More Money Less Accountability

The boys at the UN want more of our money but less of us. I wonder why. I love Rohrabacher's comment at the end of the article. It looks like the UN is the topic of the day here at SSOA.

UNITED NATIONS - Stating that the United Nations needs "nothing less than a transformation," the organization's chief of staff, Mark Malloch Brown, told Congress yesterday that reform could be achieved only by increasing funding and reducing American interference at Turtle Bay.

Mr. Malloch Brown told the House International Relations Committee that Secretary-General Annan is intent on making changes, and that he has introduced more U.N. reforms than "any of his predecessors." He said that in order for Mr. Annan to realize future reform, he must be "given back the power to manage" the world body and member states, including top contributor America, must fund the organization "properly."

Indicating weariness with promises of reform, Republican committee members such as Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, said America would have to take the lead in dictating future change. "We are told we have to give up all our leverage," Mr. Rohrabacher told The New York Sun. He said that he was not impressed by the reform package developed at the United Nations and introduced to the committee by Mr. Malloch Brown.

The various U.N.-related hearings on Capitol Hill "are building up to a point where a certain reform package is going to be presented in Congress," Mr. Rohrabacher said, and further funding will depend on its implementation. America is the largest single-nation U.N. donor, providing 22% of the organization's annual budget.

"We in the United Nations secretariat are acutely aware of the reform issues raised by events of recent months," Mr. Malloch Brown said. Among the "troubling revelations" he counted were the oil-for-food scandal, under investigation by the Volcker committee and Congressional investigations, sexual exploitation by U.N. peacekeepers in Africa and elsewhere, and inaction in Darfur.

Mr. Malloch Brown ended his speech with a call for better relations between America and Turtle Bay, but some members of the committee were cautious."No one is opposed to the U.N.'s role in facilitating diplomacy, mediating disputes, monitoring the peace, feeding the hungry, "the committee's chairman, Rep. Henry Hyde, a Republican of Illinois, said. "But we are opposed to legendary bureaucratization, to political grandstanding, to billions of dollars spent on multitudes of programs with meager results, to the outright misappropriation of funds represented by the emerging scandal regarding the oil-for-food program."

Others were more sympathetic to Mr. Malloch Brown's message. While blasting the United Nations' "pathological persecution" of Israel, Rep. Tom Lantos, a Democrat of California, said, "If an over-arching international organization did not already exist, we would have to invent it." He called on Republicans "to resist the powerful temptation to withhold the payment of our dues in an attempt to leverage needed changes at the United Nations."

Mr. Rohrabacher, one of the most vocal U.N. critics on the committee, said that "before we continue to pump money into the organization," Congress must "set some standards." He said that America should reconsider whether to continue to act as a "major player" at the United Nations - and perhaps reconsider its role as host nation.

"I don't think U.N. bureaucrats should take it for granted that their headquarters will forever be in New York," he told the Sun. "Maybe they should move to a place where they can feel philosophically comfortable, like a third-world dictatorship."

Complete article at The New York Sun.