[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 86 (Wednesday, June 28, 2006)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1312-E1314]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    IN SUPPORT OF THE UNITED NATIONS

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, June 28, 2006

  Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of Mr. Mark Malloch 
Brown, the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations. In a recent 
speech on ``Power and Super-Power: Global Leadership in the Twenty-
First Century'' at the Century Foundation and Center for American 
Progress in New York, on the 6th of June, Mr. Brown criticized the U.S. 
government for its lack of support given to the United Nations. In his 
speech he claims that the U.S. in the eyes of the rest of the world has 
ignored our commitment to the U.N., allowing divisive issues such as 
the Iraq War to break up a partnership which since the founding of the 
U.N. has mutually benefited the U.S. and the U.N.
  Historically, the U.N. was designed through U.S. leadership and other 
nations who emerged from World War II with the realization that there 
must be a vehicle to encourage the promotion of peace and provide 
collective security to all nations with the goal of promoting global 
values such as human rights and democracy. Today, the U.N. fields 18 
peacekeeping operations around the world, from the Congo to Haiti, 
Sudan to Sierra Leone, Southern Lebanon to Liberia. Unfortunately, the 
U.N.'s ability to respond to the world's challenges is being weakened 
without U.S. leadership.
  The speech identifies several key issues that have exacerbated the 
tension between the U.S. and the U.N. First, The U.N. is currently 
renovating the dilapidated U.N. Headquarters in New York. Ironically, 
the government not fully supporting this project is the U.S. Also, the 
U.N. is undergoing specific reform. This reform comes in many forms 
from the creation of a new Ethics Office and a whistle-blower policy, 
to the establishment of a new Peacebuilding Commission and Human Rights 
Council. Although the U.S. championed such reform, our endorsement has 
provoked more suspicion than support.
  The U.N. will play a larger role in maintaining security around the 
world. No country can afford to neglect the global institutions needed 
to manage it. As such, the U.S. needs to be more supportive of the U.N. 
as a vehicle around which an international consensus can be formed to 
promote peace, social and economic development. America's leaders must 
again recognize that the U.N. matters. Ultimately, as America continues 
to address concerns in countries like Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan, it 
should recognize that it needs the U.N. to provide an effective 
multilateral response that will have international legitimacy and 
support.
  Mr. Speaker, I call upon my colleagues in the House to encourage more 
open collaboration and engagement between the U.S. and the U.N.

       Speech by U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown

       Thank you for allowing me to speak to you today on Power 
     and Global Leadership. I often get asked to talk about 
     leadership, but rarely about power. I wonder why.
       With that thought as my starting point, I am going to give 
     what might be regarded as a rather un-U.N. speech. Some of 
     the themes--that the United Nations is misunderstood and does 
     much more than its critics allow--are probably not 
     surprising. But my underlying message, which is a warning 
     about the serious consequences of a decades-long tendency by 
     U.S. Administrations of both parties to engage only fitfully 
     with the U.N., is not one a sitting United Nations official 
     would normally make to an audience like this.
       But I feel it is a message that urgently needs to be aired. 
     And as someone who has spent most of his adult life in this 
     country, only a part of it at the U.N., I hope you will take 
     it in the spirit in which it is meant: as a sincere and 
     constructive critique of U.S. policy towards the U.N. by a 
     friend and admirer. Because the fact is that the prevailing 
     practice of seeking to use the U.N. almost by stealth as a 
     diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its 
     domestic critics is

[[Page E1313]]

     simply not sustainable. You will lose the U.N. one way or 
     another.


