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Member of Congress introduces bill to cut U.S. funding for IPCC

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a group of scientists from scores of countries that study the effects of climate change.  Their findings have provided scientific backbone to policy debates about how much carbon emissions should be reduced over how long a period of time to stem the most dramatic effects of climate change.  In other words, they are an invaluable resource to humanity. 

This is something that the Nobel Commitee recoginized when it awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize to the IPCC.  Someone who apparently does not share this view is one Blaine Luetkemeymer, the representative of the 9th district of Missouri in the United States Congress.  He thinks the IPCC is "international junk science." Accordingly, he just introduced a bill that would block the United States from funding the IPCC.  

For kicks, his press release says:  "Luetkemeyer’s legislation would prohibit U.S. contributions to the IPCC, which is nothing more than a group of U.N. bureaucrats that supports man-made claims on global warming that many scientists disagree with." (emphasis mine)

It would seem that Mr. Luetkemeyer's know-nothingism extends to English grammar. 

The Coup Caucus

The Weekly Standard calls it a "Coup for Democracy." The National Review, "A Counter-Coup." But Ciff Kincaid wins the award for most unhinged reaction to events in Honduras:

"The so-called 'military coup' in Honduras was a successful effort by Honduran patriots to preserve their constitutional system of government from an international alliance of communists and socialists backed by Iran," Kincaid wrote in a column published at aim.org.

Yes, Zelaya tried to subvert national institutions to his parochial advantage. But the military deposing a duly elected national president is inimical to the principals of democracy that the Honduran military is purporting to defend.  I think Kevin Casas-Zamora said it best in a balanced piece for Brookings, "If Zelaya must be prosecuted for his hare-brained attempt to subvert the Honduran constitution, then let the courts proceed as rigorously as possible. And the same applies to the coup perpetrators. If Honduras is to have a decent future its politicians and soldiers, in equal measure, must learn that the road to democracy and development runs through the rule of law."

UPDATE: Republican members of Congress join the fray. 

A couple of positive outcomes from the UN investigation in Gaza

Even though Israel is not participating, or did not allow the commission -- headed by South African judge Richard Goldstone -- to pass through Israeli territory, it seems to have helped bring about two developments that can be applauded.

First, despite its opposition to the probe, which is mandated to investigate actions of both the Israeli military and Hamas, the Israeli government has agreed to provide compensation for the damage inflicted upon UN buildings, including a school, in Gaza during the December/January offensive.  This is a welcome step, though it does not of course excuse the inexcusable: bombing a UN building, even by accident, but particularly if targeted, makes Ban Ki-moon very, very angry.

Second, and more directly, the commission was able to hear from Israeli witnesses, most prominently the father of captured soldier Gilad Shalit, in Geneva.  That the investigation is seeking out such witnesses should be signs enough to the Israeli brass that it is not "hopelessly biased," but alas, that train, as they say, has sailed.

Bolton’s Bombs: Regime change, or…bombs

Let us return to Boltonland, shall we? With yet another ridiculous op-ed in a major paper, former U.S. ambassador to the UN (*shudder*) John Bolton gives us the current state of the Battle for Iran (war has already begun!): the people are longing to rise up, but they only need a helpful American hand to help them overthrow their government (not that we haven't tried that before...); a feckless and "empathetic" Barack Obama is so eager to sit down and sip tea with Iran's hardest hardliners that he can't understand that Iran is going to nuke everyone and everything no matter what we do; and if we just poke a stick into Iran's complicated ethnic politics, everything will be hunky-dory.

Ummm...

As vehement as his hatred for diplomacy may be, Bolton's chief target here is, quite simply, the Obama Administration. The op-ed, like many others on Iran, is written for baldly partisan purposes. Nowhere does Bolton actually suggest how the United States could "support" his desired goal of regime change; he is able to get away with such ambiguous criticism because, were his preferred policies of strict belligerence and hawkish interference to actually be pursued, his party would bear the inevitable political fallout. As it is, though, even when he admits that "we’re not really in a position now to offer much concrete assistance" (h/t ThinkProgress), his criticism will emerge unscathed. And whenever something violent or unsavory happens in Iran -- imagine that! -- he will undoubtedly reclaim his mantle as the right wing's favorite bullish prognosticator.

Kasparov check-mates his own logic

I can understand why Garry Kasparov hearts dissidents, since he's one of Russia's most prominent himself. And he may be able to beat anyone but a computer in chess, but his logic falls seriously short here:

But the Soviet Union used tanks to quash dissent when it could. Dictatorships use force when they can get away with it, not when a U.S. president makes a strong statement.

