UN Reform Issue Spotlight -- Responding to Genocide Posted by David Shorr

With all the highly politicized wordsmithing of the pre-UN Summit negotiations, for some issues it's hard to tell whether the text of the resulting Outcome Document represents a step forward, backward, or sideways. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrestled with this problem in his Sunday column on genocide (full disclosure, I provided Kristof with modest help). He gives an almost schizophrenically mixed verdict, calling the statement on genocide (paragraphs #138-40) both "diluted" and "immensely important."Can both be true?

Of course the proper test regarding genocide or ethnic cleansing is action in response to particular campaigns of atrocities. Kristof's critique of the Bush Administration is that while it has called the carnage in Darfur by its rightful name, genocide, it has failed to follow through by pushing for sanctions or a no-fly zone.

So then what's the point of even having a UN statement on genocide? If the most important debates over how to respond to genocide always arise in a particular context (a specific place, perpetrators), they also take place against the backdrop of a broader debate over principles. The most contentious issues of multilateralism are at root about sovereignty -- either encroachment into a country's domestic matters or its obligation to act internationally, or both. For the issue of humanitarian intervention, a blue-ribbon commission in 2001 introduced the idea of the Responsibility to Protect -- which instead of solely granting outsiders a right to intervene, talked about a shift in the onus of protecting the basic right to safety from domestic to international governments if the local authorities prove unwilling or unable.

The statement in the Outcome Document essentially ratifies this concept, and therein lies its significance. For many countries that are either relatively weak internationally or have problematic human rights record, the purpose of the UN is to protect sovereign nations from outside interference in internal affairs. These sovereigntist governments have two concerns -- one valid, and one less so.

We need only look at the post-invasion rationalization of the Iraq War to see how powerful countries can abuse this principle. Recall how Sen. Pat Roberts said the war was justified on humanitarian grounds, or the administration's emphasis on Saddam's mass graves, dating largely from the late 1980s or early 1990s. Human Rights Watch President Ken Roth debunked this premise saying, "'better late than never' is not a justification for humanitarian intervention."

Hopefully the UN summit statement will lay to rest one of the great red herrings of this debate: the idea that humanitarian intervention will be used in cases of less drastic human rights violations. The statement addresses this issue with the unwieldy though precise phrase: "responsibility to protect population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.

When Bush Administration officials explained their negotiating position to me, they emphasized that the responsibility to protect should be a moral obligation rather than a legal one. But a closer reading reveals an effort to cast it as a choice rather than any kind of obligation. Now that the statement is part of the UN record, hopefully the larger principles rather than the finer points of language will help shape future decisions about genocide.

What's Next for the UN? 10 Possibilities Posted by Suzanne Nossel

After an embarrassing fizzle of a global summit intended to tackle UN reform, the U.S. and the world organization need to figure out what's next.  Ideas are proliferating:  Ivo Daalder at Americans Abroad suggests replacing the global body with a comparable forum whose membership would be limited to longstanding democracies.  The Wall Street Journal editorial page wants to put Turtle Bay in trusteeship to be run by Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker.

Before drowning UN HQ into the East River, its worth keeping in mind the many things the UN does well (here's a list of 10 important ones).   But its also time for some new thinking on the UN's shortcomings and what might be done to tackle them.  Here are 10 ideas - some serious, some slightly fanciful.   Please add in your own:

1.  Next time, get the Heads of State together without no low-level pre-meetings - It's the endless pre-meetings of middling delegates where all the good ideas seem to get reduced to the proposition-of-the-resolution-of-the-committee-of-the-commission.  While plenty of world leaders may prove just as obstinate and obfuscatory as their underlings, my bet is you'd have a more serious group in the room.  Have the heads of state meet privately for, say, 3 days, divided into committees they would volunteer for that could take real decisions.

2.  Refuse to participate in the UN's Human Rights Council unless and until its done right - The Summit did not kill the idea of a bona fide human rights council that would make decisions based on legitimate criteria and be comprised of members with proven commitments to human rights.  But it came close by kicking all the details into the General Assembly, where a majority is likely to resist such reforms.  But if the US, Europeans, Australians and others refuse to take part, any human rights mechanism will be relegated to a sideshow.   This is an issue worth forcing.