                            Founders' Vision

       Multilateral compromise has always been difficult to 
     justify in the American political debate: too many speeches, 
     too many constraints, too few results. Yet it was not meant 
     to be so. The all-moral-idealism-no-power institution was the 
     League of Nations. The U.N. was explicitly designed through 
     U.S. leadership and the ultimate coalition of the willing, 
     its World War II allies, as a very different creature, an 
     antidote to the League's failure. At the U.N.'s core was to 
     be an enforceable concept of collective security protected by 
     the victors of that war, combined with much more practical 
     efforts to promote global values such as human rights and 
     democracy. Underpinning this new approach was a judgement 
     that no President since Truman has felt able to repeat: that 
     for the world's one super-Power--arguably more super in 1946 
     than 2006--managing global security and development issues 
     through the network of a United Nations was worth the effort. 
     Yes it meant the give and take of multilateral bargaining, 
     but any dilution of American positions was more than made up 
     for by the added clout of action that enjoyed global support.
       Today, we are coming to the end of the 10-year term of 
     arguably the U.N.'s best-ever Secretary-General, Kofi Annan. 
     But some of his very successes--promoting human rights and a 
     responsibility to protect people from abuse by their own 
     Governments; creating a new status for civil society and 
     business at the U.N.--are either not recognized or have come 
     under steady attacks from anti-U.N. groups. To take just one 
     example, 10 years ago U.N. peacekeeping seemed almost 
     moribund in the aftermath of tragic mistakes in Rwanda, 
     Somalia and Yugoslavia. Today, the U.N. fields 18 
     peacekeeping operations around the world, from the Congo to 
     Haiti, Sudan to Sierra Leone, Southern Lebanon to Liberia, 
     with an annual cost that is at a bargain bin price compared 
     to other U.S.-led operations. And the U.S. pays roughly one 
     quarter of those U.N. peacekeeping costs--just over $1 
     billion this year. That figure should be seen in the context 
     of estimates by both the GAO and RAND Corporation that U.N. 
     peacekeeping, while lacking heavy armament enforcement 
     capacity, helps to maintain peace--when there is a peace to 
     keep--more effectively for a lot less than comparable U.S. 
     operations. Multilateral peacekeeping is effective cost-
     sharing on a much lower cost business model and it works. 
     That is as it should be and is true for many other areas 
     the U.N. system works in, too, from humanitarian relief to 
     health to education. Yet for many policymakers and opinion 
     leaders in Washington, let alone the general public, the 
     roles I have described are hardly believed or, where they 
     are, remain discreetly underplayed. To acknowledge an 
     America reliant on international institutions is not 
     perceived to be good politics at home.
       However, inevitably a moment of truth is coming. Because 
     even as the world's challenges are growing, the U.N.'s 
     ability to respond is being weakened without U.S. leadership. 
     Take the issue of human rights. When Eleanor Roosevelt took 
     the podium at the U.N. to argue passionately for the 
     elaboration of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 
     world responded. Today, when the human rights machinery was 
     renewed with the formation of a Human Rights Council to 
     replace the discredited Commission on Human Rights, and the 
     U.S. chose to stay on the sidelines, the loss was 
     everybody's. I hope and believe the new Council will prove 
     itself to be a stronger and more effective body than its 
     predecessor. But there is no question that the U.S. decision 
     to call for a vote in order to oppose it in the General 
     Assembly, and then to not run for a seat after it was 
     approved by 170 votes to 4, makes the challenge more 
     difficult.
       More broadly, Americans complain about the U.N.'s 
     bureaucracy, weak decision-making, the lack of accountable 
     modern management structures and the political divisions of 
     the General Assembly here in New York. And my response is, 
     ``guilty on all counts''. But why? In significant part 
     because the U.S. has not stuck with its project--its 
     professed wish to have a strong, effective United Nations--in 
     a systematic way. Secretary Albright and others here today 
     have played extraordinary leadership roles in U.S.-U.N. 
     relations, for which I salute them. But in the eyes of the 
     rest of the world, U.S. commitment tends to ebb much more 
     than it flows. And in recent years, the enormously divisive 
     issue of Iraq and the big stick of financial withholding have 
     come to define an unhappy marriage.
       As someone who deals with Washington almost daily, I know 
     this is unfair to the very real effort all three Secretaries 
     of State I have worked with--Secretary Albright, Secretary 
     Powell and Secretary Rice--put into U.N. issues. And today, 
     on a very wide number of areas, from Lebanon and Afghanistan 
     to Syria, Iran and the Palestinian issue, the U.S. is 
     constructively engaged with the U.N. But that is not well 
     known or understood, in part because much of the public 
     discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely 
     abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and 
     Fox News. That is what I mean by ``stealth'' diplomacy: the 
     U.N.'s role is in effect a secret in Middle America even as 
     it is highlighted in the Middle East and other parts of the 
     world. Exacerbating matters is the widely held perception, 
     even among many U.S. allies, that the U.S. tends to hold on 
     to maximalist positions when it could be finding middle 
     ground.
       We can see this even on apparently non-controversial issues 
     such as renovating the dilapidated U.N. Headquarters in New 
     York. While an architectural landmark, the building falls 
     dangerously short of city codes, lacks sprinklers, is filled 
     with asbestos and is in most respects the most hazardous 
     workplace in town. But the only Government not fully 
     supporting the project is the U.S. Too much unchecked U.N.-
     bashing and stereotyping over too many years--manifest in a 
     fear by politicians to be seen to be supporting better 
     premises for overpaid, corrupt U.N. bureaucrats--makes even 
     refurbishing a building a political hot potato.