Okay, agreed. Nothing Barack Obama says or doesn't say about the Iranian "revolution" will affect how the country's leadership, who seem to be pretty desperate to hang on to power, employs violence. But then how does this follow?

President Dwight Eisenhower might have learned that lesson in 1956 when he said nothing and the Soviets sent tanks into Budapest anyway. Likewise, in 1968 the Soviets cracked down in Czechoslovakia even though the West said little. Regardless of what Mr. Obama says, the Iranian leaders will use all the force at their disposal to stay in power.

"That lesson" is not that silence from a U.S. president will cause a dictatorship to send in tanks to quash dissidents; it is, in fact, the opposite, as Kasparov said in the previous paragraph. There is no relationship between what the "leader of the free world" says and what the leader of an unfree country does to his own people. So, contrary to the thrust of this much emulated argument, Barack Obama not issuing his "support" for Iranian dissidents will not "cause" a greater crackdown in Iran. History is being twisted into erroneous causation here, and it's being used for purely political purposes.

(image from flickr user arellis49 under a Creative Commons license)

When success is softball…

Not everyone, evidently, is as unconvinced as we are that Ban Ki-moon is "the world's most dangerous Korean." Pegging off the rather tendentious Jacob Heilbrunn FP piece of that title, Michael Keating at World Politics Review concurs that Ban's tenure at the UN has not been far short of failure.

There's no need to pussy-foot around the UN's shortcomings, and, for his part, Keating acknowledges the tremendous pressures put on the S-G office, as well as the enormity of the challenges that the UN confronts. Yet Keating's claim that "[i]t's not that anyone expects the U.N. to solve these problems" belies, I think, the lofty expectations that most people actually have of the UN, and particularly of its most visible personage, the S-G.

You see people's high expectations most anytime you hear someone lament that "the UN" isn't doing enough about whatever geopolitical issue happens to be boiling that day. So even when a top UN official does issue a strong statement about, say, the trammeling of human rights in Iran, the organization as a whole is panned for not "doing" enough to protect Iran's people. And with pretty much no one else paying attention to the ghastly continuing conflict in eastern DR Congo, the UN is the only one on whom to hang our hopes for a solution. Unsurprisingly, those outsized expectations turn out to be quite the albatross for the UN when, in fact, a war that few countries are actually interested in resolving painfully deteriorates.

But the deeper flaw in Keating's criticism -- and one that I think most people simply silently assume -- is the way he dismisses out of hand those UN operations in tough climates that actually have worked.

With the exception of softball assignments like Liberia -- an acknowledged success story -- U.N. peacekeeping operations have hardly been worth their expense.

Why must an "acknowledged success story" be condescendingly equated to a "softball assignment?" The fallacious implication here is that what the UN does well, it does well because it is easy. Liberia was wracked by years of civil war, torn apart by rebel groups, devastated by human rights violations and child soldiery, and driven into the ground by one of the most rapacious of recent dictators, Charles Taylor. If that's "softball," then I don't even want to know what the major leagues are like.

Yet into this volatile mix came some 15,000 UN peacekeepers, and, over the course of the last six years, they have, in fits and starts, helped Liberia reach the state it's in today: relatively peaceful, with improving infrastructure, a growing economy, and Africa's first elected female head of state. And all this for about $600 million a year -- a bargain compared to, say, what the United States is paying in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Not all peacekeeping missions have been as successful as the one in Liberia, to be sure. But neither, I would contend, have any of them been abject failures. In even more difficult cases like DR Congo and Darfur, UN peacekeepers are the only ones doing anything on the ground. To suggest that these missions "have hardly been worth their expense" -- especially when that expense is so comparatively low -- offends both the very real successes they have had and even the notion that something should be done about these conflicts at all. Not every brutal civil war in an oft-ignored part of the world, it turns out, is that easy to solve.

(image of an UNMIL medical officer, from UN Photo under a Creative Commons license)

“The World’s Most Dangerous Korean?” Please.

Ban Ki Moon is certainly not above criticism. In contrast to his predecessor, he is much more "secretary" than "general." No one looks to him as a "secular pope" as many looked to Kofi Annan for moral leadership.  Rather, in his 2 1/2 years in office, it's become clear that Ban's diplomatic style is one that favors quiet, direct diplomacy over grandstanding.  

There are benefits and drawbacks to this leadership style.  But he is far from, as Jacob Heilbrunn asserts in Foreign Policy, "the world's most dangerous Korean" that has "set the standard for failure" among Secretary Generals. 

