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Can the UN Do the Job?
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10105 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1993 |
1,121 Words |
| Author
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Kenneth L. Adelman
A former director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency, Kenneth L. Adelman is now vice president of the
Institute for Contemporary Studies and coauthor (with Norman
Augustine) of The Defense Revolution (ICS Press). |
The first response to any international crisis during the Clinton presidency will be to fling it into the United Nations. That may be the right initial response, but will it turn out right? When Hotspur's cousin boasted (in Henry IV, part 2) of his ability to "call spirits from the vasty deep," Hotspur snapped back: "Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?"
Likewise, the toss-it-to-the-UN response may be fine in theory but unlikely to work fine in practice. That is mainly because the United Nations itself is fine in theory but not so in practice. For the Clinton administration to expect the United Nations to carry the load traditionally borne by the major powers would be as Samuel Johnson once quipped about second marriage--a triumph of hope over experience.
That includes a half-century of experience. That may not be fair, since the first 45 years of UN ineffectiveness can be attributed to the superpower standoff. Yet, that standoff having stood down, the United Nations' deliverable goods have not been plentiful.
One need not take just my word for it, though I struggled mightily to make the United Nations more effective from 1981 to 1983, as Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick's deputy. Ours was a quixotic and disheartening quest.
Rather, take the word of those toiling for the United Nations in the world's hot spots today. Ambassador Ismat Kittani, the UN special representative, on his very first day in Somalia criticized the poor job that UN special agencies had done there. Kittani was appointed because his predecessor, Algerian envoy Mohamed Sahnoun, had complained even more vehemently about the turtlelike pace of UN activities. He was dismissed for his sentiments, on target though they were.
Meanwhile, in ex-Yugoslavia the disaster is as wrenching. Though the United Nations has mounted the largest peacekeeping and aid operation in its history, the effort has been as botched as has been UN diplomacy.
'EXTRAORDINARILY SLOW'
Again, one need not just take my word for it. Even mild-man-nered and mild-worded Cyrus Vance, onetime U.S. secretary of state and now UN special mediator on Yugoslavia, deplored the United Nations' latest military deployment for being "extraordinarily slow."
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