                           Making Reform Work

       One consequence is that, like the building itself, the 
     vital renewal of the Organization, the updating of its 
     mission, its governance and its management tools, is 
     addressed only intermittently. And when the U.S. does 
     champion the right issues like management reform, as it is 
     currently doing, it provokes more suspicion than support. 
     Last December, for example, largely at U.S. insistence, 
     instead of a normal two-year budget, Member States approved 
     only six months' worth of expenditure--a period which ends on 
     June 30. Developing and developed countries, the latter with 
     the U.S. at the fore, are now at loggerheads over whether 
     sufficient reform has taken place to lift that cap, or indeed 
     whether there should be any links between reform and the 
     budget. Without agreement, we could face a fiscal crisis very 
     soon.
       There has been a significant amount of reform over the last 
     18 months, from the creation of a new Ethics Office and 
     whistle-blower policy, to the establishment of a new 
     Peacebuilding Commission and Human Rights Council. But not 
     enough. The unfinished management reform agenda, which the 
     U.S. sensibly supports, is in many ways a statement of the 
     obvious. It argues that systems and processes designed 60 
     years ago for an organization largely devoted to running 
     conferences and writing reports simply don't work for today's 
     operational U.N., which conducts multibillion-dollar 
     peacekeeping missions, humanitarian relief operations and 
     other complex operations all over the world. The report sets 
     out concrete proposals for how this can be fixed while also 
     seeking to address the broader management, oversight and 
     accountability weaknesses highlighted by the ``oil-for-food'' 
     programme.
       One day soon we must address the massive gap between the 
     scale of world issues and the limits of the institutions we 
     have built to address them. However, today even relatively 
     modest proposals that in any other organization would be seen 
     as uncontroversial, such as providing more authority and 
     flexibility for the Secretary-General to shift posts and 
     resources to organizational priorities without having to get 
     direct approval from Member States, have been fiercely 
     resisted by the G-77, the main group of developing countries, 
     on the grounds that this weakens accountability. Hence the 
     current deadlock.
       What lies behind this? It is not because most developing 
     countries don't want reform. To be sure, a few spoilers do 
     seem to be opposed to reform for its own sake, and there is 
     no question that some countries are seeking to manipulate the 
     process for their own ends with very damaging consequences. 
     But in practice, the vast majority is fully supportive of the 
     principle of a better run, more effective U.N.; indeed they 
     know they would be the primary beneficiaries, through more 
     peace, and more development. So why has it not so far been 
     possible to isolate the radicals and build a strong alliance 
     of reform-minded nations to push through this agenda? I would 
     argue that the answer lies in questions about motives and 
     power. Motives, in that, very unfortunately, there is 
     currently a perception among many otherwise quite moderate 
     countries that anything the U.S. supports must have a secret 
     agenda aimed at either subordinating multilateral processes 
     to Washington's ends or weakening the institutions, and 
     therefore, put crudely, should be opposed without any real 
     discussion of whether they make sense or not.
       And power, that in two different ways revolves around 
     perceptions of the role and representativeness of the 
     Security Council. First, in that there has been a real, 
     understandable hostility by the wider membership to the 
     perception that the Security Council, in particular the five 
     permanent members, is seeking a role in areas not formally 
     within its remit, such as management issues or human rights. 
     Second, an equally understandable conviction that those five, 
     veto-wielding permanent members who happen to be the victors 
     in a war fought 60 years ago, cannot be seen as 
     representative of today's world--even when looking through 
     the lens of financial contributions. Indeed, the so-called G-
     4 of Security Council aspirants--Japan, India, Brazil and 
     Germany--contribute twice as much as the P-4, the four 
     permanent members excluding the U.S.
       Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged exactly this point 
     on his trip to Washington last month, and it is something 
     which does need to be addressed. More broadly, the very 
     reasonable concerns of the full U.N. membership that the 
     fundamental multilateral principle that each Member State's 
     vote counts equally in the wider work of the U.N. needs to be 
     acknowledged and accommodated within a broader framework of 
     reform. If the multilateral system is to work effectively, 
     all States need to feel they have a real stake.