3.  Campaign for Bill Clinton as Secretary General - This notion has been swirling around for years, and this week's landmark Clinton Global Initiative will only boost it.   It makes enormous sense:  Clinton would command a level of respect from leaders well beyond what any administrator or former foreign minister could muster.  His influence with the US alone would make his candidacy a win for the rest of the world.  Achieving this when Annan's term ends in December 2006 would necessitate a shift in the usual regional order of candidacies, but that's not out of the question.  After this week's debacle, the world should be in search of a savior for the UN.  If it really wants UN reform, the Administration ought to start lobbying on this one (an interesting sideline would involve implications for HRC's presidential bid . . .)

4.    Form an Americas Regional Group - The UN's regional group system (important for candidacies and elections to virtually all UN committees) is both anachronistic and simply weird.  Rather than being paired with its neighbors in the Americas, the US is group with Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a few other strays in a Western European and Other Group.  Two big deterrents to possible realignment are Cuba and Venezuela.  But all sorts of interesting things might happen if we cast lots with Canada and the Latins:  closer relationships with allies like Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Brazil; better ability to influence the UN's developing world blocs, strong Western sway within at least 2 UN regional groups . . .

5.  Offer to Fund the Staff Buyout - The Summit ducked on Annan's proposal to offer a one-time buyout to get rid of dead wood within the UN's staff, passing the issue to the General Assembly.  The U.S., perhaps with a private donor, should put forward a big pool of money goodies (visas, eligibility for US benefit programs like social security) to support this program, provided the GA approves it.  If the offer is attractive enough, staff demand will help propel passage of the program.  Those who have worked at the UN know how key an element of management reform this is.

6.  Create standing UN capabilities for peacekeeping and peacebuilding - I can hear you now:  how can you argue that an organization as dysfunctional as the UN merits standing capabilities?!?   As it turns out, the UN's doing a lot better at peacekeeping and things like post-conflict reconstruction and election running than it is at, say administering sanctions and reforming itself.   The UN's capacity has grown significantly in these areas, as has the US's and the world's dependence on it.   But without standing capabilities, the UN will continue to face the problem it did when the US wanted its help in Iraq:  inability to attract donations of sufficient qualified personnel.

7.  Establish a Peacekeeping Training Center with US Backing - Related to the above, but potentially more palatable:  The US would establish a program, seeking financial and in-kind contributions by others, to train several thousand peacekeepers from around the world each year.  Trainees would then be seconded by their home governments for UN service for some fixed period of time, though formally remaining on the personnel rosters of their own militaries.  This would improve the quality of UN peacekeepers, give an incentive to more countries to participate, ensure a ready flow of qualified personnel, and give the US a measure of control over the whole effort.

8.   Make clear that the US views the UN as critical to its efforts on terrorism and WMD - The Summit took some tentative steps toward a global treaty on terror, and threw up its hands when it came to proliferation.  Whereas many of the preliminary reports that fed into the reform effort highlighted these top US foreign policy priorities, the US itself has sidelined the UN in its fights against terror and WMD.  While Bush talked about terror and proliferation during his Summit address last week, the Administration has viewed the UN as too weak and untrustworthy to play a key role and, partly as a result, the UN hasn't stepped up to the plate.  While these fights cannot be outsourced to the UN, there's no reason not to convince the membership that the organization's contributions are taken seriously.

9.  Air UNTV - One way to make the UN more transparent and accountable would be to introduce CSPAN-style gavel-to-gavel coverage of the tedium of UN committee work, broadcast via satellite worldwide.   The cameras might cut down on the hypocrisy and mischaracterizations that go on in UN debates, and incentivize countries to appoint stronger delegates.  This poll on the impact of CSPAN on its 25th birthday suggests some reasons for pause, however.  The number one reason cited for Members choosing to speak on the floor is raising their personal visibility.

10.  Invoke Responsibility to Protect in Darfur - Probably the most significant result of last week's Summit was inclusion of language in the outcome document specifying a "responsibility to protect" innocents confronted by genocide and war crimes.   The Canadians deserve great credit for pioneering the concept of "duty to protect" and pushing it this far.  The next step should be a swift new UN Security Council resolution invoking this obligation in relation to Darfur.  By quickly breathing life into this new provision, the UN membership can see to it that the Summit was not for naught.

