is well worth a read.

As Matt reported below, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee formally approved Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad's nomination for United States Ambassador to the United Nations. During his hearing two weeks ago, Khalilzad offered welcome testimony affirming the centrality of the United Nations to American foreign policy objectives. You can read Khalilzad's full statement here and UN Foundation President Tim Wirth's enthusiastic endorsement of Khalilzad here.

Highlights from Khalilzad's testimony are below the fold.

The Vital Role of the UN

The United Nations is an important and valuable institution. Historically, the challenge of creating an effective collective security organization has bedeviled mankind. The United Nations, which was a signal achievement in the great period of international institution building after the Second World War, stands as the most successful collective security body in history. No other such organization has been able to undertake peace enforcement actions comparable to the one in Korea in 1950, to lead scores of peacekeeping missions over the course of decades, to achieve consensus on endorsing such strong actions as the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 or the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001. In light of this record, I agree with the view of the Gingrich-Mitchell report that an effective United Nations is in America’s interest. As one of the principal architects of the United Nations, the United States placed at the foundation of the U.N. certain fundamental purposes and values – preserving peace, promoting progress, and advocacy of human rights. It is therefore vital for the United States to enable this institution to make the greatest possible contribution to advance those founding objectives.

[snip]

At the same time, the United Nations has limitations, resulting from the nature of the U.N. Charter, the failure of the members of the Security Council to come to agreements on all issues, and the unwillingness or inability of the U.N. system to confront the problems of corruption and inefficiency. When members of the Security Council cannot come to agreement, action is stymied or watered down. The organization, formed at a time when direct aggression was the principal security concern, has not always found effective means to deal with aggression undertaken through insurgency or terrorism. It has also struggled to cope with new realities that put respect for state sovereignty in tension with the imperative to address security threats emanating from failed states or transnational networks or the humanitarian consequences of massive violations of human rights inflicted by governments on their own peoples. The U.N.'s actions have sometimes been driven by coalitions with a myopic focus on a single issue or applying double-standards in judging the actions of states, particularly in the area of human rights. Also, the United Nations itself has had recent internal failures, including the Oil-for-Food scandal, instances of peacekeeping forces sexually abusing members of the local populations that they are supposed to protect, and weaknesses in management and accountability.

The challenge for the international community is to strengthen the United Nations in those areas where it has proven effective and to address the shortcomings in areas where its performance has been poor. If confirmed, I will put the weight of U.S. influence toward this end. Working with the representatives of other countries and the Secretary General, I will seek to increase the contribution of the United Nations to addressing the central security issues of our times and to make the U.N. itself a more effective institution through needed reforms.

Mark Lagon, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, has teamed with the Stanley Foundation's David Shorr in a paper that addresses American expectations of the United Nations. The joint report, titled How to Keep from Overselling or Underestimating the United Nations is part of the Stanley Foundation's new series Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide. You can read the pdf here.

In the new issue of the World Policy Journal, Ian Williams offers the final word on the often discussed, but little understood, Oil For Food program. The article is a study in how a small number of determined right-wing pundits in the United States turned their vendetta against Kofi Annan into an easily swallowed media narrative about rampant corruption at the UN.

You can read the entire piece (as a pdf) here. Some highlights are below the fold. And as always, for more information on the program, visit Oil for Food Facts.

For most of the UN staff, the OFF program was about feeding Iraqis. For Washington it was about starving the regime of funds for rearmament. It needs reiteration that in both contexts it was hugely successful. By the end, the program was providing essential food and medical supplies for over 80 percent of the Iraqi population, and, as was subsequently proved by both Hans Blix's UN Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission inspectors and their American successors, it was also successful in stopping Iraqi rearmament…

How Success Turned to Scandal
Within a year of the Iraq invasion, the anti- UN media in the United States began to trumpet the "UN Oil for Food Scandal," which was, according to the neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, "the biggest financial scandal in the history of the world." Some of the wilder pundits claimed it involved the mismanagement o "hundreds of billions of dollars." The real target of the attacks was the United Nations itself, and, especially, the reputation of the secretary general…

The chorus grew louder following the leak of a letter in which Annan cautioned the U.S.-led coalition against a frontal assault on Fallujah. Fox television's Bill O'Reilly declared that "it's becoming increasingly clear that UN chief Kofi Annan is hurting the USA." On November 24, 2004, the National Review declared "Annan should either resign, if he is honorable, or be removed, if he is not." And, on December 1, 2004, writing in the Wall Street Journal, Senator Norm Coleman called for Annan's resignation...

