Abolish The U.N.

Whenever I walk by the United Nations, usually hunched over forward to prevent the icy wind blowing across Turtle Bay off the East River from enveloping my face, I try to listen or read what a group or individual are protesting. While fighting the elements as I make my way through the crowd or barricade, I can’t help wonder when this unfunded dinosaur will join the ranks of other beautiful relics in New York’s museums and become a peaceful historical geopolitical Jurassic Park. The Museum of Natural History came to mind. Prime East River real estate, wasted on an outdated global failure. Just like the U.N. peace missions and countless resolutions. Twentieth century failures, as Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Iraq and Sudan remind us. Isn’t it really time for the U.S. to get out of the U.N. and the U.N. to get out of the U.S.?

Walter Lippmann once wrote: “A policy is bound to fail which deliberately violates our pledges and our principles, our treaties and our laws. The American conscience is a reality.” One of the first lessons I learned when I started practicing law was that “what starts fucked up ends up fucked up.” Barnie Shapiro, a senior partner at the firm I started my legal career, ingrained that quote in me after I questioned why a particular company we were representing was bankrupt. I’ve modified the expression to: “An organization is like a building. It’s as good as its foundation.”

The U.N. was built on the site of a former abattoir – a slaughter house. Built in 1952, the retro modernist building, with stained glass by Marc Chagall, murals by Fernand Leger and a tapestry by Picasso’s celebrated anti-war painting, Guernica, violates New York’s safety and fire codes. The building is packed with toxic asbestos, has no sprinkler system and leaks about a quarter of the heat used to keep it warm in winter. The U.N. wants to build another office building next door, so that the headquarters building can be gutted. How appropriate. Why not just go for the kill?

Why waste the $1.6 billion on a temporary conference hall for the General Assembly that will be in use until the proposed renovations that will take place until 2013? The $1.6 billion price tag is 55% higher than anticipated. No surprise there.

The Hong Kong government demolishes buildings with weak foundations, even brand new ones if the pilings are not up to code. The U.N.’s pilings, not to mention piles, that the UN security videos reveal of the homosexual sexual activities in the the most secretive confines of the building while trying to defend themselves against crime and terrorism do not serve or comply with any code of today’s geopolitical reality and like substandard buildings in Hong Kong should be replaced-superceded by a global organization that is up to the geopolitical code of the 21st century.

UN-Sanction Sanctions

The U.N. embargoes on Serbia and Iraq have failed. Tobacco companies R.J. Reynolds, Philip Morris and Japan Tobacco sold billions of cigarettes in violation of the embargoes. Russia, a Security Council member, sent electronic jamming equipment, antitank missiles and night vision goggles to Saddam’s regime on planes with Russian businessmen in defiance of the U.N. sanctions and without the U.N.’s approval. Russia’s $40-billion economic pact with Iraq further highlighted the futility of U.N. sanctions. The combination of the lure of the dollar and sympathy for cultural kin made a mockery of U.N. economic sanctions against Serbia as they did to the U.N. arms embargo against all the former Yugoslav republics.

The most absurd embargo of all was the arms embargo imposed on the Taliban in Afghanistan. Even a United Nations study on the feasibility of imposing an arms embargo on the Taliban concluded that more than 300 border crossings existed between Pakistan and Afghanistan and very few were staffed. The report concluded that if the United Nations wanted to stop every truck with a capacity of more than 10 tons, more than 10,000 border guards would be needed. Nevertheless, the U.N. imposed the arms embargo and left the enforcement to the bordering countries rather than external monitors. In other words, nothing was done after the embargo was imposed.

The U.N. embargoes are just as meaningless as the U.S. embargos on China, Cuba, North Korea, Haiti and Vietnam. Remember, America had an embargo on China from 1949-1979 and labeled it a rogue state. Vietnam was considered the enemy from 1975 until the embargo was lifted in 1994. Today both China and Vietnam epitomize capitalism, not the communism Washington feared. The same will happen in North Korea and Cuba once the embargoes are lifted. The embargoes merely perpetuate the dictatorships they are intended to bring down because they restructure their societies in detrimental ways to survive the sanctions while they impoverish their populace.

The U.S. calls for the U.N. to impose economic sanctions on Iran because of its refusal to stop its nuclear program were a non-starter. Russia and China are economically tied to Iran and would veto any such resolution. There is no doubt that Iran is developing nuclear technology and is willing to share such technology with other Islamic nations. But economic sanctions are not the solution to ending Iran’s nuclear program. The same holds true for any U.S. efforts to impose a U.N. sanctioned embargo on North Korea.
The leaders of the countries against whom sanctions are imposed merely create a lucrative underground black market that allows their supporters and backers to profit handsomely, at the expense of the people. Sanctions also create havens for gun runners, drug traffickers and money launderers. In Haiti, sanctions reinforced what Sen. John Kerry in 1993 called “a partnership made in hell, in cocaine, and in dollars between the Colombian cartels and the Haitian military,” solidifying Haiti’s role as a conduit for drugs to the U.S. and hobbling Haitian democracy, which the embargoes were meant to restore.

The 40-plus year embargo on Cuba has been such a failure that every kind of U.S. made product is available there. MasterCard, Visa and every consumer item from soft drinks to diapers can be found by the more than 200,000 plus American citizens who travel there in defiance of the embargo. Western Union has an office there to facilitate the wire transfer of dollars – including those from the Oil-for-Food program.

The Oil-for-Food program demonstrated the shortcomings of sanctions. “Sanctions are a blunt instrument which have a tendency to hurt a lot of people they are not aimed at, while providing opportunities for clever people to make money,” said Edward Mortimer, a senior advisor to U.N. General-Secretary Kofi Annan.