Signs of Getting Out Posted by Derek Chollet

After a couple weeks of being pushed out of the headlines by Katrina, Roberts, and the UN summit, Iraq roared back in a serious way this week.  During the past three days, nearly 200 people there – mostly Iraqi police and civilians doing things like waiting in line to get jobs -- have been killed, beginning with 5 suicide bombing attacks on Wednesday alone, which ended up being the bloodiest single day so far.  Clearly, the situation is not getting any better (for an alarmingly comprehensive list of the chaos since Wednesday, check out this timeline).

But lost in all of this has been a few events that seem to indicate that we are starting to get out of Iraq, slowly but surely.  As we’ve discussed here and I’ve written elsewhere, I think that over the next year the U.S. will begin to get out of Iraq for both policy and political reasons – in terms of policy, the insurgency ain’t going away, and our all-volunteer military is stretched too thin and cannot sustain the current pace of operations much longer; and politically, the American people’s support for the current muddle through approach is eroding rapidly (and now, after Katrina, the Administration has even less political capital to spend).

So since pulling out is a policy and political reality, my prediction is that the Administration will make a virtue of necessity, declare victory (or some kind of success) and start bringing the troops home.  I doubt it will do so with much fanfare and it won’t necessarily happen quickly; it will just start happening, and little by little our force presence will get smaller.  Note how this will be framed differently (and in a more politically appealing way) than the withdrawal proposed by Administration’s critics: to Bush, we are getting out because we are “succeeding.”  To his critics, we are getting out because we are failing.  It’s the difference between Saigon 1975 and Sarajevo 2004.

That’s what I think we’ve started to see develop during that past few weeks.  First, ten days ago, American forces withdrew from the southern city of Najaf and turned over control to the Iraqis (this is the first withdrawal this year).  As Juan Cole described it: “We see here the beginnings of the Bush administration exit strategy for Iraq, which is that the south will be turned over to Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (the party that rules Najaf) and Badr (its paramilitary corps). The U.S. military must be convinced that Badr can now handle the Mahdi Army and can protect Grand Ayatollah Sistani from assassination (both are tall orders).”

And the Washington Post, through military sources, described the withdrawal in a broader context, explaining that the U.S. “is pushing for major withdrawals to begin in early spring. Iraqi and U.S. officials had identified Najaf as one of the first places where the United States could draw down its forces. Other cities in the heavily Shiite south, and in the Kurdish north, are likely to be next.”  So stay tuned.

With this, the Iraqis themselves have been talking more openly about the U.S. getting out.  This week a committee of the democratically-elected Iraqi National Assembly, the “National Sovereignty Committee,” referred to the U.S. troops as “occupation forces” (which is apparently a first) and called for setting a timeline for withdrawal.

This recommendation didn’t draw much attention, but another statement this week did: in an interview with American journalists, Iraqi President Talabani said that since Iraqi forces were improving, as many as 50,000 U.S. troops could withdraw by the end of the year. “We think that America has the full right to move some forces from Iraq to their country because I think we can replace them [with] our forces,” Talabani said. “In my opinion, at least from 40,000 to 50,000 American troops can be [withdrawn] by the end of this year.”  After his meeting with Bush at the White House, Talabani walked this back a little – saying that there would be no timetable for withdrawal – but he did not retract the basic thrust of his comments: that as Iraqi forces make progress, the U.S. can start to get out.

My guess is that the main problem the Bush team had with the Talabani statement was one of timing.  They believe that they need to stay until the political process plays itself out – that is, until after a new constitution is approved and new government elected at the end of this year.  After then, the Administration will have no problem with statements like this – in fact, it will welcome and even encourage them, providing the justification for withdrawal that it wants.

A Great Speech, but... Posted by Michael Signer

The President's speech last night was one of the best I have heard him give.  It was elegant yet strong, compact yet memorable, and he evinced an emotional connection -- a seriousness and an empathy -- that was unfamiliar to me.  He seemed mature and poised, and grounded.  And what I appreciated most was the general intellectual honesty of the speech, its humility, and its can-do embrace of entrepreneurship -- an idea that could be applied not only to the people whom the President was addressing (the New Orleanians who hopefully will soon own homes and businesses for the first time in their lives) but to the President himself -- we need him to be an entrepreneur, a leader, for us. 

So, the question I want to ask is:

Why hasn't he made the same kind of speech about Iraq?

The parallels between the hurricane and Iraq are striking. 

