[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 96 (Thursday, July 20, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H5546-H5552]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               THE ORIGINAL MISSION OF THE UNITED NATIONS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Daniel E. Lungren of California). Under 
the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from 
Tennessee (Mr. Wamp) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of 
the majority leader.
  Mr. WAMP. Mr. Speaker, before I get to the topic that I want to spend 
at least the lion's share of the next hour on, I want to respond 
somewhat to the commentary from my friends on the other side over the 
last hour and really agree with them on a whole lot of issues.
  As the cochairman of the bipartisan Renewable Energy and Energy 
Efficiency Caucus here in the House, which has over 218 members, a 
majority of the House belong to our bipartisan caucus. Congressman Mark 
Udall of Colorado is the Democratic cochairman, and I am the Republican 
cochairman; and we are working together to advance many of the 
initiatives that they have talked about as quick as we can.
  I do think that tremendous energy now is put behind the goal of 
becoming energy independent as soon as possible in this country.
  Last night, Congressman Udall and a bipartisan group that I 
participated in met for about 2\1/2\ hours with Vinod Khlosa about this 
issue of cellulosic ethanol and what potential it has in this country 
for transportation.
  Earlier today I participated with Congressman Inglis of South 
Carolina, who chairs the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Caucus here in the Fuel 
Cell event we had in Cannon Caucus.
  Just a few days ago we had the Renewable Energy Expo here, which 
Congressman Udall and I participated in. Through all of these efforts, 
I would say that what we are doing is not this particular technology or 
that particular technology, because in many ways our free enterprise 
system is going to sort the winners and losers out.
  But, really, our position is we have got to do all of the above. Time 
is of the essence. I don't think we can pick and choose right now. We 
need domestic capacity, so we have to go after new oil and gas 
resources. But we have to wean ourselves off foreign oil and move 
towards advanced transportation systems.
  Clearly, hybrids are a bridge. We want to promote that. But we have 
got to move through all these technologies.
  I think fuel cells have great applications but, frankly, so do the 
E85-based fuels.
  So I just want to say that that is something that many Members from 
both sides of the aisle are doing an awful lot about.
  Last summer the Congress passed EPACT, the Energy Policy Act of 2005. 
This President signed it into law. Today we hailed, many people in a 
bipartisan way, the successes that the tax incentives give to the 
renewable sector, to the fuel cell sector, to the advancement of 
hydrogen. I would argue that we need to go further because the 
production tax credits that are in that bill need to be extended for a 
longer period of time so that the industry out there has a definition. 
They know what to expect. It is not a 2-year thing that might or might 
not be renewed. So clearly, we need to do more.
  But there is bipartisan resolve to advance all of our energy sources 
as rapidly as possible. And so I applaud them in a sense, but I would 
also say that there is no silver bullet. We need to do all of the 
above, and we can't just rely on particular fuels. We need to increase 
our domestic capacity.
  Now, to lay the groundwork for what I am going to talk about, with 
the help of a couple of my colleagues, Mr. McCotter from Michigan has 
joined me already, and I think the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. 
Foxx) will also join us.
  I want to talk a little bit about world events, but then get to the 
meat of this hour, and that is the United Nations and whether or not it 
is living up to its original charter, whether or not it is a viable 
organization today, or whether or not, frankly, it has been corrupted 
over time, especially in recent years.
  But I want to say, to begin with, that I think to define this war 
that we are in as a war on terror misses the point in many ways. Terror 
is a tactic that our enemy is using, but it is not really a war on 
terror. We need to be honest that we are at war with the Islamic 
jihadists. The jihadists are spreading their networks around the world.
  A letter between Zarqawi and Zawahiri laid out specifically that they 
wanted to use our involvement in the Middle East as an opportunity to 
remove the infidels from Iraq, and then expand the califate, according 
to Mohammed, from Morocco in Northwest Africa, all the way into 
Indonesia. Clearly, aggression is part of the plan.
  And the jihadists don't just surface through al Qaeda. The jihadists 
surface through Hezbollah, frankly, a seasoned terrorist organization 
that has now taken up a very important place of power in Lebanon, 
supported, without question, articulated last night on the floor of 
this House, by Iran and Syria.
  Democrats and Republicans, over and over again, last night, as we 
debated the resolution in support of the State of Israel, talked about 
who is backing Hezbollah right now. Hamas, also elected to governmental 
leadership in Palestine, includes the jihadists, people who have 
declared war on the United States of America and its ally, Israel. And 
this really is a war of global proportions. And we need to be realistic 
about this and share with the American people the seriousness of the 
moment that we live in and rise to our generational call to address 
this issue and not just think that this is about Iraq.
  If we pulled out of Iraq tomorrow, Islamic jihadism is on the rise. 
And they continue, as we see in Lebanon, to seek to destroy the State 
of Israel and seek to drive America back and bring us to our knees. We 
must stand tall and straight.
  Now, the United Nations is an organization that I believe was founded 
with good intentions. As a matter of fact, a prominent Tennessean named 
Cordell Hull was very involved with it. And if you call the 
Congressional Research Service or look for the records of all this, and 
we did, you find out the history of all this, because Cordell Hull came 
out of the State of Tennessee. He was elected to Congress in 1907. He 
served here in the House until 1931. He was elected United States 
Senator, but

[[Page H5547]]

resigned upon his appointment as Secretary of State by President 
Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.

