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	President Bush must address Poverty in America by Gary Hart / Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) California, USA   15 October, 2005   "The art of caring for Souls", by Gary Hart. (Huffington Post)   Belief in the ineffectiveness of government, as we have seen in recent weeks, is self-fulfilling. For some, it is also deadly. It is a cause for wonder that those most critical of government are among those most eager to secure its power. Not believing in government, however, a conservative either does not know or care to know how to make it effective.   Response to hurricane Katrina is not proof of government’s failure; it is proof of George W. Bush’s failure to govern effectively.   The failure to govern well is a natural and a predictable result of disbelief in government. It is a brief step from disbelief in government to disbelief in governance. With many Democrats in tow, conservatives have demonized government: “Government is not the answer; government is the problem,” was Ronald Reagan’s inaugural pronouncement. How does one, not believing in government, respond when given its reins? In the case of the incumbent and previous conservative presidents the response is to not take it too seriously. Work out a couple of hours a day. Take a nap. Watch television in the evenings. Resist foreign travel and engagement in the great events of the times. Delegate authority, in many cases to incompetent people, because it really doesn’t matter much. Most of all avoid responsibility and, at all costs, accept accountability only reluctantly.   The most obvious problem with this theory of management, if you wish to call it that, is that people die. On January 31, 2001, the U.S. Commission on National Security - 21st Century, the most comprehensive review of national security in more than half a century which I co-chaired with Warren Rudman, warned of terrorist attacks and urged President Bush to create a Department of Homeland Security. Eight months later, 9.11 occurred. He was warned. He neglected to act. Another nine months went by before he reluctantly acceded to our recommendation. A year and a half was lost. He was never called to account.   Four years later hurricane Katrina revealed how slip-shod, mismanaged, uncoordinated, lackadaisical that agency still was. The president took little or no interest. He could not be bothered. This was “government” and he does not believe in government. When in public office, I heard chanted like a mantra, Why can’t we run government like a business? Perhaps only George W. Bush can imagine running a giant corporation like he tries to run the government of the world’s greatest super-power. It would soon be on the verge of bankruptcy, its customers would have fled, its management would be in chaos, and any board of directors worth its salt would have fired him. Does he really want to be held to serious business standards? As Edmund Burke had it, “a great empire and little minds go ill together.” The columnist David Brooks recently asked how “a comprehensive governmental failure is going to restore America’s faith in big government.” It shouldn’t. But it should now cause Americans to wake up to the difference between ineffective and effective government and the consequence of electing a “leader” who not only doesn’t believe in government, he doesn’t believe in governance. To judge the effectiveness of government by the performance of the most incompetent president in modern times is a shabby refuge for discredited conservatism.   There was a time when the terrorism of the day was economic depression. Thankfully we had a president who had the genius to govern effectively and he saved democratic capitalism. But he couldn’t waste much time on an exercise bike, for he had polio.   Whatever one’s beliefs about the size of government, and the size of government has increased under Ronald Reagan and both Bushes, there ought to be some commonsense consensus that to seek to govern at all involves a solemn commitment to govern well. And to govern well means to be engaged, to step off the exercise bike and into the machinery of management, to appoint competent managers and actively inquire whether they are doing their jobs, to visit the levees before they give way, to order a snap emergency drill at Homeland Security and put a stop-watch on performance, to visit first responders (even without photographers) to see if they are awake and to offer encouragement.   Had we had a president who believed in effective, energetic government, levees might have been strengthened, drills coordinating disaster response among levels of government might have been carried out, mothballed military bases might have been made ready for victims, evacuation plans might have been current. We have now paid the somber price for the carefree neglect, the smirk and the wink, the frat-boy funny names, the swagger and the brush-cutting photo-ops. Now is the time for a sober understanding that governing America requires more than an attitude, especially one that guarantees ineffective government and incompetent governance.   We might then not have the most physically fit president in recent history, but we would surely have a more physically fit nation.   