In both, a lack of preparation and planning by the federal government approached gross negligence, and (in some sense) criminal liability. 

In both, the death tolls are likely to be in the low thousands -- low, compared with historical catastrophes like world wars or massive man-made disasters, but high, against the standard of avoidable disasters -- or, put another way, death by choice. 

In both, the conservative philosophy, which entails not only a dislike of big government, but a disrespect of governance itself -- of the art of managing the instruments of collective action -- has backfired so wildly and lavishly it's reminiscent of the guns in those old peacenik posters whose barrels have been twisted into knots -- being fired.

In both, the least well-off (in New Orleans, urban underclass African-Americans, and in the Iraq War, National Guard and Reserve families) have borne the brunt of poor policy and poor planning.

Finally, in both, the obvious choice facing the President has been between responsibility or spin -- between avoidance and an embrace of the burden.  In Iraq, he has consistently avoided treat ing the situation with the gravitas, humility, intellectual honesty, or constructive spirit we saw last night.

While he deserves praise for the speech last night, if the Administration follows through, in good faith, on its promises, he deserves equally heavy criticism for what it shows about Iraq.  While he elevated himself last night, the lantern he raised unintentionally illuminated the depths of his failures in Iraq. 

Using our Military at Home: We're all Nails Now Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Laura Rozen over at WarandPiece.com points to this commentary by William Arkin, opening the discussion of whether Bush is right that:

It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces -- the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice.

Remember that old cliche about everything looking like a nail when you've got a hammer?

We have a military, as is repeated ad nauseam by the political class, of unprecedented power and quality.  Its excellence includes:  tracking and destroying fast-moving enemies, be they large armies or small guerrilla groups; preparing for and fighting the large set-piece battles on land, sea and air that this generation of military leaders trained for; moving massive amounts of materiel and soldiers quickly; taking overwhelming control (when political leaders allow it) of the means of violence and of technology; and putting minimal humanitarian systems in place immediately after a battle or natural disaster.

But when a democracy reaches the point that the military is the first answer to any policy question that comes up, that is a scary place.  Scary for society as a whole, but also for the military.  It's interesting that conservative military writers have been putting out novels and policy analyses for a decade now, some approvingly and some alarmingly, imagining a dystopian future where the military is the last competent organization on a decaying American landscape.

Now, it should be simple and straightforward to call in the military for help when a massive disaster occurs.  And when someone without a dog in the blame fight documents for me how something other than Federal, state and local failure to appreciate Katrina's gravity prevented that from happening, I'll listen to suggestions about changes. 

But this is the same Administration that thought it didn't need any civilian planning for post-war Iraq, and which has dumped on our military there a set of civilian chores (and failures) that make it harder for the military to get its military job done.  I'll look forward to hearing from those National Guard generals cropping up all over what they would've needed to get their job done.  I'll bet you that it's more competence on the civilian side, not more shifting of responsibility from the civilian side.

*ps - I am stranded for the foreseeable future at the United gates, Detroit airport, if anyone wants to come by and say hello or engage in learned debate to while away the hours...

Oink for Oil Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Michael, your post, and Ron Utt's idea, is great.  I'd like to see some of our wealthy progressive friends re-framing the tax cut issue as them giving their tax cuts back.  (I did see Hillary Clinton do this on the morning shows, actually.)

But more relevant to our national security website, how about we also ask the energy industry to give back some of the more outrageous goodies it got in the recent energy bill?  For starters, the one that guarantees a profit to anyone who wants to open up a nuclear power plant, even if it never produces a kilowatt?  The money could even go into rebuilding and diversifying our energy infrastructure, so energy companies would still have a shot at getting the money -- they'd just have to do something to earn it.

Oink! Posted by Michael Signer

It looks like President Bush, in his speech to the nation tonight on Hurricane Katrina, will propose funding the relief effort partly through the selective reduction in some embarrassing pork-barrel projects passed by "conservative' House members in their recent frenzy of self-indulgence called the highway bill -- you know, the one paved with bacon.

