The Rosett Report » So Much for the UN Charade in Syria…
By Claudia Rosett On August 30, 2013
If there’s one favor Russia and China have done for us all lately, it’s been to reduce the United Nations to glaring irrelevance in the Syria conflict. Due to these two, there has been no Security Council resolution proposing to deal with Syria, and it looks like there won’t be. Repeated emergency meetings and draft resolutions have all arrived at a big nothing.
Why is that helpful? Because it removes the fig leaf assumption that the UN is on the job, ergo something is being done. Too often, when terrible events start to build, the UN becomes the go-to place for relays of special envoys, Security Council resolutions, and grand pronouncements by senior international civil servants. Money is spent, statements are issued, diplomatic huddles take place, crash meetings are called, and in a cloud of bureaucratic palaver, the can gets kicked down the road. Erstwhile leaders of the free world can delay any real decisions, because they have deflected the problem to the UN. Meanwhile, on the ground, the troubles keep boiling over.
Examples range from the 1994 decision of Kofi Annan, then head of UN peacekeeping, to ignore the warnings of his own man in the field about the imminent Rwanda genocide; to the pronouncements of the UN’s top diplomats that the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq was one of the UN’s stellar achievements; to the assurances of Annan in 2006, as secretary-general, that his secret negotiator was hard at work arranging the return of two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hezbollah (ultimately, Israel was left to redeem their mortal remains in exchange for releasing living terrorists). The UN over the past seven years has imposed a series of sanctions resolutions on Iran and North Korea, meant to stop their rogue nuclear projects — with much fanfare and no success. The list goes on. The point is, the UN promises things it cannot deliver, and while those promises are invoked as remedies, or signs of action, people suffer and die, and the problems grow.
In the case of Syria, when the March, 2011 rebellion met with violence that mushroomed into mass carnage, civil war, the use of heavy weapons, and chemical weapons, by the regime, and the emergence of Islamist elements including al Qaeda affiliates among the opposition, it was easier for the U.S. and its allies to hang back and watch — because the UN was, in theory, on the job.
-go to links-
Why is that helpful? Because it removes the fig leaf assumption that the UN is on the job, ergo something is being done. Too often, when terrible events start to build, the UN becomes the go-to place for relays of special envoys, Security Council resolutions, and grand pronouncements by senior international civil servants. Money is spent, statements are issued, diplomatic huddles take place, crash meetings are called, and in a cloud of bureaucratic palaver, the can gets kicked down the road. Erstwhile leaders of the free world can delay any real decisions, because they have deflected the problem to the UN. Meanwhile, on the ground, the troubles keep boiling over.
Examples range from the 1994 decision of Kofi Annan, then head of UN peacekeeping, to ignore the warnings of his own man in the field about the imminent Rwanda genocide; to the pronouncements of the UN’s top diplomats that the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq was one of the UN’s stellar achievements; to the assurances of Annan in 2006, as secretary-general, that his secret negotiator was hard at work arranging the return of two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hezbollah (ultimately, Israel was left to redeem their mortal remains in exchange for releasing living terrorists). The UN over the past seven years has imposed a series of sanctions resolutions on Iran and North Korea, meant to stop their rogue nuclear projects — with much fanfare and no success. The list goes on. The point is, the UN promises things it cannot deliver, and while those promises are invoked as remedies, or signs of action, people suffer and die, and the problems grow.
In the case of Syria, when the March, 2011 rebellion met with violence that mushroomed into mass carnage, civil war, the use of heavy weapons, and chemical weapons, by the regime, and the emergence of Islamist elements including al Qaeda affiliates among the opposition, it was easier for the U.S. and its allies to hang back and watch — because the UN was, in theory, on the job.
-go to links-
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