Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2007, pages 36-37

United Nations Report

New Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon Will Soon Find Out What It’s All About

By Ian Williams

SHORTLY AFTER taking office, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon mentioned that the Israeli-Palestine question was a crucial one and that he wanted to get the Quartet on the case. Needless to say, that gave AIPAC the jitters, so Israel’s lobbying behemoth asked unconfirmed former U.S. Ambassador John Bolton how worrying it was. For once Bolton was quite blasé, saying it was early yet, and the new secretary-general had to find his feet. But he was gracious enough to point out that he thought it was a mistake to have included the U.N. in the Quartet in the first place.

There, of course, his prejudices as an American unilateralist and die-hard Israel supporter converged. The United Nations represents international law—indeed it makes international law—and Israel has never liked much of its product since the one decision it really appreciated, the General Assembly resolution to partition the Palestine mandate into two states. (Ironically, Israel’s friends now fervently repeat the mantra that General Assembly decisions are non-binding, tending to overlook the big one that created the state.)

Washington is a recent convert to this idea, but President Bill Clinton and the current Bush administration both essentially bought the AIPAC idea that the U.N. is a now-and-then player in the Middle East—to be brought in when necessary and dismissed when inconvenient.

As former foreign minister of South Korea, with its own problems and at the opposite edge of a huge continent, Ban Ki-Moon could be forgiven for wondering why everyone makes such a fuss about the problem. After all, neither Buddhists, Hindus nor Confucians see much holy about the land.

However, the pressure of his new position will soon bring it to the forefront of his attention. And then, since he appears to be of a legalistic and formal frame of mind, he will find that he is supposed to implement a host of previous resolutions on the issue—and that almost every member state except the U.S. and Israel will tell him that this is a keystone issue for any hope of peace in the region. Even Tony Blair, who on most issues is very close to President Bush, differs from him on this. It is clear that peace in the region hinges on a settlement of the Israel-Palestine question. Other regional issues may still need a lot of work afterward, but that work is certainly wasted if the core problem is not solved first.

However, notwithstanding that body of U.N. resolutions—242, 338 and the others—there will be tussles with the organization. For example, according to U.N. insiders, Terje Roed-Larsen, Kofi Annan’s former special representative, continually pressed for a more pro-Israel stance, and probably would have been more successful than he was were it not for strong counter-pressures within the organization.

It is certainly disturbing that Ban Ki-Moon seems to be allowing President Bush to nominate one of the most important positions in the organization, the under secretary-general for political affairs, even as Ban boosts the power and influence of the post to include crucial political aspects of the Peacekeeping portfolio.

Under the circumstances the rumored appointee, Burton Lynn Pascoe, currently U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, is not as bad as one would expect from this administration—at least it was not John Bolton! Pascoe is a foreign service professional deeply aware of the rest of the world. A three-year spell in Taiwan and knowledge of Mandarin, time in Central Asia and China, and you begin to see why Ban could feel he could appoint such a nominee even if the nomination came with an implied big stick. One cannot help wondering how the Chinese will regard Pascoe’s Taipei stint, but since they were eminently pragmatic about working with Bolton, a former Taiwanese lobbyist, they should be able to live with this one.

Pascoe is too sophisticated to thank Bush publicly for his appointment, as did Christopher Burnham, the previous under secretary general for management. But one cannot help thinking that he will keep his fingers crossed when he takes the international civil servant’s oath. On the crucial Middle Eastern issue, any American in such a prominent position who follows the Secretariat’s historical stands is in effect abandoning a political career in Washington, short of a substantial foreign policy revolution there.

If Ban Ki-Moon thinks that putting an American in such jobs will insulate the organization from criticism, he should consider that American presidential patronage nominees have been in charge of U.N. management for 15 years—a decade and a half of unrelenting American media and congressional criticism of U.N. management.

Personalities apart, it is not good for either the United Nations or the United States to have an American identified with the current White House (or, for that matter, any previous administration) heading such a crucial department.

For all the wacko complaints from Congress and the heartland, Washington actually has always had far more say in the U.N. than is good for the organization, and while on one level such senior appointments would line up perceptions with reality, it would reap no benefits for anyone.

For a rational U.S. foreign policy, a seemingly independent and globally respected organization carrying out American policies provides a perfect firewall. The advantage of the U.N. for rational American policy is not only that it provides a global legion of Sepoys to carry out duties that would swamp the U.S. military, but that the organization can claim international standing for its action. Putting an American in such a strategic position puts a big inky Washington thumbprint on everything the organization does.

Indeed, Tony Blair’s recent close proximity to U.S. positions probably counted against appointing a British candidate for peacekeeping as well. Instead, Blair’s personal nominee, Sir John Holmes, became head of the Office of Humanitarian Affairs. The job, while under the constant glare of publicity, is not as politically sensitive—and, it must be said, Sir John does not have starkly obvious qualifications for it. British sources say Blair insisted that Holmes was the only name put forward for a high-ranking U.N. job. As a Blair nominee, one presumes that Holmes also shares the much more pro-Israel stance of his prime minister rather than the British Foreign Office’s traditionally more Arabist position.

Mixed News on Bolton Replacement

On top of all this, the impending appointment of current U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad as Washington’s replacement for Bolton is mixed news. Khalilzad takes his directions from Cheney, and is a longstanding supporter of the various adventurist neocon positions from the time of Reagan’s administration until now. His position in Iraq, and previously in Afghanistan, was almost as much viceroy as envoy.

While he almost certainly shares the neocons’ bedrock disregard for international law and the U.N., he does not have Bolton’s baggage of a decades-long record of obsessive fulmination against the organization.

Cosmetically, as a Muslim of Third World origins, and with some more social and diplomatic graces than his predecessor, Khalilzad probably will do a better job of advancing the White House agenda than did Bolton—which, one must admit, may be a mixed blessing. Do we really want a more sophisticated and effective exponent of this particular agenda?

Even so, Khalilzad is likely to be less viscerally anti-Muslim than his predecessor.

He is, of course, a frontline warrior against terror—and he should know, since he was one of those who put the puff in blowback originally. He was a major proponent of supporting the mujaheddin and Taliban in Afghanistan in the war against the Soviets—a miscalculation which led directly to the World Trade Center, although one does not hear much about that nowadays, since everyone knows the War on Terror is being fought in the streets of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

Indeed, while on Iraq, so desperate was the press corps for any information from the Hermit Kingdom that Ban Ki-Moon has been ruling hitherto in the U.N., that they read unduly deep significance into his, admittedly ambiguous, remarks on the sordid execution of Saddam Hussain, in which Ban basically said that the former Iraqi president had committed many crimes, and that each country had the right to execute if it so desired.

It should have given him a clue that many of the media that gleefully pointed out his mistake were hardly death penalty abolitionists themselves. At his first major press conference in the New Year, Ban tried to square the circle, and say “the trend” of international law and practice was against executions, that he welcomed this trend, and that he had appealed to the Iraqi government not to execute Saddam’s co-accused.

He should note. For many American media, the U.N. secretary-general is always wrong—the only question being what he is wrong about on any given day. And we can be sure that for them, if he follows U.N. policy, he will always be wrong on the Middle East.

Ian Williams is working on a book about U.N.-Haters in the U.S., and has a blog at <www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com>. His last book was Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776.

< Prev		Next >