Give the U.N. the Credit It Has Earned

Is a capacity for stupidity a requirement for membership in the U.S. Senate? How else to explain that 93-0 vote to urge the United Nations to try Saddam Hussein as a war criminal the very week that the chief U.N. weapons inspector praised Baghdad for a new spirit of cooperation?

“We were given access of a kind we’ve never had before,” Richard Butler said, “both in terms of the places we got into and in terms of the number of inspectors and the way in which we got into those places.”

If the goal is to destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, then the U.N. inspection program has proved a stunning success. More weapons have been destroyed than during the Gulf War, without the disastrous human costs. Iraq’s nuclear threat has been eliminated and its capacity for biological war eroded.

Thanks to the effective diplomacy of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, that effort is being speeded up and once-forbidden sites now are open to inspection. Two weeks ago, U.N. inspectors searched the headquarters of the Iraqi Ministry of Defense for the first time in seven years.

Significantly, the recent round of inspections was led by William Scott Ritter Jr., the former Marine whom Baghdad had accused of being a U.S. spy. Butler said that he expects his teams to enter the eight presidential palaces, previously off limits, by the end of this week.

Iraq’s refusal to permit such inspections was the justification for a planned blitzkrieg, which would very likely have cost the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis. Shouldn’t we be thanking the secretary-general for accomplishing the same goal without all that death and mayhem? But instead of applauding the U.N. for making this a safer world, the Senate, following the obnoxious leadership of Foreign Relations Chairman Jesse Helms, refuses to pay the $1.4 billion that the U.S. owes in U.N. back dues for peacekeeping activities our government had encouraged.

The U.N. is threatened with bankruptcy at a time when it has proved so valuable to the world because it is a convenient hostage in the domestic battle over abortion. (The Republicans in Congress have similarly attached antiabortion riders, which they know Clinton won’t sign, to funding for the International Monetary Fund’s Asian bailout.)

Annan has made good on his commitment to streamline the U.N.’s bureaucracy and otherwise cut costs, and that effort should now be rewarded by the United States’ making good on its financial obligations to the organization.

Throughout the world, U.N. personnel are struggling to keep the peace in volatile situations. Daily, it is the U.N. that provides the difference between death and life for those faced with starvation and violence. In Iraq where the U.N. estimates that more than 1 million children suffer from malnutrition, U.N. teams last week provided polio vaccine to 3.5 million children under the age of 5. Those kids are the true victims of our embargo, not Hussein, who continues to live the high life.

It is in the interests of innocent civilians that we begin the process of normalization, as was called for in an editorial last Sunday in the state-run Baghdad Observer. Hussein remains a bloody dictator, but no more so than when we backed him in the war against Iran.

And since when have we drawn the line at normal relations with dictators? Now we hear that the U.S. no longer will support the resolution in the U.N. condemning China for human rights abuses.

The demonization of Hussein, reiterated once again in the Senate resolution, may be rhetorically satisfying, but it distorts any serious assessment of the dangers in this world. Has anyone looked at Kadafi’s Libya lately, or those ever-cheerful folk contending for power in Afghanistan? Is our obsession with Hussein leading us to embrace the ayatollahs of Iran who are now assisting us in blocking Iraqi trade? Hussein will never be a good guy, but normalization will lead to trade, investment and tourism--the power package that has proved so effective in undermining totalitarian regimes.

It is a good sign that Defense Secretary William Cohen credited U.N. inspectors for their success in gaining access to suspected Iraqi weapons sites. Even more promising was his statement that economic sanctions against Iraq would be lifted if Baghdad offers proof that it has destroyed its weapons of mass destruction. That is far more reasonable than continuing to punish the Iraqis for failing to overthrow Hussein.

Cohen is a former Republican member of the Senate, and it is encouraging that service in that body does not permanently damage one’s ability to think straight.