  Foreseeing danger to peace in the rise of dictators, he advocated 
rearmament, pled for the implementation of a system of collective 
security, supported aid short of war to the Western democracies, 
condemned Japanese encroachment into Indochina, warned all branches of 
the United States military well in advance of the attack on Pearl 
Harbor to prepare to resist simultaneous surprise attacks at various 
points.
  Although Hull participated in some of the policy-making conferences 
of the allies, his major effort during the latter stages of World War 
II was that of preparing a blueprint for an international organization 
dedicated to the maintenance of peace and endowed with sufficient 
legislative, economic, and military power to achieve it.
  Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Cordell Hull proposed the 
formation of a new world organization in which the United States would 
participate after the war. To accomplish this aim, in 1941 he formed an 
advisory committee on postwar foreign policy composed of Republicans 
and Democrats. Mindful of President Wilson's failure with the League of 
Nations, Hull took pains to keep discussion of the organization 
nonpartisan.
  By August of 1943 the State Department had drafted a document, 
entitled ``Charter of the United Nations,'' which became the basis for 
proposals submitted by the United States at the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks 
Conference.
  Poor health forced Hull to resign from office on November 27, 1944, 
before final ratification of the United Nations charter in San 
Francisco. President Roosevelt praised Hull as the one person in all 
the world who has done his most to make this great plan for peace, in 
effect, a fact.
  Following nomination by Roosevelt, the Norwegian Nobel committee 
presented the 1945 Nobel Prize for peace to Cordell Hull in recognition 
of his work in the Western Hemisphere for his international trade 
agreements and for his efforts in establishing the United Nations.
  Too ill to receive the award in person, Hull sent a brief acceptance 
speech that was delivered by the United States Ambassador to Norway, in 
which he wrote: ``Under the ominous shadow which the Second World War 
and its attendant circumstances have cast on the world, peace has 
become as essential to civilized existence as the air we breathe is to 
life itself. There is no greater responsibility resting upon peoples 
and governments everywhere than to make sure that enduring peace will, 
this time, at long last, be established and maintained. The searing 
lessons of this latest war and the promise of the United Nations 
organization will be the cornerstones of a new edifice of enduring 
peace and the guideposts of a new era of human progress.''
  As a matter of fact, the U.N. charter preamble says this: ``We, the 
peoples of the United Nations, determine to save succeeding generations 
from the scourge of war which twice in our lifetime has brought untold 
sorrow to mankind, and reaffirm faith and fundamental human rights in 
the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men 
and women and of nations large and small, and establish conditions 
under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from 
treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and 
promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom. 
And for these ends, to practice tolerance and live together in peace 
with one another as good neighbors and unite our strength to maintain 
international peace and security. And ensure by the acceptance of 
principles and the institution of methods that armed force shall not be 
used save in the common interest, and employ international machinery 
for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all 
peoples.''
  Now, that is a bold plan for an organization, to secure international 
peace and guarantee international security. And I just want to say, 
fundamentally, a fair assessment of the United Nations in 2006 on its 
original mission is a low grade. If not an F, it has got to be a low D, 
because the United Nations today, as was written yesterday in a column 
by Norm Ornstein in Roll Call, is effectively impotent in certain areas 
of the world today.
  Clearly, as we look at the observers in southern Lebanon and the 
U.N.'s role with peace keeping, we are facing the most difficult 
challenges of our generation with respect to war and peace, and the 
United Nations is not effective anymore. That is the sad truth today, 
and we are trying to change that.
  Here in the House of Representatives, we passed the Henry Hyde United 
Nations Reform Act and sent that bill to the United States Senate, 
where we can't even get agreement on a conference report. As a matter 
of fact, that bill said that there were 38 recommendations for 
reforming the United Nations to clean up the graft and corruption, make 
it more efficient and accountable, have it live up to its original 
charter; and unless 31 of those 38 reforms were implemented, we were 
going to, the United States of America, withhold up to 50 percent of 
our dues to that organization. And we are, and will show later in this 
hour, by far and away the number one contributor to the United Nations 
in the world.

