Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled
Global Chaos
By Dore Gold
(Crown Forum, 308 pages, $25.95)
Hopes were high for the U.N. after the Cold War ended. People
said what had hamstrung the organization was the U.S.-USSR deadlock
in the Security Council, and, more broadly, the division of the
world into opposed blocs. With the passing of that situation, the
U.N. would regain its true role as a settler of conflicts and
dispenser of justice.
Indeed, when in 1990 the Security Council authorized force
against Iraq after its unprovoked invasion of Kuwait, those hopes
seemed — for a moment — to have been vindicated. Yet the U.N.
quickly returned to its mode of moral equivalence and worse. After
the war, it did nothing to stop Saddam Hussein’s genocidal
aggression against the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites; the United States
and Britain eventually went outside the U.N. framework altogether
to help those groups.
A few years later in Rwanda, the U.N.’s behavior was even more
egregious. When Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of a U.N.
peacekeeping force that was stationed in Rwanda, delivered a clear
warning of imminent genocide, the U.N. reacted by opposing
a rescue operation and withdrawing forces — and continued
mouthing moral inanities about a “peace process” and “violence on
all sides” while the Hutus massacred 800,000 Tutsis in the space of
a hundred days. And just a year later in Bosnia, the ghastly script
repeated itself when U.N. forces entrusted with protecting Muslim
refugees in Srebrenica simply abandoned them to Serb attackers, who
slaughtered 7,000 Muslims while deporting 40,000 more of them to
other parts of Bosnia.
In this illuminating book, Dore Gold, formerly Israel’s
ambassador to the U.N. and now head of a Jerusalem think tank,
traces the U.N.’s pathology to its very beginnings: a fundamentally
flawed organization that has spread chaos rather than order and
“just doesn’t work” when it comes to resolving international
disputes.
When the U.N. was created in 1945 in the wake of World War II,
the original criterion for membership was having fought at least
one Axis power. This already opened the door to countries like
Stalin’s Soviet Union and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. But as more and
more countries were admitted, the U.N. soon became a Babel of
democracies and dictatorships with clashing aims and norms.
The U.N.’s weaknesses were already evident at the time of the
first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. Although the U.N. Partition Plan
had declared Jerusalem an international city, the U.N. reacted to
the Arab attack on Jerusalem by proposing, in a “peace plan,” to
place it under complete Arab sovereignty. The U.N. did no better
when Pakistani forces invaded Kashmir and, also in 1948, India
turned to the Security Council for help: the U.N. ignored the
Pakistani aggression, treated the two sides as morally equivalent,
and eventually rewarded Pakistan by recognizing its status
in Kashmir and calling for a reduction of Indian forces there.
In both these cases, however, the U.N. did more than treat
aggressors and defenders as equals, while, indeed, showing a tilt
toward the former; it spread chaos by taking measures that would
help perpetuate both conflicts. In the Israeli case, the U.N.
innovated totally unique definitions of “refugee” that ensured the
continuation of the “Palestinian refugee problem,” and also the
conflict, to the present day. In the Indian case, by signaling to
Pakistan that aggression pays, the U.N. helped set the stage for
further India-Pakistan wars and ongoing strife.
As Dore Gold skillfully demonstrates, this pattern recurred over
the years and, if anything, worsened. By the 1960s, the Soviet
Union had recognized the U.N. as a useful tool and was busily
forging an anti-Western bloc there. The U.N. proved “evenhanded”
and totally useless in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis; the U.S. was
finally able to end the standoff only by ignoring the U.N. and
issuing a tough ultimatum to the Soviets. By 1970, the General
Assembly placed itself squarely on the side of terrorism with
Resolution 2649, which affirmed “the legitimacy of the struggle of
the colonial peoples and peoples under alien domination to exercise
their right to self-determination and independence by all the
necessary means at their disposal.”
From there it was a short step to the Assembly’s ecstatic
reception of a pistol-packing Yasser Arafat in 1974 and of Ugandan
dictator Idi Amin in 1975. Having been created partly under the
impact of the Holocaust, the U.N. now became a prime mover of
anti-Semitism, culminating in its sponsorship of the anti-Semitic
hatefest in Durban in 2001. The U.N. did nothing about Iraq’s
attack on Iran in 1980, and ignored the plight of peoples in places
like Tibet and Sudan while focusing obsessively on the alleged “war
crime” of Israeli settlement activity.
After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the U.N. continued to
perform miserably not only in Rwanda and Bosnia. Although UNSCOM,
the agency set up to monitor Iraq’s disarmament after the Gulf War,
originally functioned effectively, the U.N. eventually defanged it
and replaced it with the impotent UMNIVOC, helping set the stage
for the current Iraq War. Under its Oil for Food program, the U.N.
became more concerned with fattening Saddam than containing him.
Instead of promoting human rights in the world, the U.N. appointed
such stalwarts as Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and Saudi Arabia to its
Human Rights Commission, which has devoted 30 percent of its
resolutions to Israel. Syria, one of the main state sponsors of
international terrorism, was allowed to serve on the Security
Council from 2002 to 2004.
After nine crisp chapters of description and analysis, Gold
turns to prescription, suggesting a two-track approach for dealing
with the U.N. One track is to circumvent the Tower of Babble and
create a Community of Democracies with common values and strategic
goals. Such a body would not necessarily have to include
America-hostile countries like France and Germany, but could
include states as diverse as Australia, Poland, India, and the
Philippines. The second track is for the U.S. and its allies to
work within the U.N. to alter its voting patterns. Gold, who does
not favor discarding the U.N. completely, maintains that many
African and Asian states would be amenable to cooperating with a
democratic bloc, and “these nations need to be led and not
abandoned.”
But any such positive transformation of the U.N., he
acknowledges, “will take many years to complete,” and that is why
“going outside the U.N. is crucial.” The corrupt, malfunctioning,
destructive U.N. we have today is one of the central problems of
our time, unflinchingly diagnosed by this revealing book.
