The UN is owed an apology

Robert Scheer, of the Los Angeles Times, wrote an excellent column today entitled "The UN Deserves an Apology."

My sentiments exactly.


Some Americans like to talk as if the U.N. exists merely for the convenience of the Third World, forgetting that it was the United States that fought to create an inclusive international forum to help restrain mankind's new ability to destroy itself.

[...]

In the decades since [its inception], the U.N. has undertaken hundreds of largely thankless humanitarian, arms control, nation-building and peacekeeping missions. If these actions have not cured man's rapaciousness and cruelty, they have certainly helped save countless lives and arguably prevented a third world war.

Yet, even as we once again call on the organization to help broker peace and elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, American politicians find the U.N. an irresistible piñata, ripe for demagogic bashing. When the president honored United Nations Day last week in a routine annual resolution and then asked state governors to follow suit, for example, opportunist Texas Gov. Rick Perry refused to sign the symbolic proclamation. It's not surprising, because the Texas Republican Party believes that the United States should leave the U.N. altogether.

Of course, such posturing does a disservice to the many U.N. "blue helmets" who have died in the cause of peace over the last five decades. Even more important than their bravery, however, has been the U.N.'s work in helping to restrain the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The UN, along with France, has become the new bete noire of politicians and yapping heads who want to take cheap shots to score partisan political points.

These folks, a motley crue of the disingenuous and the willfully ignorant (which doesn't include the tiny minority who actually offer reasonable criticism in good faith), speak of "the UN" as though the General Assembly, the Security Council and the New York City-based bureaucracy is the entireity of the organization. Those anti-polio vaccination campaigns, the peacekeeping missions, feeding and housing refugees, etc., they don't exist according to these self-proclaimed experts.

Fortunately, most people around the world know that the UN is more than a building in Manhattan.

Yet, in a classic case of blaming the messenger, some in the media have accused the U.N. of interfering in U.S. electoral politics by calling attention to the missing explosives. "The U.N. … used 377 tons of high-grade Iraqi explosives to announce its opposition to reelecting George W. Bush," wailed a Wall Street Journal editorial, notes Scheer.

In response to the sniping of U.N.-bashers, Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the [International Atomic Energy Agency], was forced to point out the obvious: "There is a world out there other than the American election."