                              {time}  1730

  We were trying to bring some accountability to the United Nations, 
and I have to tell you that the resistance to that accountability not 
only comes out of the heart of the United Nations, but there is 
resistance even in this country for reforming the United Nations.
  I have to say this Member of Congress from the State of Tennessee, 
much like the Member of Congress from Tennessee who received the Nobel 
Peace Prize for starting the United Nations, looks back on the legacy 
of Cordell Hull and, sadly, says that we need to reevaluate our 
participation in the United Nations as long as it is going in the 
direction that it is going in.
  Before I yield to the gentleman from Michigan, I want to point to a 
book that has been written, called The U.N. Exposed, by Eric Shawn.
  Eric Shawn is not an author trying to make money writing a book. Eric 
Shawn is a very legitimate journalist who has been incredibly effective 
over the years at reporting on the United Nations. It is very similar 
to a reporter covering city hall that sees so many things going on in 
city hall that, after a long period of time, they just kind of look 
themselves in the mirror and say, this stinks and somebody needs to 
write about it. And this book documents all of the graft, corruption, 
deals, inefficiencies, arrogance that exist at the United Nations. The 
U.N. Exposed. And I want to just read a page out of it in the 
introduction to set the stage and then yield the floor to the gentleman 
from Michigan.
  In the introduction it says: ``Terrorism is not a United Nations 
priority. The majority of its members are focused on `development,' '' 
which is ``diplomat-speak'' for increasing the amount of money coming 
into their own nations. Terrorism, even though it should be the most 
pressing international issue of the 21st century, is simply not on most 
U.N. agendas.
  ``The United States is compromised. The United States funds a 
whopping 22 percent of the U.N.'s $3.6 billion budget, pays 27 percent 
of an additional $3.6 billion in peacekeeping operation costs, and 
provides billions more for the U.N. agencies and related operations 
each year. And yet the United Nations has become the coliseum for 
confronting and opposing the United States. With the end of the Cold 
War and the rise of one lone superpower, the United States' veto-
wielding rivals press their agendas at our expense and maneuver for 
their own advantages, not ours.
  ``The United Nations Security Council guaranteed security for the 
Iraqis and an unstable and untenable environment for American and 
British forces attempting to enforce the Council's mandates from 1991, 
when Saddam surrendered in the Gulf War, to the 2003 invasion made 
necessary by the U.N.'s malfeasance. Had the Council and the United 
Nations held to moral principles and enforced their resolutions and 
requirements, the war could have been prevented. There would have been 
clarity, not confusion, regarding Saddam's possessions of weapons of 
mass destruction. His corruption and bribery of the Council created 
conditions of uncertainty that empowered his regime.

[[Page H5548]]

  ``The same mistakes are now being repeated elsewhere. The U.N. is 
incapable of effectively resolving the nuclear threats posed by Iran 
and North Korea, member states that have in some cases lied to U.N. 
officials, including those of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 
or, in other cases, ignored their request.
  ``While the U.N.'s humanitarian programs are rightfully praised for 
providing food, shelter, and medicine to millions of the world's needy, 
they have now also come under questioning and criticism. The U.N.'s own 
independent investigation, headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve 
Chairman Paul Volcker found that even the gems of the U.N. system, such 
as the World Food Program, the World Health Organization, and UNICEF, 
operated in Iraq with `little transparency and oversight' amid evidence 
of `gross mismanagement.' ''
  A fair assessment says the United Nations is not effective at all in 
international peace and security and they do provide humanitarian 
assistance, but even their provision of humanitarian assistance is 
grossly mismanaged, and basically everybody involved in the leadership 
of the United Nations is, in one way or another, benefiting financially 
from the very programs that come through the United Nations.
  We are going to document even more of that as we go on. But at this 
point I want to yield to the gentleman from Michigan, Thaddeus 
McCotter.
  Mr. McCOTTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Tennessee for 
yielding.
  I am here as a Representative from Michigan. And as many of you know, 
and I am sure you do, Mr. Speaker, Senator Arthur Vandenberg from 
Michigan played a key role in bringing the United States into the 
postwar world. He originally started out of Grand Rapids as an 
isolationist. And yet as he saw the gathering clouds of World War II 
and the impact of isolationism and appeasement upon the course of world 
events, he quickly became a believer in the United States' role in the 
world, and not simply being in the world itself and going along with 
the tide of history but trying to direct that tide of history towards a 
positive outcome for our own citizens and for humanity.
  This is why today, as an admirer of Senator Vandenberg and, yes, as 
an admirer of President Roosevelt, we have to admit that today the 
dream of President Roosevelt has been turned into a nightmare by the 
corruption of the United Nations.
  The dream which President Roosevelt inherited from President Wilson 
and his League of Nations, a torch that President Roosevelt carried 
throughout election after election, despite its being many times 
unpopular, has been put in the hands of people who operate the United 
Nations not as an entity to bring about global peace and prosperity and 
security through mutual diplomatic action but rather as a corrupt 
political machine. In fact, the United Nations has one advantage over a 
traditional municipal political machine. It is that the enormity of 
their crimes tends to mask their crime.
  The global scale of the theft, which the gentleman from Tennessee 
will soon help to elucidate, has masked the simple fact that they are 
operating in their own interests rather than the interests of the 
citizens of the United States and rather than the interests of people 
throughout the world.
  One of the things which is most striking, as the gentleman pointed 
out, is the fact that when we look back upon the search for weapons of 
mass destruction by the Security Council and the resolutions that were 
passed and passed and passed, and ignored and ignored and ignored, is 
the simple, ineluctable fact that Saddam Hussein had bribed the jury, 
that Saddam Hussein had taken the Oil-for-Food program and turned it 
into an instrument not only for his aggrandizement and enrichment at 
the expense of starving people in his own nation, he also utilized it 
to buy influence amongst member countries at the Security Council 
level.
  When viewed in that light, it is easy to see why there was such 
discord and such incomprehensible division amongst former allies and 
erstwhile allies in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq by the United 
States to liberate that country from Saddam. It is also easy to see 
why, in so many other instances when dealing with the dictator, it was 
very difficult to get the U.N. to take a stand and to commence action 
to enforce its own resolutions.