The Washington Post reports that the President is looking at a smart, tough proposal by the Heritage Foundation's Ron Utt (who's a family friend -- our families grew up on the same block together) to cut around $12 billion of pork and direct the funds instead to hurricane relief.  The idea borrows from a rare phenomenon -- people around the country who actually want to give appropriations back to the government.  Ron reports:

Indeed, the citizens of Bozeman, Montana, are proposing to return the $4 million they received for a new parking garage, arguing that the people of the Gulf need the money more than Bozeman needs a garage.  In Alaska, concerned citizens are barraging local newspapers with letters to the editor decrying the $320 million that will be wasted building the state’s infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.”

In the through-the-looking-glass ideological world of the Bush Administration, it's altogether weird that I should be praising him for borrowing a liberal (née conservative) approach on funding Hurricane Relief -- but whatever.  This is a good idea.

Of course, it wouldn't be any fun if I finished without noting the delicious fact that the opposition to the plan is coming from none other than Congressional Republicans:

While support for the giveback concept is spreading rapidly across the country, the response from Members of Congress has been mostly silence.  A few angrily defended the spending and challenged the practicality of the giveback plan, while others claim that the $2.5 trillion federal budget contains no low-priority programs or wasteful spending.  In response to questions from the press and pressure from voters, a spokesman for Highway Committee Chairman Don Young (R-AK) called the plan “moronic” and defended the highway legislation.

As a deficit hawk-conservative friend of mine said to me last week, referring to Virginia Republicans, who have similarly wreaked havoc with the Old Domion's budget:  "I'm too conservative to be Republican."

Exactly.

Our peace-seeking Army Posted by Lorelei Kelly

It's ten thirty and I just got home from a two day Army workshop on Peace and Stability.  Change is in the air!
But first,

REVISED WITNESS LIST: A STELLAR LINEUP!
Bipartisan Congressional Forum on How to Bring the Troops Home

When: Thursday, September 15, 2005
10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
webcast here.

Who:   U.S. Representative Lynn Woolsey and Other Members of Congress ( couple dozen other Members) with:

U.S. Senator Max Cleland, former member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, former Director of the Veterans  Administration and Vietnam veteran.   General Joseph Hoar (Ret. USMC), former Commander in Chief of U.S. Central Command.  Ambassador David Mack, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East, former U.S. Ambassador to  the United Arab Emirates, and current Vice President of the Middle East Institute.    Dr. Ken Katzman, Middle East analyst and Iraq specialist at the Congressional Research Service.   Antonia Chayes, Director of the Project on International Institutions and Conflict Management at Harvard Law School.   Visiting Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and former Under Secretary of the Air Force during the Carter Administration.  Anas Shallal, founder of  "Iraqi-Americans for Peaceful Alternatives."
 

The Army workshop I attended this week was the best yet. The overarching theme was to discuss and  develop ways to educate about Peace and Stability.

Of course, the challenge for everyone was deciding what these "in between war and peace" activities should be called. It  is a vocabulary with more political correctedness than a Berkeley kindergarten--with the current indecision being over  whether the words like "peace" and "support" should appear along with "stability" (the latest Army field manual btw, only calls it "stability ops")  but from what I could tell at the workshop--which was about 75% military--Army people are fine  with the peace part.  Stability and Support  Operations (SASO) each has its own division of labor. Stability may still  require use of force while  support is primarily addressing humanitarian needs.  In my view, it seems the stability-only title is hedging  bets--postponing the inevitable day when the military--but the Army specifically--is going to have to decide  whether to: 1. be responsible for all of these tasks 2. share resources 3. ask for more on behalf of other agencies--or 4. pray that Congress  becomes enlightened.

This day may not be far away.  This year, Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary Rice co-signed a letter asking specifically  for $200 million dollars from DoD's budget to be transferred to a rapid response fund for the State Department.  Members of Congress obstinately opposed this sensible action.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have given the military permission to talk openly about squishy things like peace and prevention, negotiation and dialogue.  This is a welcome change. The Army has actually been quite good at these tasks  over the years--but they are precisely the activities that they have never wanted to take credit for.

The excited uncertainty has engendered great creative tension--obvious at the conference. My own opinion: I think the  Army should be the Executive Agent for SASO-- this would force some clarification of terms and boundaries. Also, it  would give credence to the 15 years of peace operations experience resident in the US military.   This sentiment has flipped--while not exactly embracing SASO, the military (mostly the landpower folks, Army, Marines and Special Forces) now realize that we all need to be able to talk confidently about SASO in order to understand returning troops,  their needs and the lessons they've learned.  This Executive Agency could be shared, over time, to a co-equal partnership either with State or a new entity.

