America has requested extensive last-minute changes to a draft agreement on reforming and modernising the United Nations. Painful negotiations lie ahead of next month’s summit of world leaders.
IF THERE was still any question that America is taking a new line with the United Nations, the answer now seems clear. Next month, 175 world leaders will gather in New York to consider a raft of reforms for the world body. But just weeks before the summit is to begin, America has asked for extensive changes to the draft “outcome document” that many other negotiators felt was almost finished. Many detect the hand of John Bolton, America’s controversial new ambassador to the UN, who offered the proposed changes on Wednesday August 24th. But Mr Bolton is probably more symptom than cause”George Bush sent him to the UN as a signal that business-as-usual would no longer be acceptable.
There is talk of crisis in many of the media reports about America’s proposed changes. The Washington Post reported that 750 such edits had been made to the draft “outcome document”. In truth, the majority of these are nitpicking wording changes that have little effect on the content. But some of them would change the declaration considerably, particularly regarding development efforts and intervention to stop human-rights catastrophes.
September’s summit, billed by the UN as the biggest gathering of world leaders in history, was originally to be a five-year review of the 2000 Millennium Summit, the most notable product of which was the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These include worthy aims such as halving abject poverty and achieving universal primary education by 2015. As desirable as these goals are, there seems little hope of achieving the panoply of policy objectives embedded in the MDGs; the UN itself is already complaining about the lack of progress.
The UN is complaining about their own inaction?
It’s a damn shame that Jean Kirkpatrick left the UN when she did. I liked the way that woman worked. During her tenure, there were about a total of two anti US resolutions that got sent up to the security council. After the first one hit her desk, she had her assistant get the foreign aid numbers for all of the nations who had signed onto it and made some phone calls. After that, Cuba, who had started all of the anti US resolutions, couldn’t find a single cosponsor or anyone to even agree to vote for one as long as she was the ambassador.
The UN is an incredibly corrupt organization and will remain so as long as it remains chartered the way that it is. We need to stop the one nation, one vote thing and the alphabetical rotation through the committee chair assignments. How on earth is it acceptable that China, Cuba, or any of the African dictatorships be in charge of the Human rights commission? That’s like letting the Nazis preside at Nuremberg. Or maybe Jamie Gorelick be on the 9/11 commission. OOPS! Did I say that?
The best thing we the USA can do for the world and the UN is to get ourselves out of the UN and have nothing more to do with the wretched corupt UN:mad: