Thursday, 06.05.08

The UN Scandal That Wasn't

Photo by Flickr User stevecadman Under a Creative Commons License

After more than a year of strident accusations of corruption, the United Nations Development Program has been cleared of wrongdoing in North Korea.

"I have in my possession the names of 57 Communists ..." Oops -- wrong witch hunt. In a ginned-up controversy that gave the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal a bad case of ants in the pants, Mark D. Wallace, the U.S. representative to the United Nations for administration and reform, accused the United Nations Development Program last spring of transferring more than $15 million in aid money to North Korea's government, hiring DPRK officials to staff UNDP programs, and buying almost $3 million in "goods and services" from an "entity" that had ties to the DPRK's weapons establishment, among other charges. But an outside audit released this week found no evidence that the UN was serving, in effect, as Kim Jong Il's ATM. (Never mind the WSJ board "reporting" that more than $100 million may have been diverted.) More broadly, as the New York Times observed, "the dense 353-page report appeared to concur with what the [UNDP] had maintained all along, that the American allegations were baseless."

The standards of accountability and transparency that the United States wants to set for the United Nations are laudable. Indeed, it would be nice if the United States lived up to them. Worried about contributing to Mr. Kim's nuclear retirement fund? Then stop the millions of dollars in no-strings, cash-in-a-box payments to Pyongyang for its help in locating the remains of U.S. servicemen, or re-freeze the $25 million in North Korean cash we just released from a bank in Macau. Want to protect the financial interests of U.S. taxpayers? Tighten oversight at the Pentagon, which can't account for billions, not just millions, in military spending -- especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the bagmen of the imperium have dispensed satchels of reconstruction cash with nary a receipt or report. Don't think the United States should hire workers from a foreign government to run our overseas missions? Tell that to our diplomatic posts in China, which have always had to choose Chinese employees approved by China's Diplomatic Service Bureau.

Hypocrisy may be one of the privileges of hegemony. But it comes at an increasingly high price. The failed smear campaign against the UNDP, based largely on the testimony of a discredited former employee, will make future (and more legitimate) efforts at UN reform only harder. But that outcome seems unlikely to bother Bush appointees like Wallace, who cared more about tearing down the United Nations than about advancing U.S. interests there. Check out, for example, Michael Hirsh's devastating critique of former U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations John Bolton's failure to prepare for the extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Countries like China send some of their best diplomats -- seasoned firebreathers like Sha Zukang -- to the United Nations. Pitted against them we have political hacks like Mr. Wallace, who started out as Jeb Bush's driver in 1994, helped lead the Republican effort to stymie the Florida recount in 2000, was general counsel of FEMA under Michael "Heck of a Job, Brownie!" Brown, and deputy manager of the Bush campaign in 2004. Thank God, at least, for Zalmay Khalilzad!

— James Gibney

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