  As the distinguished ranking member of the International Relations 
Committee, Mr. Lantos of California, has pointed out, the United 
Nations is a derivative reality. As he points out, it is a derivative 
reality in the sense it is composed of member states. And member states 
can be bad actors on the international stage or good actors on the 
international stage, and when they come together, the results can often 
be less than productive.
  But in the end, it is not the position of myself or many in the 
United States who are encouraging U.N. reform that the U.N. do what we 
ask it to do or that it be led by the nose by the United States of 
America and back us in all our diplomatic efforts.
  But what we are trying to do, through the Henry Hyde bill and through 
other attempts legislatively, is to guarantee a fair and impartial 
hearing amongst the Security Council and amongst the member states and 
know that when we make our case that we will not be greeted by a bribed 
judge and jury, but that we will be greeted by other sovereign nations 
acting objectively in the best interests of world security and world 
prosperity.
  It is this chance that we were cheated of, and it is this chance that 
we are endeavoring to restore because endeavoring to restore the 
integrity to the United Nations, we are endeavoring to rekindle the 
spark of the dream of Franklin Roosevelt and the entire postwar 
generation that hoped that the horrors of the Second World War would 
not be lost upon future generations, thus condemning them to a third 
world war. Arguably, that chance has already been lost.
  Regardless, we must press ahead because the United Nations as a 
concept, as an ideal, has a very practical value in the world today. 
And I think it is very difficult for us not to confront the reality 
that it is not performing that function, largely due to its own 
corruption.
  Mr. WAMP. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his commentary.
  What is the United Nations? To a lot of people, they may not have 
been there, they may not realize it, but it is an 18-acre compound on 
the East River in Manhattan, in New York City. And that 18-acre 
compound, which is very much delineated, detailed in Eric Shawn's book, 
is basically a safe haven for everyone who operates there. They are 
immune from virtually everything. They do not even have to pay sales 
tax on the food that they eat in New York City. They do not have to pay 
their parking tickets. They operate with such impunity that they, 
frankly, have become incredibly arrogant toward our country.
  The number two guy at the United Nations, Malloch Brown, recently 
just delivered a scathing analysis of the United States' position 
toward the United Nations as if we had no business whatsoever meddling 
in their organization, as if we should not in any way exert oversight 
when, again, about a fourth of all of their revenues come from us and 
they have this autonomy here in our country.
  The Oil-for-Food scandal, which an investigation was ordered on here 
in the Congress, it showed such gross graft and corruption that it 
could very easily be the largest case of grand larceny in the history 
of our country in terms of the billions of dollars that were siphoned 
off and used to manipulate, to effectively bribe member countries; 
even, as one of the chapters in the book shows, the media, the press 
that covers the United Nations, setting up these organizations where 
reporters could actually draw income from outside of their work at the 
United Nations. Now, if that is not a conflict of interest for a 
journalist, I do not know what is.
  But Saddam Hussein methodically set out to use the revenues from the 
Oil-for-Food scandal to keep the countries that could very well force 
the United Nations or hold the United Nations back from going in and 
enforcing their resolutions in Iraq. He used the money. It was a 
scheme. It was a scam, a multibillion-dollar scam. That has been 
documented here on the floor, but

[[Page H5549]]

I do not think the people in this country ever really got it. I do not 
think that they fully understood it.
  A summary of the time line, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 
1990, the United Nations barred him from profiting from sales of his 
country's vast oil supplies. The ban was meant to keep him from 
rebuilding his military and pursuing a nuclear weapons program. It also 
deprived the Iraqi economy of its main export, leading to hunger and 
deprivation among his people, according to him, a condition that Saddam 
both exacerbated by hoarding the wealth his country possessed, and then 
publicized to win international sympathy. Eric Shawn's book points to 
the fact that a lot of it was just propaganda coming out of Iraq by 
Saddam that, indeed, a lot of the children that he had claimed were 
starving to death because of the lack of oil revenues were not, in 
fact, starving to death. But he won a lot of international sympathy.
  So support for the sanctions gradually eroded. And in 1996 the United 
Nations created the Oil-for-Food program through which Iraq could 
resume oil sales to pay for humanitarian goods such as food and 
medicine. Saddam exploited, though, the renewed oil flow in three ways:
  First, he simply ignored the sanctions and illegally sold oil to 
Syria, Turkey, Jordan, and other countries with no U.N. supervision, 
which furnished him by far his biggest source of illicit income, about 
$13.6 billion, according to a Senate subcommittee investigation.
  Second, Saddam and his loyalists used tricky pricing schemes, 
surcharges, and kickbacks to milk another $7 billion or more from oil 
buyers and sellers of humanitarian supplies as a result of Saddam's 
successful arguments at the United Nations, that as a sovereign nation 
Iraq should be allowed to negotiate contracts directly.