15 September 2005   "President Bush must address Poverty in America". (Congresswoman Barbara Lee / Dem-Oakland)   The devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina has torn down the curtain, and exposed the dirty secret that divides our nation like an open wound.   If anyone ever doubted that there were two Americas, hurricane Katrina and our government''s shameful response to it have made the division clear for all to see.   New Orleans is a city where 67 percent of the population was black. Nearly 30 percent, one in every three people, were living below the poverty line. Twenty one percent of the households earned less than $10,000 a year. Eighty four percent of the people living in poverty in New Orleans were black.   The brutal fact is that the majority of people who died in this tragedy were poor, primarily African Americans. Many were old and disabled.   So, when the disaster came, people who had cash in the bank and a car in the garage escaped, and those who did not were shamefully left to fend for themselves.   The incompetence and indifference demonstrated by the administration in responding to this tragedy was shocking, but it wasn''t surprising. Does anyone doubt that if this sort of devastation had taken place in the communities where the small percentage of people who are benefiting from the Bush administration''s tax cuts live, the response would have been swift and efficient? Can you imagine these individuals, desperately clinging to their roofs, waiting for days to be rescued?   This indifference to the most vulnerable among us is not isolated to this tragedy. It is part and parcel of a systemic problem that seeks to make a large sector of our population invisible, where more than $200 billion has gone towards an unnecessary war that has stripped our resources for economic and homeland security.   Many people, viewing the human tragedy left in Katrina''s wake, could not recognize the images they were seeing. They thought they were witnessing a tragedy in Somalia, Haiti or Sudan. They think to themselves, this does not look like the America that I know. Some have even come to refer to the survivors of this catastrophe as "refugees," as if the images of the survivors they are seeing are too foreign for them to recognize them as Americans.   For some of us, however, this is an America we know too well, an America that is too often swept under the rug by lawmakers and the media.   The truth is, there are almost 36 million Americans living in poverty in the United States today. There are more than 15 million living in extreme poverty.   What does that mean? According to the Census Bureau, it means that a family of three is living on less than $14,680 a year. They define extreme poverty as half of that.   The connection between poverty and race cannot be ignored. In 2003, while 8.2 percent of whites lived in poverty, the number was 22.5 was for Latinos and 24.4 percent for African Americans.   Since President Bush took office, the number of poor people in America has grown by 17 percent. In 2002-2003 the number of children living in extreme poverty grew by half a million.   This is the real state of the so-called "ownership society." And it is unacceptable. The Bush administration''s zeal for cutting taxes for the wealthy while cutting the programs that reach the most vulnerable helped lay the groundwork for this disaster.   Ideas have consequences, and the aftermath of Katrina has demonstrated the bankruptcy of the Bush administration''s idea of the role of government. It was not simply the failure to respond to the hurricane in a coherent or competent manner, it was the tragic failure to acknowledge the massive structural crisis that poverty and inequality pose for our nation and the stubborn refusal to conceive of any constructive role for our government in addressing it.   It is time to start moving in the right direction again, and the first step is for the Bush administration to acknowledge that there is a problem.   I call on President Bush to demonstrate that he is not indifferent to the least among us. I have introduced legislation, asking President Bush to present his plan to eradicate poverty in this nation.   America has been shocked by the images that have exposed this terrible divide in our nation. It is up to us now to decide whether our government has a responsibility to help improve the lives of the millions of Americans who are living in poverty, or whether we will again abandon them to the dirty water to fend for themselves.   Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) represents California''s Ninth Congressional District.   September 5, 2005   "Killed by Contempt", by Paul Krugman. (New York Times)   Each day since Katrina brings more evidence of the lethal ineptitude of federal officials. I"m not letting state and local officials off the hook, but federal officials had access to resources that could have made all the difference, but were never mobilized.   Here"s one of many examples: The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday - without patients.   Experts say that the first 72 hours after a natural disaster are the crucial window during which prompt action can save many lives. Yet action after Katrina was anything but prompt. Newsweek reports that a "strange paralysis" set in among Bush administration officials, who debated lines of authority while thousands died.   What caused that paralysis? President Bush certainly failed his test. After 9/11, all the country really needed from him was a speech. This time it needed action - and he didn"t deliver.   But the federal government"s lethal ineptitude wasn"t just a consequence of Mr. Bush"s personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn"t forthcoming?   Does anyone remember the fight over federalizing airport security? Even after 9/11, the administration and conservative members of Congress tried to keep airport security in the hands of private companies. They were more worried about adding federal employees than about closing a deadly hole in national security.   Of course, the attempt to keep airport security private wasn"t just about philosophy; it was also an attempt to protect private interests. But that"s not really a contradiction. Ideological cynicism about government easily morphs into a readiness to treat government spending as a way to reward your friends. After all, if you don"t believe government can do any good, why not?   Which brings us to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In my last column, I asked whether the Bush administration had destroyed FEMA"s effectiveness. Now we know the answer.   Several recent news analyses on FEMA"s sorry state have attributed the agency"s decline to its inclusion in the Department of Homeland Security, whose prime concern is terrorism, not natural disasters. But that supposed change in focus misses a crucial part of the story.   For one thing, the undermining of FEMA began as soon as President Bush took office. Instead of choosing a professional with expertise in responses to disaster to head the agency, Mr. Bush appointed Joseph Allbaugh, a close political confidant. Mr. Allbaugh quickly began trying to scale back some of FEMA"s preparedness programs.   You might have expected the administration to reconsider its hostility to emergency preparedness after 9/11 - after all, emergency management is as important in the aftermath of a terrorist attack as it is following a natural disaster. As many people have noticed, the failed response to Katrina shows that we are less ready to cope with a terrorist attack today than we were four years ago.   But the downgrading of FEMA continued, with the appointment of Michael Brown as Mr. Allbaugh"s successor.   Mr. Brown had no obvious qualifications, other than having been Mr. Allbaugh"s college roommate. But Mr. Brown was made deputy director of FEMA; The Boston Herald reports that he was forced out of his previous job, overseeing horse shows. And when Mr. Allbaugh left, Mr. Brown became the agency"s director. The raw cronyism of that appointment showed the contempt the administration felt for the agency; one can only imagine the effects on staff morale.   That contempt, as I"ve said, reflects a general hostility to the role of government as a force for good. And Americans living along the Gulf Coast have now reaped the consequences of that hostility.   The administration has always tried to treat 9/11 purely as a lesson about good versus evil. But disasters must be coped with, even if they aren"t caused by evildoers. Now we have another deadly lesson in why we need an effective government, and why dedicated public servants deserve our respect. Will we listen?   (Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University).   6 - 9 - 2005   "After Katrina, a government adrift", by Godfrey Hodgson. (openDemocracy)   It is not just the levees of New Orleans that are weak. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, George Bush’s predicament reveals serious breaches in the way the American government works – weaknesses that result from the domination of sectarian conservative politics in the country’s administration and culture.   It would be nice to think that the conservative ascendancy is the democratic consequence of mass conversion of a majority of the American electorate to conservative shibboleths in law, economics, religion and foreign policy. It would be truer to say that it is the result of a quarter-century of political manipulation by a surprisingly small coterie of conservative activists.   Conservatives like to say that those pesky Democrats enjoyed a comparable ascendancy once. They didn’t. In the middle third of the 20th century, when Democrats controlled the White House most of the time and the Congress almost all the time, the real flywheel that ran the country was a conservative alliance between mostly conservative Republicans and the bloc of southern conservative Democrats, some twenty senators and a hundred members of the House of Representatives. That structure was swept away by the civil rights revolution. But the counter-intuitive consequence has been to give conservative Republicans an opportunity to dominate every part of a system that was supposed to be checked and balanced.   Those of us who admired the political system the conservatives have been doing their best to dismantle must look beyond the immediate inadequacy of George W Bush to the long-term damage the conservative ascendancy has done to American government and society.   Damage and dereliction   As the feeblest president since the 1920s struggles to delay the disappearance of his political credibility beneath the muddy waters of New Orleans and Baghdad, paradoxically Republican conservatives have achieved a dominance without precedent in the American system which, thanks to the legal traditionalists of the Federalist Society, runs flat contrary to the intentions of the founding fathers.   It is almost irresistibly tempting to heap Mississippi mud on George Bush. His response was pathetic. Though he has not so far appeared in a specially designed “commander-in-chief” jacket to tell us that his mission has been accomplished, his first response was to see Katrina as an opportunity to call on his fellow-citizens to import less oil - that is, to call on Congress to give more perks to the oil and gas business that has contributed so handsomely to the private and political fortunes of his friends and supporters.   But it is unseemly to kick a fellow when he is down, even if you sense he would do it to you. And more importantly, many of the charges thrown at him do not stick. Whatever you think of the war in Iraq, the absence in the middle east of part of the Mississippi national guard was hardly the reason for the administration’s tardy and incompetent response. The explanation of that is simpler: it is to be found in the callous indifference among conservatives towards the poor.   While it is true that the class bias of the Bush administration’s domestic and budget policies has helped weaken the ability of both state and federal agencies to respond to an almost unprecedented domestic disaster, it was nevertheless an absence of sympathy, not a lack of means, which motivated the low priority given to poor, mostly black victims. (The disaster is almost unprecedented – there have been great disasters in the US before, such as the Mississippi flood of 1927, which flooded 26,000 square miles, caused more than a thousand deaths and forced almost a million people from their homes.)   Unfortunately it is not a surprise that, forty years after the Lyndon B Johnson administration’s civil-rights legislation, most African-Americans in the Deep South live in poverty. Journalistic rhetoric along the lines of “how could this happen in the midst of the world’s richest nation/lone superpower/greatest democracy?” is wide of the mark. Louisiana, Mississippi, southern Alabama and Arkansas are and have always been a “third-world” region with a democracy deficit, in spite of the arrival of a few Japanese car plants and a booming gambling industry, protected by Republican insider lobbyists like Jack Abramoff.   Meanwhile, it may or may not be true that Katrina’s ferocity, which wrought such devastation on the coast, owes something to the global warming about which Bush and his political housecarls are still in denial. At present, there seems to be no scientific consensus that hurricanes are more frequent and more severe because of climate change. But, ominously, as the hurricane sped towards the shore, Republican committee chairmen in Congress were harrying leading scientists who dare to suggest global warming might be at least in part man-made.   Dominance over government   Now is the time for those of us who care about what the conservative ascendancy has done to America to estimate the flood damage. Sectarian conservatives – by which I mean not those of a cautious or traditionalist bent, but ambitious politicos who long ago signed up to a self-interested ideological takeover of the American government – control all branches of the polity.   It is not just that the president is a conservative Republican, and that consequently the vice-president, the White House staff, the cabinet officers and all senior members of the administration have passed a rigorous ideological screening.   The entire culture of Washington is now dominated by this same ideological mindset. The most powerful law firms, the K Street lobbying organisations, the best-funded research institutions, all do obeisance to the party line, or face the consequences. Even the Washington media, once respected for its feisty independence, seems almost intimidated, as the Bush administration wields as much pressure as it can — by fair means and not so fair — to exclude critics and neutralise opposition. Public television is just one recent target. Over on mainstream television, so-called pundits engage in reactionary, derogatory disputes.   The founders intended the legislative and judicial branches of government to be equipped with separate, balanced powers, each checking the other. Today not only are both houses of Congress controlled by conservative Republicans, but those conservative Republicans are themselves intimidated by a handful of powerful figures who limit the freedom of committee scrutiny, cut off financial resources from those who do not toe the line, and behave in ways that make the legendary Democratic powerbrokers of the past - Lyndon B Johnson, speaker Sam Rayburn, Judge Smith of the rules committee and Wilbur Mills of ways and means - look positively biddable.   As for the judges, George W Bush has just nominated a candidate to the supreme sourt who, whatever his great qualities, is a safe conservative vote. With the death of chief justice William H Rehnquist and John Roberts’ appointment, he will be able to maintain an unassailable conservative majority on the court, at a time when there is steady pressure from conservative headquarters for the judges to reverse the progressive measures of the Warren court and repeal Roe vs. Wade. Moreover, the Bush administration and the Republicans in the Senate are unashamedly determined to appoint only conservatives to as many federal judgeships as they can.   While the administration claims to be bringing democracy to the benighted populations of the middle east, at home the United States sees the spirit and the practice of genuine democracy more threatened than at any time since the Gilded Age of the 19th century.   At the heart of this “conservative” ideology has been a sustained attack on government, which is habitually derided as bureaucracy. Government budgets have been cut, government servants humiliated and harassed. Is it any wonder that the efficacy of government has suffered, in Baghdad and on the Gulf coast? In both cases, the tooth-clenched “resolve” the president is always talking about has not proved a substitute for efficiency and generosity.   Dare we hope that the truly lasting importance of the hurricane will be to revive the news media’s independence, and to alert the Democratic party to the full spectrum of dangers in giving unchecked power to a shallow president, corporate interests, and a limited political and ideological clique?
	To Save the World from Hell by Samantha Power Le Monde Diplomatique   Published: September 2005   There will be an exceptional summit of world leaders in New York this month to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, and to consider proposals for its desperately needed reform, although whatever they can agree upon is sure to be disappointing and will be derided. The UN has failed to banish war, yet it remains indispensable to the world’s peace..   Sixty years ago the battered victors of the second world war gathered in San Francisco to plan the creation of the global organisation that would not “bring us to heaven”, as the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr, put it, but might “save us from hell”. President Franklin D Roosevelt began the creation of the UN, but when he died, 13 days before the San Francisco conference, Harry Truman took over. Truman makes President George Bush look well-travelled: he had been to Europe only once, during service in the first world war. Yet he understood the importance of US engagement with the UN. “America can no longer sit smugly behind a mental Maginot line,” he wrote. The stakes were too high: “In a world without such machinery, we would be forever doomed to the fear of destruction. It was important for us to make a start, no matter how imperfect”.   The UN’s imperfections were manifest from its creation. It was built upon some obvious contradictions. It was necessary because greedy and bellicose states could not be trusted to avoid war, respect the rights of their citizens or care for people suffering outside their borders. Yet the new UN would rely upon those selfish states to enforce its principles.   Just as the US constitution hailed equality but legitimised slavery, so the UN charter proclaimed self-determination and encouraged decolonisation, but was steered by many member states that resisted surrendering their colonies. (In the UN’s first two decades, membership, originally 51 states, soared to 117 - it now has 191 members.)   The UN gave equal voice to dictatorships and democracies, but its charter took sides, calling on members to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms. The UN, like any other organisation, depended on authoritative leadership, but power was put in the hands of the Security Council, a squabbling committee dominated by five permanent members with widely divergent interests and political systems. The secretary general, the nominal face of the organisation, was appointed to serve as only the chief administrative officer. He was a servant of the states, a point driven home by his place of work, a secretariat.   Moreover the UN was premised on the idea that the gravest threat to mankind was cross-border aggression, the main cause of the second world war: history later showed that the gravest threats came from states abusing citizens within their borders, or from terrorists who disregarded borders. It is no wonder that Charles de Gaulle referred to the UN as the “so-called United Nations”, while David Ben Gurion teased the UN (“Oom” in Hebrew) by muttering “Oom Schmoom”.   Annus horribilis   The organisation was ridiculed from its founding, but 2004 was its worst year, its annus horribilis, according to Kofi Annan. Its steep slide began in 2003 when the UN’s most powerful state, the US, together with Britain, overrode the divided security council to make war in Iraq.   When it briefly looked as if the war had been won, the rest of Europe, which had been opposed to the war, and the US tried to conciliate, and chose to do so through the UN. The security council passed a resolution recognising the US occupation of Iraq (which was a victory for the US) and summoned Annan to send a UN political mission to Iraq to speed the transfer of power to the Iraqis (which was a victory for Europe).   Annan seldom feels he can say no to the council, no matter what its request. He was so obsessed with the US accusation that the UN was losing its relevance that he immediately obliged with a mission. He did more. He offered the UN’s best: his old friend, Sergio Vieira de Mello, the most seasoned nation-builder and diplomat in the UN. Eleven weeks after landing in Iraq with an oxymoronic mandate (for how do you simultaneously assist and dismantle an occupation?), De Mello and 21 other UN workers were murdered by a suicide bomber.   The year then worsened. UN peacekeepers from Morocco, South Africa, Nepal, Pakistan, Tunisia and Uruguay were discovered to have committed sexual offences against young girls in Congo and in Liberia. UN officials who staffed the $65bn oil-for-food programme that had fed Iraqis during the late 1990s were accused of receiving bribes. The UN Commission on Human Rights, chaired by Libya in 2003, re-elected Sudan to a three-year term of office in 2004 despite a campaign of ethnic slaughter in the country that had taken tens of thousands of lives.   In early 2005, as the UN hit rock bottom, the Bush administration announced that its next ambassador at the UN would be John Bolton, a man who did not recognise the existence of international law and said that if the UN building “lost 10 storeys, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference”. In March this year a reporter asked Annan if he thought it was time for him to resign. Annan has long liked to joke that the SG for his title of secretary general “stands for scapegoat”, yet, totally out of character, he fired back, “Hell, no” and promised reforms in time for both anniversary celebrations this month.   New desperation   UN reform has been talked about, usually unhelpfully, for as long as the UN has existed. But never before has the subject been broached as desperately as now. In an organisation where jobs are difficult to acquire but impossible to lose, several key officials in Annan’s inner circle have been forced out. He has recommended disbanding the easy entry (and embarrassing) Commission on Human Rights and establishing a smaller council of states that respect human rights. Germany, Japan, Brazil and India have forged a bloc to win permanent seats on a newly-expanded security council.   Nowhere is the talk of reform louder or more self-satisfied than in the US. The motives of the self-styled reformers vary. The House majority leader, Tom DeLay, a long-time UN-basher, hopes to use reform to diminish the autonomy of the UN, which he describes as “one of the world’s great apologists for tyranny and terror”. His colleague, Henry Hyde, produced a bill, passed in the House on 17 June, that would withhold 50% of the US’s UN dues if the organisation does not meet at least 32 of 46 conditions by 2007.   The Bush administration rightly opposes the bill because it says it would depreciate US influence at the UN at a time when it is most needed and, more important to an administration famous for seeking control, because it would intrude on the president’s foreign policy-making authority. Distancing itself from Delay and Hyde, the Bush administration has publicly backed Annan’s calls to abolish the Commission on Human Rights and overhaul UN management and administration. It has called for building a caucus of democracies within the UN, as well as approving a convention on counter-terrorism. US officials say that only when these changes are under way should the General Assembly get drawn into a debate about Security Council expansion. “We don’t want to see all the oxygen sucked out of the room [by the council debate],” said the US undersecretary of state, Nicholas Burns.   The administration supports giving a permanent seat (but not a veto) to Japan, the UN’s second-largest financial contributor, and to one other country. It supports adding two or three non-permanent seats. A more dramatic intake of new members, Burns suggested, would not be easily digestible and would turn the council into an even more cumbersome decision-making body than it is. It might come to resemble the unwieldy 26-member Nato council.   But President Bush has been uncharacteristically coy about whether Brazil, Germany or India would be approved. “We oppose no country’s bid for the Security Council,” he said on 27 June, immediately after meeting the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder.   Among UN officials in New York, reform is welcome. With the UN’s reputation in tatters in the country where it is based, how could it not be? But UN veterans are sceptical about how far reforms can go, given that so many of the problems are the result of fissures that were carved into the UN’s foundation in 1945, and also of conscious policy choices by the UN’s most powerful member states.   Blame game   Blaming the UN for the Rwandan genocide or for Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, as Richard Holbrooke, former US ambassador to the UN, says, “is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the New York Knicks play badly”. The UN is a building. It is the behaviour and priorities of the states within it that need to be reformed. Take two notorious examples of the UN in crisis: peacekeeping and mismanagement. The most serious accusations against the UN have been that the massacres in Rwanda in 1994 and Srebrenica in 1995 happened in the presence of UN peacekeepers.   Annan, who then ran the department of peacekeeping operations in New York, was warned by Romeo Dallaire, his field general in Rwanda, of the imminent events. Annan, unforgivably, failed to pass the warning to the Security Council.   But who must bear the greatest responsibility for allowing the genocide? Annan, who predicted that the warning would cause member states either to do nothing or to flee Rwanda (a prediction borne out during the genocide, when western powers withdrew UN peacekeepers)? Or Bill Clinton who, fearing that US troops might get drawn in, demanded that the blue helmets be evacuated when the massacres were already happening? Or François Mitterrand, who had helped arm and train the murderers, and whose French soldiers parachuted in to rescue leading perpetrators during the last days of the killings?   Has anything changed? Western nations have heeded the lessons of the 1990s, but not by ensuring that peacekeeping is done well. Instead, they have avoided peacekeeping altogether. Armed forces from western nations who serve under the UN flag are now rare. The five main contributors of troops to the UN are Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Ghana. The successful military operations of the past decade - the Nato intervention in Kosovo in 1999, the Australian rescue of the East Timorese in 1999, and the British mission in Sierra Leone in 2000, were carried out by coalitions of the willing.   Instead of strengthening collective structures to perform essential humanitarian and peacekeeping tasks, rich countries have decided to go it alone or stay home. The troops of poor countries are managing the hardest cases, such as Congo and Darfur.   In peacekeeping, the UN hardly constitutes what Bolton called a “great rusting hulk of bureaucratic superstructure”. The UN lacks the staff to manage the blue helmets it does deploy. After the debacles of the 1990s Annan promised never to allow the UN to be overstretched again. But the Security Council has authorised the deployment of 18 new missions. Because of costcutting, 66,000 peacekeepers are supported in headquarters by only 500 personnel. No western member state would dream of sending its troops in harm’s way with so little backing from headquarters. Yet when the troops are to be sent from the developing world, the major powers do not hestitate.   As Kevin Kennedy, an operational wizard at UN headquarters in New York, put it: “The places the UN is sent generally suck. That’s not an excuse for incompetence or laziness, but they suck. And if they didn’t suck, UN member states would deal with them themselves.” If the UN goes mainly to places all others wish to avoid, and with the skimpiest of resources, it is no wonder that the UN’s rate of peacekeeping success is not high.   Gifts with strings   The other high-profile target of reform zealotry is the notoriously inefficient UN management. Ronald Reagan once said that accepting a US government grant, with all its rules, was like marrying a girl and finding that her entire family moved in with you before the honeymoon. The strings that member states attach to payment of their UN dues are even more demoralising; they insist that every penny they give the UN be meticulously accounted for, meaning that senior staff working in the most perilous UN missions often spend more time on paperwork than they do on the prevention of HIV, planning elections, or policing the streets.   And in personnel decisions, member states insist on pushing their nationals, regardless of their suitability for the job. As Annan said to me recently, “We don’t get the best. Governments tend to send us those people they can’t place.”   But it is too simple to blame the UN member states for the annus horribilis or place the burden of reform on the member states. On the rare occasions that the UN secretariat does attract the best, it rarely keeps them. When De Mello died in the Baghdad blast, Annan, who was obviously shaken, said: “I had only one Sergio.” While he was paying tribute to a brave and brilliant public servant, that statement was also an unwitting indictment of the organisation that he runs. When he needed a troubleshooter, he should have been able to call upon somebody other than De Mello or the former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi, who is now 71. The UN eats its young. The quality of its staff will continue to suffer if UN leaders do not stamp out the defeatist culture in which UN officials see themselves only as the objects of member state machinations, not as the shaper of them.   It is unlikely that the member states will change soon, and unlikely that the contradictions built into the UN will be easily overcome. But while the most powerful states have yet to be convinced that a strong UN will advance their interests, all of them can agree that a UN mired in scandal distracts member states and UN agencies from dealing with pressing security and humanitarian challenges.   So the secretariat must tidy up its administrative house; recruit, retain and develop young talent; push to appoint the best envoys and senior staff on the basis of merit rather than nationality; and be unashamed to publicise, not internalise, predictable efforts by member states to manipulate, micromanage and under-fund UN programmes.   If there is one reform that the UN secretariat can achieve alone, it is a refusal to allow the UN flag to be used to screen member states’ discord and indifference.
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