UN bashing: the reality & US campaign rhetoric

By Thalif Deen at the united nations

NEW YORK - If Mitt Romney, a former Governor of Massachusetts, ends up as President of the United States, he has vowed to find an "alternative" to the United Nations primarily because he views the world body as an irritating hindrance to American power play. "The United Nations has been an extraordinary failure of late," complains Romney, who is one of the key Republican candidates running for the White House. The only alternative he can think of is a new "coalition of free nations" which, presumably, will not challenge the American political agenda -- be it in Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran or the rest of the Middle East.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney serves ice cream to supporters in Spartanburg, S.C. on Thursday. AP

Last month, Romney urged Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to bar Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from addressing the General Assembly in an attempt largely to score political points from right wing neo-conservative voters who are quick to denounce the world body -- as the Mormon presidential candidate does.

But all this is mostly election-year rhetoric and far removed from the realities of political life. As the only self-proclaimed superpower in the world, the US has increasingly abandoned multilateralism in favour of bilateralism. But that self-centred policy keeps hitting roadblocks -- particularly at the UN which is also home to 191 other nations.

When the Security Council refused to provide cover to the US during its military invasion of Iraq five years ago, the Bush administration dismissed the world body as being "irrelevant" -- and went to war anyway. In political hindsight, the Security Council has been proved right in not endorsing the invasion which has turned out to be a monumental mess-- both for the US and the world at large.

The recent growing antagonism towards the UN has been triggered by several factors. The Bush administration has been stymied in its efforts to impose sanctions on Iran, Sudan and Myanmar because of veto threats from two of the permanent members of the Security Council, China and Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been harking back to the days of the Cold War challenging the political might of the US. After a visit to Iran last week, Putin said that dialogue with Iran was more productive than "a policy of threats, sanctions or power politics" -- a well-aimed blow at the Bush administration, as well as at a divided European Union.

Worse still, he publicly criticised the Iraq war as "absolutely pointless" and urged the Bush administration to set a deadline for the withdrawal of troops. Russia's decision to challenge the US both on Iraq and Iran does not play well either with the White House or right wing conservatives in the ruling Republican Party.

But Putin these days is speaking from a position of strength -- mostly from rising oil incomes that are fast turning Russia in to a global economic power. In the eyes of the neo-conservatives and the Bush administration, the UN's Human Rights Council (HRC) is also a new target. When President Bush addressed the General Assembly last month, he faulted the HRC for its "excessive criticism" of Israel while it has remained "silent", he said, "on repression by regimes from Havana to Caracas to Pyongyang and Tehran."

But what Bush refuses to understand is that "excessive criticism" of Israel is predicated on the equally excessive human rights violations and military repression by Israel in its occupied territories. It was only last week that the Israeli government reprimanded one of its own commanders in the West Bank for leading a young Palestinian at gunpoint during a house to house search.

The investigation was triggered by the release of a video which had been taped by a television camera crew. In 2005, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled against the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields in the ongoing conflict in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, the argument adduced by most members of the HRC is that the US does not have the moral high ground to criticise others when it is in violation of the Geneva Conventions governing prisoners of war or terrorist suspects.

At the same time, it uses different yardsticks to measure human rights abuses: one for its close political allies and another for its avowed political enemies. When the HRC was voted into office in May 2006, the General Assembly brushed aside both US and Western criticisms to elect China, Russia and Cuba to the newly-created body.

All three countries -- along with Iran -- were castigated by Western nations, as well as by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), as "human rights violators" who should be kept out of the new Council. Among the countries that decided to skip the elections was the US, which had been criticised for human rights abuses of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad and at the U.S.-run detention facility in Guantanamo Bay Cuba, where terror suspects are being held.

The Bush administration also came under fire for justifying violations of the rule of law and international conventions in the name of fighting terrorism. With its current blemished record on human rights, the US wisely kept out of two successive HRC elections fearing it will suffer a humiliating defeat on a secret ballot.