                              {time}  1745

  Legitimate Iraqi oil profits went to a U.N.-controlled escrow 
account, but kickbacks were secretly routed by complicit companies to 
hidden regime bank accounts.
  And, third, Saddam bribed foreign officials and others. He oversaw a 
list of people who were given vouchers to buy Iraqi oil at below market 
price, essentially multimillion dollar buyoffs. Their apparent purpose 
was to win Saddam defenders in his fight to lift U.N. sanctions. 
Beneficiaries allegedly included oil company executives from Russia, 
China and France and prominent politicians from Russia and France.
  There is documented evidence now that he systematically sought to use 
this revenue to buy basically the votes at the United Nations to keep 
the United Nations from enforcing their own resolutions.
  So was the United Nations corrupted through the Oil-for-Food scandal? 
Absolutely it was. Over a period of a decade, it was corrupted in a 
gross way, so that the United Nations was never going to enforce their 
resolutions because basically everybody in the decision-making process 
had some obligation to Saddam Hussein because of where the money 
flowed.
  Kofi Annan runs the United Nations. Thankfully, his term is going to 
end at the end of this year. His son, Kojo, his fingerprints are all 
over this stuff. Money flowed. Investigations have been run. People 
just looked the other way. Malik Brown then criticizes us for exerting 
oversight, saying that the United States has just become anti-U.N.
  Listen, we all believed in the original legitimacy of the United 
Nations, the original mission, international peace and security. But I 
will tell you what, the United Nations is, if anything, not only not 
helping with international peace and security; the United Nations is in 
the way today sometimes of international peace and security if they are 
unwilling to enforce their own resolutions.
  You might say, well, you know, if it is not the United Nations, then 
what? I got to say the coalition of the willing needs to reevaluate, in 
my humble opinion. The coalition of the willing means countries willing 
to fight Islamic jihadists, willing to stand strong against terror, 
willing to engage, to say we have to drive this threat back.
  Then what do we do? Let's look at an expanded NATO. Let's look at a 
coalition of the willing. Or let's insist that the United Nations go 
back and meet its original charter. It is, frankly, not an organization 
worthy of this level of support by the American people today. That is 
the bottom line.
  Now, I am prepared to yield to the gentlewoman from North Carolina, 
if she is ready. Are you ready?
  Ms. FOXX. I am ready.
  Mr. WAMP. I yield to Virginia Foxx from North Carolina.
  Ms. FOXX. Thank you, Mr. Wamp. I appreciate your inviting me to be 
with you all today. It is a real treat to listen to you and Congressman 
McCotter. The things you have said I agree with wholeheartedly. I am 
not nearly as eloquent as the two of you. I am a much more plain-spoken 
person, I think, a product of having grown up in the mountains of North 
Carolina, and I think that in many ways you are being very kind about 
the United Nations.
  I agree with you that the United Nations was born in a spirit of 
optimism and that people had hoped very much that the United Nations 
could provide peace and stability in the world. And we all want that. 
We all want that to happen.
  But I will tell you, as I talk to my constituents and as they talk to 
me about the United Nations, even the average American, you don't have 
to serve in Congress, the average American knows that the United 
Nations has failed miserably in its role as a peacekeeper in this 
world. All we have to do is look at what is happening right now in 
Lebanon, what is happening in Israel, to know that it has failed 
miserably. We would not be having the problems that we are having in 
the Middle East if the United Nations were doing its job. I think that 
it is high time for the Congress and the administration to demand a 
great deal more from the United Nations.
  I think that our Secretary of State is doing a fabulous job in her 
job, and I think that it was a sad day when we could not get Ambassador 
Bolton confirmed by the Senate to his job, and I think that the 
President was right to appoint him on an interim appointment and that 
he is speaking for the majority of the American people and saying the 
kinds of things that need to be said.
  I want to quote Henry Hyde. Again, there are very few people in this 
House who are as eloquent as Chairman Hyde, and I think that it is 
entirely appropriate that the bill that he introduced, the United 
Nations Reform Act, was named for him. I want to just quote one quote 
from him relating to that bill and relating to the United Nations:
  ``No observer, be they passionate supporter or dismissive critic, can 
pretend that the current structure and operations of the U.N. represent 
an acceptable standard. Republican and Democrat administrations alike 
have long called for a more focused and accountable United Nations. 
Members on both sides of the aisle agree that the time has come for 
far-reaching reforms.''
  I think that the comments, again, that have been made here by my 
esteemed colleagues have set the stage for some of the things that we 
ought to be talking about. The United Nations charter has laudable 
goals, but, as I said, I am a much more plain-spoken person than some 
others. But when the rubber meets the road, the U.N. has failed 
miserably to put these ideals into practice, especially in recent 
years. And we have a duty here in the Congress and as a permanent 
member of the U.N. Security Council, the United States, we have a duty 
to insist on a higher standard. We have a duty to ensure accountability 
of each and every American taxpayer dollar that goes to the United 
Nations.
  I know my colleague is going to point out some of the problems with 
the U.N. ``supervised'' Oil-for-Food Program. But I want to say that 
from that program, to the lack of action with respect to genocide in 
Darfur, Sudan, to the tremendous human rights abuses by the U.N. 
peacekeeping staff during their mission to Congo, the U.N. is 
absolutely rife with fraud and abuse and needs reform.
  We could list these things, and there is a long list, and I am going 
to talk a little bit about the history of scandals in the United 
Nations: the Oil-for-Food Program, we will talk a little bit more 
about; the peacekeeping operations; the Center for Human Settlement or 
Habitat; Settlement Rehabilitation