Today’s Stability and Support Operations SASO evolved from  decades of trying out different names:  small wars,  irregular war, conflict termination,  low-intensity conflict, military  operations other than war (MOOTW). The United  Nations cornered the market on peace words long ago  and many of them influence the American military definition of  SASO.  Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Peace  Enforcement come straight from the UN charter. Appreciative lessons learned  from these partnerships were present  throughout the workshop.

Now there's a good political molotov:  Anti-UN reactionaries must hate the troops! (Just kiddin! well,' sort-of).   

Too Little Too Late on UN Reform Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Hate to say it, but told you so. (Scratch that.  I shouldn't gloat - - just saw David's piece below offering plaudits for my prescience - his praise is enough) Sure enough, the UN membership has come up with a watered down document on reform just in time to ensure that tomorrow's in-gathering of 160 heads of state does not dissolve in disarray.

I predicted that:

The document will be much vaguer than hoped, and will simply duck significant areas of disagreement .. . There will be some language that, if acted upon, could result in substantial, specific reforms to the way the UN does business . . . But the text will also leave loopholes that allow spoilers bent on killing particular reforms to get future bites at the apple (slowing the reforms down, watering them down, and/or refusing to fund them) once other bodies like the Security Council and GA working committees take over and attempt to implement.

This is exactly what happened.  The Summit resolution calls for renaming the UN's discredited Commission on Human Rights a Human Rights Council, but stops short of necessary reforms including keeping known violators out of the henhouse.  It calls for a terrorism convention, but stops short of offering a consensus definition of terrorism.  It includes no firm commitments in terms of a duty to protect innocents from genocide, and no concrete pledges in terms of management reform.  It apparently says nothing on non-proliferation or disarmament.

In all, while we had some time ago resigned ourselves to low expectations, all-in-all its a huge disappointment.  While some good may yet come out of the package, this consensus breathes no wind into the organization's sagging sales, resolves none of the bitter rifts that divide the membership and hamper progress, and commits neither the organization nor its members to any of the painful but necessary steps toward making the body function better.  For more on what woulda, coulda, shoulda happened in terms of reform, see here.

How could this have been different?  The U.S. will privately point to the likes of Algeria, Cuba, Iran and others as spoilers, holding out for unrealistic commitments of aid for the developing world.  Plenty of others will blame John Bolton and his last minute, aggressive redlining of the Summit document.

Why didn't the reform push achieve its promise?  3 reasons, each tightly interrelated:

1. Lack of political will - The UN has a way of eliciting lowest-common-denominator behavior from its members, meaning self-interested, uncompromising, and short-term minded stances that impede boldness and set back change.  Part of the problem is that negotiations are delegated to ambassadors in New York who get mired in UN internal politics and bloc dynamics, rather than keeping their eyes on big picture questions like how to strengthen the organization and keep the largest members involved and committed (both of which stand to enormously benefit the rank and file membership).

2.  A hobbled Annan - Oil-for-food and particularly Annan's personal involvement in the scandal weakened what had been the organization's strongest leader in decades.  Annan would otherwise have had the ability to cut through some of the small-mindedness, to pick up the phone and call in heads of state, and to push a lot harder.   That kind of tough leadership was desperately needed, yet absent from the Secretary General's office.  There's only one other place it could have come from . . .

3.  Ineffective US diplomacy - I've argued from the outset that the US stood to gain enormously from many of the reforms on the table this year, including strengthened UN commitments on terrorism and WMD, a more legitimate human rights mechanism, a buy-out for the organization's dead wood, and beefed up internal controls.  While the Administration's frayed relationships made it harder to push these things through, it could have been done.  In the past we've hammered home wildly unpopular reforms at the UN, through a painstaking process I call retail diplomacy.  It involves going member-by-member, capital-by-capital and figuring out what other nations want in return for agreeing to what matters most to us.  The US has enough clout at the UN to be able to get its way on almost anything, provided we go about it skillfully, advocate forcefully at the right levels well in advance of decision time, and are prepared to make trade-offs.  This work cannot be done by mid-level diplomats alone:  cabinet secretaries and even the President need to get involved. 