Heilbrunn is a gifted writer, but his analysis of Ban's first two and a half years shows only a passing familiarity with what the United Nations has been up to since January 2007.  For example, Heilbrunn suggests that Ban has been passive when it comes to climate change.  This is just plain wrong. Ban has made climate change his signature issue.  In September 2007, Ban invited world leaders, ranging from Nicolas Sarkozy to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to Al Gore to the United Nations headquarters for a climate change summit. (Foreign Policy even covered the event!)  And there will be a repeat of this summit in September, which is intended to build some momentum for the climate talks in Copenhagen in December. 

At the center of Heilbrunn's assertion that Ban is somehow "dangerous" is that in his 2 1/2 years, Ban has no successes of which to speak and that his quiet diplomatic style is making the UN irrelevant.  There are two points to make here.  First, 2 1/2 years is not a very long time with which to pass such sweeping judgments on a Secretary General. Most serve for five or ten years.  Second, Heilbrunn seems to think that the Secretary General is a position with all means of authority over global affairs.  Sure, it's a big title, but the Sec Gen has no real power other than the moral authority that comes with the title.  Kofi Annan was skilled at wielding moral authority to press for human rights.  For his part, Ban's been spending his moral capital on climate change. 

The Sec Gen does have some (but not much) authority over how the General Secretariat runs itself.  For example, he can't open or close new offices or bureaus with out the General Assembly's approval -- but he can make a few suggestions and prod the General Assembly to take them up. One important institutional reform he saw through was dividing the overburdened Department of Peacekeeping Operations into two directorates.  That may not sound like much to outsiders, but it was a huge change in how the UN manages its over 100,000 peacekeepers in the field. 

The bottom line is that Heilbrunn passes some sweeping judgements on the current Secretary General without showing that he knows very much about the position itself. A more useful way of judging the success or failure of a Secretary General is to analyze the extent to which he is able to achieve certain goals within the institutional and legal constraints that he faces.  Simply picking a problem in the world and blaming the Secretary General for not fixing it is an easy way to beat up a Secretary General, but it is pretty unhelpful as a heuristic device. 

Rothkopf: Shunning the World

In a long and rambling post David Rothkopf froths that the recently agreed upon Security Council resolution strengthening North Korean sanctions means that the United Nations should be disbanded. Really.
"watching the UN continue its kabuki theater concerning North Korea makes me want to shut the place down, convert it to condos and remit the funds to the former member states. Even in a down New York real estate market it is almost certain to be a better return on investment for the dollars poured into that white elephant on the East River than "outcomes" like the proposed sanctions on Pyongyang."
I really wish that people who wish to be taken seriously as foreign policy commentators would refrain from this kind of hyperbole and give serious thought to the consequences of their words. Does Rothkopf really believe that recalling over 100,000 peacekeepers around the world, including places like Haiti, Darfur, Liberia and Lebanon, is a good idea? Does he think that sending humanitarian assistance to starving populations is a bad idea? Does he think that coordinating a global response to pandemics should be left to individual countries? The UN is an easy punching bag for pundits and politicians looking for a scapegoat. But posts like this from Rothkopf are simply irresponsible. To be sure, there are legitimate question to be raised about the utility of this latest round of Security Council action on North Korea. But, as Madeline Albright liked to point out, blaming the UN in these instances is sort of like blaming Joe Louis Arena when the Red Wings lose. Also, what's with his use of the term "bitchlet" to describe his daughter's elementary school classmate? Isn't it time we move beyond these derogatory gendered terms?

No, providing tens of thousands of tons of food aid in Somalia is not easy

Quoting a Times of London article about sacks of food aid from the World Food Program disturbingly showing up for sale in a Mogadishu market, Ed Morrissey's unsurprising embrace of UN-bashing curiously omits the following from the very same article:
Many of the sacks for sale are marked: “A gift from the American people”, with the US government’s aid agency, USAID, providing $274 million last year in food and in humanitarian assistance for Somalia.
If food aid is not getting into the hands of those who need it, and is instead being re-sold for a profit -- whether the aid comes from the UN, the U.S. of A., or anywhere else -- that is a serious problem. It is also a problem that needs to be addressed in context; Somalia is the most difficult, dangerous, and complicated place for an aid worker to operate. Ensuring that every sack of food gets to the place it is supposed to go to is likely as impossible as accounting for every one of the ransom dollars that Somali pirates spend so recklessly. This is not an apology; it is a reality. Morrissey's indictment of the entire UN aid program in Somalia is all the less defensible because, again, the very article that he cites concludes with the WFP's Somali director characterizing the re-selling of food aid as a "minor phenomenon." This may go against the scandal-mongering tenor of the rest of the piece, but the fact is that the WFP does a lot of humanitarian aid work in Somalia, and the sacks that cannot be accounted for likely make up a very small percentage of this work. The WFP, though, is investigating the problem.