[[Page H5550]]

Program in Northern Iraq; UNICEF, the U.N. Children's Fund; the 
Conference on Trade and Development; the Development Program; the 
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Program; we all know UNESCO; the 
Electoral Assistance Division, meaning electing people, not 
electricity; High Commission for Refugees; the Office of Drugs and 
Crime; the Claims Commission; the Population Fund; and the 
Environmental Fund. Every one of these programs has had a scandal 
attached to it.
  The American people are much more familiar with the U.N. Oil-for-Food 
dollars because, fortunately, the popular press and the popular media 
picked up a little bit on that program and have talked about it. But 
all of these programs have had scandals associated with them, and I 
think that just by highlighting this one program, we can give an 
example of what some of the others are.
  I would like to come back in a few minutes and talk about some other 
issues that have been touched upon by Congressman Wamp, but I am going 
to turn it back over to him so that he can explain in some detail some 
of what went wrong with the Oil-for-Food dollars.
  Mr. WAMP. I thank the gentlewoman.
  Put this in perspective: think like North Korea today. Kim Jong Il is 
defying the international will in terms of developing a nuclear program 
and nuclear weapons capabilities, so the world is rightly isolating 
him.
  So back in 1990, Saddam Hussein invades his neighbor, and the world 
comes and drives him back and basically begins to isolate him and he 
can't sell his oil to the world.
  So he comes up with a scheme. Hey, this is what we can do: we can 
claim that children are starving and that our country is experiencing 
all these humanitarian crimes, and, as a result, we have got to kick 
the oil revenues back in.
  What happens is the $64 billion worth of oil revenues which Oil-for-
Food was supposed to send through a New York escrow account and on back 
for humanitarian needs, and the administration associated with getting 
the money back there. And the way the thing ended up getting corrupted, 
it goes through Jordan and Lebanon and other countries and other 
accounts and back to Iraq, and this is what happens with the money: 
military equipment, weapons from Belarus, Bulgaria, China, France, 
India, Jordan, Russia, Poland, North Korea, South Korea, Syria, Ukraine 
and Yugoslavia. He bought with all that the military arsenal to put 
himself back on his feet in the nineties.
  And who was co-opted into believing all that? The United Nations, 
very easily. How were they? Well, kickbacks. Bribes. A methodical 
effort to make sure that the very people that could expose this or stop 
this were all somehow on the payroll.
  That is exactly what happened. It is one of the most outrageous 
stories in the history of the world, especially in an organization that 
most people have a good impression of. After all, when the light-blue 
flag of the United Nations shows up around the world, people think good 
thoughts. It is like the American Red Cross. They say, hey, that is 
nice, they are here. Little do they know, though, that there is this 
kind of fraud and abuse and corruption at the United Nations.
  This is all documented now. We really need to evaluate how long this 
country is going to participate in a scam like this and then be 
criticized by the rest of the world every time we try to hold them 
accountable as being arrogant or too bossy, the things that they say.
  Eric Shawn has done this country a service by putting all this in a 
document, his book, ``The U.N. Exposed.'' He really has. Again, he is 
just a journalist. He is just trying to show what he learned over the 
years reporting on the United Nations.
  In an interview, they asked him about Iran, because we now know what 
a threat Iran is. Iran is backing Hezbollah. That is all about this 
war. And, frankly, Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, has denied that 
the Jews were ever put through the Holocaust. He says the Holocaust 
didn't exist, and he wants to end Israel. He wants to destroy Israel. 
That is a stated objective of the guy running Iran now.
  All right. So they asked Shawn about the United Nations and Iran, and 
he says this: ``The United Nations has given Iran a 21-year head start 
in its development of nuclear technology, a country whose President now 
vows to wipe Israel off the map. It seems inconceivable, but the United 
Nations' own nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, didn't even know about Iran's 
nuclear facilities for 18 years. Then in 2003, after Iran's program was 
exposed, Iranian activists and the IAEA confirmed Iran's violations, it 
took another 3 years for the issue to even reach the Security Council. 
Russia and China served as Iran's linebackers on the governing board of 
the agency, refusing to allow Iran's infraction to be reported to the 
Security Council until earlier this year. The latest IAEA report 
details Iran's many violations, such as the existence of uranium metal 
designs that can only be used for nuclear warheads. Moreover, it also 
raises many unresolved questions about Iran's nuclear capabilities as a 
whole.
  ``Despite the crisis, Russia and China, whose economic interests 
clearly lie in protecting Iran, have already castrated the Security 
Council by declaring they oppose sanction, creating the impossibility 
of full council-backed action. Even a legally binding Chapter 7 
resolution would not result in a vote for sanctions, a naval blockade 
or other action against Iran. It may require another coalition of the 
willing to effectively deal with what the Security Council is unwilling 
to achieve.''
  He says in his book: ``It was not the U.N.'s effort that exposed the 
extensive global black market in nuclear technology peddled by 
Pakistan's Dr. A.Q. Khan. No U.N. committee ordered Muammar Qaddafi to 
surrender his weapons of mass destruction programs. Those successes are 
among the achievements of the proliferation security initiative, the 
brainchild of Ambassador John Bolton under the Bush administration. 
Compare PSI's actual achievements with the U.N.'s failure on the 
nuclear weapons front. Iran only has to look at Security Council's 
crippling by Saddam to understand why President Ahmadinejad calls the 
U.N.'s resolutions meaningless.''
  That is the bottom line. Their resolutions are now meaningless. They 
have no credibility. Our enemies know that they have been co-opted and 
corrupted and bribed and that they are not going to enforce their 
resolutions. Iran now knows it. And so they just laugh off anything 
that the United Nations does.
  How dangerous is that? Well, I would say the average citizen, not 
just in this country but around the world, they have confidence in the 
United Nations that the United Nations is going to somehow carry out 
its original charge of international peace and security.

                              {time}  1800

  I have been a Member of the United States Congress for 12 years. I am 
not an expert on these things, but I have studied them and I learned 
them. I have very little faith in the United Nations to do much of 
anything on international peace and security.
  They do feed people that need to be fed. They do reach humanitarian 
needs. That is good. But that does not mean all of the other things 
that they do are good.
  As a matter of fact, they are AWOL, AWOL, absent without leave, on 
the critical issues of terrorism and international security. They will 
not stand tall.
  On the issue of human rights, what a disaster the human rights 
activities of the United Nations are today. They have put the fox in 
charge of the hen house. They have let some of the most egregious human 
rights violating countries play a prominent role in human rights 
decisions by the United Nations. How absurd is that? I yield to Mr. 
McCotter.
  Mr. McCOTTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. I am very happy, 
too, with Mr. Shawn producing this book, because I hope it brings light 
to the problems at the United Nations. I would also like to thank the 
gentlewoman for her kind remarks about it. Just because we are 
loquacious does not make us eloquent. And you certainly know how to 
make your point.
  Aside from the international ramifications of the United Nations 
corruption, it would be very simple for Americans to say, well, what is 
the problem? We know that the world is not perfect. We know that an 
amalgamation of nations is not going to always act with

[[Page H5551]]

the proper rectitude that is expected or the proper perspicacity that 
is required under an international crisis.
  Many people in my district and throughout America will say to 
themselves, well, the U.N. is corrupt. That is not news to us. We are 
not surprised that champagne-sipping, caviar-chomping globalists are 
making a mess of the jobs that we have entrusted to them.
  But there are several points that are important. Even if we are 
tempted to shut out the ramifications for the world of the United 
Nations corruption, let us remember that we are paying for it. The 
United States taxpayers are the largest contributors to the United 
Nations.
  Now, by any objective measurement, this is not a sound investment for 
the American taxpayers, given the current circumstances occurring at 
the United Nations, anymore than I would say that in 1900 Tammany Hall 
was a wise investment for New Yorkers.
  My concern also is that these very people, not content with their 
misfeasance and malfeasance internationally, now wish to do something 
about your sovereign rights as an American citizen.
  The U.N. continues to like to use international treaties, and as many 
of you know, when the United States signs a treaty, that treaty has 
more weight than statute, has more weight than State laws. They like to 
engage in coming up with conventions and conferences to come up with 
treaties that nations can sign and then be bound by and, consequently, 
their citizens governed by.
  The United Nations has such incentives to deal with your second 
amendment constitutional rights. They have conventions that they would 
like you to sign to help reduce your ability to raise your own children 
as you see fit, to intrude upon every aspect of American life.
  I think that that is insane for us to continue to fund an 
organizations that would like to destroy the Republic's consent to be 
governed through international convention while they make a nice buck 
off of doing it, and get to travel to all of the places that they like 
to frequent and hold these conventions, and, might I point out, not one 
of them is in Darfur or in North Korea.
  The ramifications to the United States taxpayer in terms of their 
prosperity and in terms of economy of measures by the government, as 
well as in terms of their inherent sovereignty itself, is endangered by 
a corrupt organization that is bent on its own aggrandizement at our 
expense.
  It is often frustrating to me, as someone who came out of Wayne 
County Commission, the Wayne County Government, which is very much like 
Cook County, Illinois, and politics in Chicago, as one of the few 
Republicans who got to watch a machine, a political machine at work.
  Mr. Speaker, I do not think it would be wise for the United States to 
continue to subsidize heavily a corrupt political machine. I do not 
think it is wise for us to subsidize it at all. I think that we should 
terminate it if it proves that the reforms that we are trying to 
achieve are impossible.
  I think it is imperative that we continue to demand accountability 
from them. But I think it is also important, as Mr. Wamp from Tennessee 
and Ms. Foxx from North Carolina and others are trying to do, is to 
make the American public aware that this is not some esoteric exercise 
in international law. This is a direct threat to your sovereign, 
inalienable constitutional rights as an American citizen.
  If we do not demand accountability from the United Nations, if we 
continue to allow the United Nations to believe itself, as a self-
