UN Gone Astray Due to 'Broken Moral Compass,' Author Says
CNSNews.com | January 18, 2005 | Julie Stahl
 

Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - The United Nations has strayed from its original mission of safeguarding the international community against aggression and is unable to discern between victim and aggressor worldwide because it is guided by a broken "moral compass," said expert Dr. Dore Gold.

Gold, who served as Israel's ambassador to the U.N. from mid-1997 until the end of 1999, is author of the recently released book Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos.

In the book, he says that the U.N. has essentially strayed from its original moral underpinnings, creating global chaos in the face of international security threats instead of worldwide order.

"During the period of my ambassadorship, I had a gnawing sense that something was very wrong with the U.N., that its moral compass was essentially broken," Gold told the Cybercast News Service in a recent interview.

"It was unable to establish in international struggles who were the aggressors in the world and who were the victims of aggression," he said.

"Israel particularly suffered from this because frequently, Israel had to face two dozen resolutions in the U.N. General Assembly, and yet, there were countries involved in massive abuse of human rights that weren't even mentioned," he stated.

"The 1990s was supposed to be the decade of the United Nations," Gold said.

From 1945 until 1991, Cold War rivalries between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union essentially paralyzed the Security Council because they could neutralize each other's veto power, Gold said.

"But once the Cold War was over and the Soviet Union disintegrated, it was expected that the U.N. would be at the hub of the New World Order that President George H. W. Bush was trying to create.

"But rather than being a force for international order in the 1990s, I found that the U.N. with its broken moral compass was a force for international chaos, and that's really the theme of the book," he said.

In his 300-page book, Gold includes maps and original U.N. documentation, which he writes presents "stark evidence how the U.N. has ignored mass murder, propped up dictators, emboldened terrorists and otherwise betrayed its mission to protect the world's security."

It is this abandonment of morality, for example, that forced President Bush to circumvent the U.N. and establish what Gold calls the coalition of the willing, pulling together allies to confront Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Reforms

Because the problems in the world body are rooted in substantive moral issues and not merely structural ones, planned reforms to the world body won't enable the U.N. to deal effectively with security issues in the world, Gold said.

Kofi Annan has been working on reforms at the U.N. since he assumed the role of secretary-general in December 1996, concentrating on organizational, structural and management type changes.

Already under heavy fire for apparent U.N. mismanagement of the oil-for-food program in Iraq, Annan said on Monday that he was making changes in his management team. A number of key people in his staff were leaving, providing him with an opportunity "to rethink the team and remake the team," Annan said.

Following the issuing of a U.N. report by a special panel on security issues last month, Annan said that it offered the U.N. "a unique opportunity to refashion and renew our institutions."

One of the suggested security reforms is that membership in the Security Council, where resolutions are binding, be broadened.

But Gold said that the problems at the U.N. are much deeper.

"The problem with the U.N. is not structural," Gold said.

"It's not a question of whether the U.N. Security Council will have 24 members instead of 15 members, or whether now India sits as a permanent member and not just the original permanent five members from the Second World War. The real problems of the U.N. are problems of substance," Gold said.

"The United Nations was originally conceived by the staff around [U.S.] President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be a body that would nip aggression in the bud," he said.

According to Gold, there was no moral neutrality in the original U.N. of 1945. Any country wanting to attend the founding meeting in San Francisco had to be an ally of the U.S. and declare war on one of the axis powers.

And even if there were member states like Josef Stalin's Soviet Union, which did not cling to the same values of international justice, they would many times "acquiesce to the leadership of the U.S., Great Britain and the democracies," he said.

When it came time for a vote, for example on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia would abstain rather than vote against it.

"So it was clear that the leadership in the early U.N. was in the hands of the United States. That slipped over the years, and by the time you get to the 1960s and 1970s, many pro-Soviet countries in Asia and Africa are dominating the U.N. [and] its voting pattern, and they are adopting resolutions that totally twist the morality of the original organization," he said.

Currently, the 56-member Organization of Islamic Conference, coupled with Non-Aligned Movement members, constitutes an automatic majority in the General Assembly.

"Human rights are no longer defined chiefly as individual rights to liberty, but rather as collective rights for economic equality," he said.

"Alternatively, the United Nations begins to adopt a series of resolutions, which justify the use of violence in colonial struggles and later becomes a kind of general form of approval for the use of violence in any attempt for a country or a group of people to rid themselves of 'alien domination.' And that really became a license in the U.N. for the growth of terrorism," he said.

Following 9/11, he said, the U.N. adopted Security Council Resolution 1373, which took a strong stand against terrorism by al Qaeda but not against any other terrorist organizations recognized in Europe or the U.S.

That same year, Syria -- which had been on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations since the late 1970s -- was elected by a two-thirds majority to sit on the Security Council.

"It's no wonder that Syria internalized the message that whatever it was doing in terms of terrorism was clearly not a violation of U.N. standards," he said.

According to Gold, fixing the moral compass of the U.N. would take at least a decade.

"For this reason, I believe that the only parties that can really intervene in a global crisis are a coalition of the willing led by the United States," Gold said.

"Until the U.N. can first of all generate new resolutions that clean off the books its past support for terrorism and create an effective body that can discern who is the aggressor in an international crisis, the U.N. Security Council has little it can contribute to the kinds of security threats that the Western alliance faces in the years ahead," he added.