[snip]

[Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's] team found no evidence that the Secretary General had in anyway been involved in the procurement scandal but held that he had not treated these allegations seriously enough. Annan had asked for the advice of his(U.S.- appointed) undersecretary general for management, and of his undersecretary general for legal affairs, who told him that since he had no contact with the procurement process, he did not need to take further action. And, though Volcker countered that he should not have believed his son and authorized a major inquiry, the published report effectively cleared Annan and the UN of the vast majority of the corruption charges leveled by the conservative media.

In today's confirmation hearing for Zalmay Khalilzad, nominated to be the next United States ambassador to the United Nations, a number of senators pointed out a problematic contradiction of American policy toward the UN. At the Security Council, the United States and other members advocate sending more and more UN peacekeepers to global hot spots. But back in Washington, the White House is proposing to slash its financial contributions to UN peacekeeping operations.

At the hearing, the highest ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar, explained this dilemma well:

...the United Nations remains a key component of U.S. foreign policy. In particular, U.N. peacekeeping missions are a cost-effective method of enforcing peace and helping shattered societies re-build. The ability of U.N. peacekeeping missions to be a force-multiplier was underscored by a 2006 General Accounting Office analysis of the U.N.'s peacekeeping mission in Haiti. The GAO concluded: "The U.N. budgeted $428 million for the first 14 months of the mission. A U.S. operation of the same size and duration would have cost an estimated $876 million." The report noted that the U.S. contribution to the Haiti peacekeeping mission was $116 million - roughly one-eighth the cost of a unilateral American operation.

With this in mind, I was perplexed to see that the Administration's FY 2008 budget request asks for approximately $300 million less for peacekeeping than in the previous year. Little evidence was presented to explain why the current sixteen missions would suddenly require less funding than in previous years. Moreover, additional peacekeeping missions may arise in Chad and Darfur, further straining the peacekeeping budget.

Something has to give. In the past year the United States and other members have voted to increase UN peacekeeping operations around the world by over 50%. If the United States does not pony up cash for these peacekeeping operations (which it could have vetoed) future peacekeeping operations, including a potential deployment to Darfur, will have a hard time getting off the ground.

David Bosco, one of my favorite writers at Foreign Policy, reviews (pdf) the historian Paul Kennedy's Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Bosco is working in a book about the Security Council and is one of the more insightful UN analysts out there. I have not read Paul Kennedy's book (yet) but Bosco's generally favorable review certainly piques my interest.

Gallup released the latest installment in a long-runinng series of polls that take the temperature of Americans' attitude toward the United Nations. On the basic question of job performance, the United Nations has yet to recover from the sharp drop it experienced in the run up to the Iraq war, when a large majority of Americans thought the UN was acting against American interests and trying to prevent the war. Still, as the poll showes, most Americans want the United Nations to have a robust role in setting global policies.

You can view the entire poll here.

Watching the President's comments this week complaining "about [UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's] approach to the crisis, and for holding the view of many leaders [at the G-8 summit] that Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah should ceasefire and hash out their differences," one might think that the President is upset about the role that the UN is playing in the current crisis in the Middle East. Nothing could be further from the truth. Monday afternoon White House Press Secretary Tony Snow clarified the President's position saying that he "has been supportive from the very start of the U.N. mission to the region."

That three-person UN mission, which includes Vijay Nambiar, the Secretary-General's Special Political Adviser, has arrived in Israel, after "discussing concrete ideas" in meetings with the Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament and Prime Minister Fuad Siniora in an effort to diffuse the crisis in the region. Over the next few days, they may return to Lebanon and, perhaps, travel to Syria, Jordan, and the occupied Palestinian territories before returning to brief the UN Security Council. This team's itinerary and access, along with the level of international support, has once again clearly shown both the ability of the United Nations to perform tasks that no one nation could on its own and its indispensability as the primary instrument for international cooperation, peace, and prosperity.