In this case, while the Administration waxed lofty on reform, they were far too distracted in Iraq to make the kind of push that would have been needed.  The U.S. put the nail in the coffin of Security Council reform back in June, but struck no comparably powerful blows in favor of the reforms it should have cared about the most.

5 Ideas for the President's UN Speech Posted by Heather Hurlburt

(with apologies to the White House staff -- I know this memo is kinda late.  Let's just blame FEMA and go forward.)

1.  Thank you.  Yes, I know this is obvious.  But follow it up with something about how we feel part of the world community, how the basic humanity that unites us is bigger than the politics that divide us, and how grateful we are for the institutional preparedness of outfits like the UN and NATO.  Acknowledge how they're helping us.  A significant strand of the foreign coverage of Katrina wants to see us reaching out, wants to see us getting back on our feet.  I'm not asking for new pledges of cooperation on issues other countries care about, or even an apology for past insensitivity, or efforts to starve various international rapid reaction capabilities.  Even the tiniest gesture would be well-received.  What we don't need is the sort of line Karen Hughes was peddling in Washington last week:  the problem is that "there are a lot of things being said about us around the world that aren't true."  No, the problem is that there are a lot of things about our response to Katrina that shouldn't be true.

2.  On fighting terrorism:  G-SAVE, GWOT, G-willikers.  It couldn't hurt to offer the international community (never mind us here at home) a comprehensive explanation of what exactly we think this struggle is, how we intend to fight it over the long term, and what we are asking others to do.  Again, I'm not, just this once, trying to score an ideological point here; rather, there's genuine confusion even among those who want to support the Administration.  And one thing the neo-cons and I agree on:  anytime you're not defining the playing field, someone else is doing it for you.  The inimitable Mark Danner wrote this past Sunday that the American public has "lost the narrative" of this conflict; the international community has too.  Or they're making up their own narratives, some of which are not so useful (eg Russia and Chechnya).

3. On Poverty:  OK, so we just watered the UN's fight on poverty down to invisibility.  This Administration still has a window to do something really big and interesting by re-seizing the high ground on trade.  Some analysts think that, after the German elections, we may see a new push in Europe to eliminate agricultural subsidies and seize the high ground on letting developing economies export their way to prosperity.  As things stand now, we will get flattened by such a move.  So we should do it first, and let the Europeans be the ones who have to respond slowly.  Besides, it's the right thing to do -- it would generate cash flows to sub-Saharan Africa many times what we do in aid.  And it sound so small-government, free-enterprise.

4.  On UN Reform:  Here's where I get in trouble with all our resident UN gurus.  But there's a fundamental sense in which all the urgency of the UN reform debate is a bit specious.  The UN can only be as efficient, or as strong, or as stringent, as its member states will allow it.  That doesn't excuse corruption in the Secretariat.  And it's true that the US is in no position to point fingers.  But imagine any President getting up and saying "we pledge to pay our bills on time -- that means on the UN's time, not ours; and we pledge to put any US citizens caught misbehaving as peacekepers or other UN employees OR CONTRACTORS on trial, not yank them home or plead dipomatic immunity.  We will stop our nickel-and-diming in the budgetary process, and in exchange we will institute zero tolerance for even the appearance of fraud or mismanagement.  We challenge the rest of you to do the same."

5.  On Iraq:  I can't help it.  The rest of the world wants to know what the plan is as badly as Americans do.  Whatever the truth of the strange brouhaha surrounding UN printing of the draft Iraqi constitution, we're clearly out of sync again.

And a bonus #6: 

6.  The Millennium Development Goals.  Great idea, pure of heart, lousy framing, execution full of acronyms, dubious statistics, and numbing rhetoric.  Unclear, unfortunately, that they're making much of a difference on the ground -- which means, I'm sorry, they're not a success as an organizing tool.  Mr. President, since John Bolton tried to edit them out of existence anyway, couldn't you please task the brilliant Michael Gerson with reformulating them in language and constructs that speak to normal people, who don't go in for the five- and ten-year plan approach?  It's true that the international aid bureaucracy wouldn't thank you for it.  But the people who are supposed to be benefiting from them just might.

Score along at home:  if I go zero for five, be really afraid.  If, with half-credit and generous interpretations, I go 3 for 5, my cynic-o-meter is about right.  If I go 5 for 5 or, God forbid, 6 for 5, my mind has been taken over, alien-movie-like, by David Frum.