[[Page E1314]]

                         New Global Challenges

       But a stake in what system? The U.S.--like every nation, 
     strong and weak alike--is today beset by problems that defy 
     national, inside-the-border solutions: climate change, 
     terrorism, nuclear proliferation, migration, the management 
     of the global economy, the internationalization of drugs and 
     crime, the spread of diseases such as HIV and avian flu. 
     Today's new national security challenges basically thumb 
     their noses at old notions of national sovereignty. Security 
     has gone global, and no country can afford to neglect the 
     global institutions needed to manage it. Kofi Annan has 
     proposed a restructuring of the U.N. to respond to these new 
     challenges with three legs: development, security and human 
     rights supported, like any good chair, by a fourth leg, 
     reformed management. That is the U.N. we want to place our 
     bet on. But for it to work, we need the U.S. to support this 
     agenda--and support it not just in a whisper but in a coast 
     to coast shout that pushes back the critics domestically and 
     wins over the sceptics internationally. America's leaders 
     must again say the U.N. matters.
       When you talk better national education scores, you don't 
     start with ``I support the Department of Education''. 
     Similarly for the U.N. it starts with politicians who will 
     assert the U.S. is going to engage with the world to tackle 
     climate change, poverty, immigration and terrorism. Stand up 
     for that agenda consistently and allow the U.N. to ride on 
     its coat-tails as a vital means of getting it done. It also 
     means a sustained inside-the-tent diplomacy at the U.N. No 
     more ``take it or leave it'', red-line demands thrown in 
     without debate and engagement.
       Let me close with a few words on Darfur to make my point. A 
     few weeks ago, my kids were on the Mall in Washington, 
     demanding President Bush do more to end the genocide in 
     Darfur and President Bush wants to do more. I'd bet some of 
     your kids were there as well. Perhaps you were, too. And yet 
     what can the U.S. do alone in the heart of Africa, in a 
     region the size of France? A place where the Government in 
     Khartoum is convinced the U.S. wants to extend the hegemony 
     it is thought to have asserted in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 
     essence, the U.S. is stymied before it even passes ``Go''. It 
     needs the U.N. as a multilateral means to address Sudan's 
     concerns. It needs the U.N. to secure a wide multicultural 
     array of troop and humanitarian partners. It needs the U.N. 
     to provide the international legitimacy that Iraq has again 
     proved is an indispensable component to success on the 
     ground. Yet, the U.N. needs its first parent, the U.S., every 
     bit as much if it is to deploy credibly in one of the world's 
     nastiest neighbourhoods.
       Back in Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's day, building a 
     strong, effective U.N. that could play this kind of role was 
     a bipartisan enterprise, with the likes of Arthur Vandenberg 
     and John Foster Dulles joining Democrats to support the new 
     body. Who are their successors in American politics? Who will 
     campaign in 2008 for a new multilateral national security?

                          ____________________