Wisely, as Tony Snow said on Monday, the Bush Administration has supported the UN mission from the beginning. Statements to that effect have been made by several members of the Administration over the last few days. Secretary Rice, during a press briefing in Germany on July 13, called the Secretary-General's mission "the best opportunity now for de-escalation of this crisis." During the same briefing, she spoke to the UN's central role in formulating a practical solution for the Middle East, noting Security Council resolution 1559 that oversaw "the withdrawal of Syrian forces, and that has tried to bring together an international consensus ... about a road ahead for Lebanon ... including the disarmament of militias." Referring to the discussions among the G8, she said:

"Everybody is now very focused on trying to help the U.N. Secretary General's mission work. And I think we don't want to send confusing signals. The kind of 'too many cooks in the kitchen' problem is one that we want to avoid, because the Secretary General has all the right mandates to deal with this issue. I might note, too, that as to the Gaza situation, of course, the U.N. is a member of the Quartet. And so the U.N. Secretary General I think has all the right mandates. Let's put all of our efforts behind making his effort work."

National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley echoed Secretary Rice's statements at the same briefing:

"We hope that the U.N. mission the Secretary talked about can be a framework for going forward, can do a number of things -- can increase the pressure on Hezbollah and Syria, who are going to be key in winding this down and getting these hostages back to Israel; can be a vehicle for strengthening the [Lebanese] government and help them ride out this very difficult path; and finally, to be a framework for avoiding further escalation."

At later press briefings in Russia and on the morning show circuit over the weekend, Secretary Rice and President Bush remained committed to supporting the Secretary-General's mission to the Middle East. In Russia, Secretary Rice said:

"This is really a time for diplomacy, but it's not just diplomacy of talking and talking and talking. It's diplomacy of moving toward a goal of using the diplomatic vehicles -- in fact, in the case of the road map, the international vehicle; in the case of the 1559, the Security Council vehicle -- that we have established over the last couple of years, and using that now. This is the time to use those vehicles to get results, because those vehicles are going to give us the best outcome for a permanent peace."

President Bush: "The United Nations is playing a vital role in Iraq -- they assisted in last January's elections, and the negotiations for the constitution, and in the recent constitutional referendum. And at the request of the Iraqi government, the U.N. Security Council unanimously approved a resolution extending the mandate of the multinational force in Iraq through 2006."

From President Bush's speech at Fort Bragg, N.C. 6/28/05:

"In January 2005, more than 8 million Iraqi men and women voted in elections that were free and fair and took place on time.... In the past year, the international community has stepped forward with vital assistance. Some 30 nations have troops in Iraq, and many others are contributing nonmilitary assistance. The United Nations is in Iraq to help Iraqis write a constitution and conduct their next elections."

From President Bush's press conference, 5/31/05:

"[T]he reason I picked Bolton is he's a no-nonsense kind of fellow who can get things done. And we need to get something done in the United Nations. This is an organization which is important. It can help a lot in terms of the democracy movement; it can help deal with conflict and civil war."

From President Bush's press conference, 4/28/05:

"I think the United Nations is important. As a matter of fact, I'll give you an example. Today I met with the United Nations representative to Syria, Mr. Larsen. He's an impressive fellow. Now, he's delivered -- to Lebanon, excuse me -- he's delivered a very strong message to the Syrian leader, though, that the world expects President Assad to withdraw not only his military forces, but his intelligence services, completely from Lebanon.

And now he is in charge of following up to make sure it happens. I think that's a very important and useful role for the United Nations to play. We have played a role. France has played a role. A lot of nations have played roles. But the United Nations has done a very good job in Syria -- with Syria in Lebanon of making sure that the world expects the Lebanese elections to be free in May, without Syrian influence. He's an impressive fellow. I applaud him for his hard work.

But there's an example of why I think the United Nations is an important body."

Assistant Secretary of State Kim Holmes Speaks About the Bush Administration's Views on United Nations Reform:

"I believe the United Nations works best when its member states and the United States work together. This requires U.S. leadership. Not all countries may agree with everything the U.S. espouses. But most would agree, I would maintain, that the UN can accomplish very important things when the United States and the member states of the United Nations act as partners."

Full Text (PDF file)

In a Washington Times piece on the John Bolton nomination, Secretary of State Rice is quoted as saying, "The United Nations "is not an outpost in New York, it's an extremely important instrument of American policy, and I think [Mr. Bolton is] going to be great."

From the BBC: "In a speech in London, Mr Annan said the UN had an important role to play in fighting terror and poverty. Earlier, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair strongly endorsed Mr Annan, calling him a "tremendous unifier".

Secretary Rice, from a Q&A in Paris: "The United States is a founding member of the United Nations. We want the United Nations to be strong and active and effective.... The United Nations has been critical in providing the mandate for the coalition forces that are now in Iraq as a part of a multinational force there to support the Iraqi people."