aggrandized harbinger and herald of a new world order, then we will 
feel the ramifications not only in places like North Korea and Iran and 
Iraq, we will feel those ramifications in Iowa and New Hampshire and 
Idaho.
  That is why we are engaged in this discussion tonight. It is not only 
to decry and curse the darkness of the past, it is try to light a 
candle upon the unsavory activities of the United Nations, to try to 
engage the American public with an awareness of the realties of the 
consequences to them should U.N. reform not occur; again, in our own 
way, to try to start the journey of the thousand miles that is U.N. 
reform, and put that organization back on a track that will serve the 
people of the United States, that will serve the citizens of other 
nations, and will again rekindle Franklin Roosevelt's dream for that 
organization.
  Mr. WAMP. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his participation 
and his contributions to our country. He is one of the most articulate 
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, very bright man. I am 
grateful for his leadership. He talked about the U.S. paying 22 percent 
of the overall dues to the United Nations, and 27 percent of the 
peacekeeping operations around the world.

  You know, China has the same Security Council power at the United 
Nations as the United States. China pays 2 percent of the United 
Nations dues. So at the very least, one of the reforms should be 
Security Council reforms on the balance of power.
  Because, frankly, again I have been to the United Nations several 
times. They do not treat the United States well. And I do not 
understand why. I know there are a lot of excuses why. But I will tell 
you this. We are footing the bill and many other countries are not. And 
the ones that have the same kind of veto power through the Security 
Council need to be carrying more of the weight, especially when you 
consider the gross trade imbalance that our country now has with China.
  It is not exactly like China needs a lot of help financially, they 
need to pull their weight. So I am prepared to yield to the gentlewoman 
from North Carolina.
  Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Wamp. I appreciate that very much. 
I would go even farther than you have gone in terms of talking about 
the amount of money that we have put into the United Nations.
  I think that we should lower completely, to a very low amount, what 
we give to the United Nations. And if we cannot get other nations to 
increase the amount of money that they give, then I think that we 
should seriously think about withdrawing from the United Nations 
altogether.
  It is such a corrupt organization. It does so little for what it 
should be doing, that I think that it is something that we definitely 
should give some thought to.
  I want to go back. You mentioned the Malloch Brown speech. I really 
want to talk just a little bit about that, because I think that Malloch 
Brown's speech and the comments that he made are an indication of the 
fact that the members of the United Nations, people at the United 
Nations, are totally out of touch with the world.
  You described the little spot of ground that the United Nations sits 
on. I have been there too, went there last year for the second time in 
my life. I went there as a young person to visit the United Nations, 
you know, thinking again idealistically about what the United Nations 
did.
  I went there and took my grandchildren to show them the United 
Nations and get them to get a little bit of sense of what it is. But 
those people who come here from other countries I think really, really 
are out of touch. I want to make a couple more comments about what 
Malloch Brown said. I find it so ironic that he would come in and 
criticize the American people.
  We are the only superpower in world. We are undoubtedly the most 
successful country in the world. And yet we are criticized by the 
Malloch Browns of the world, by almost everybody in the United Nations, 
for what we do. I find it so ironic that we provide so much of the 
money for the United Nations.
  When you look around, you see that we are the most successful country 
in the world, and how these people can come in and criticize us for 
what we do. I want to say, our Ambassador Bolton said, it was a 
criticism of the American people. I think that that is absolutely true.
  He criticized our people. I think that that is such an affront to us, 
and I think the American people understood that as an affront. And he 
chastised the Bush administration because we had not constructively 
engaged the American people in what good things the United Nations was 
doing. He is telling us we are too inadequate to explain that.
  Well, the American people are very smart people. We are the smartest 
people in the world too, I think. They understand, rightfully, if the 
United Nations was doing what it was supposed

[[Page H5552]]

to be doing, its work would stand for itself. That is the kind of thing 
that we Americans understand.
  I think that it is, aside from the fact that he was injecting himself 
into the political life of this country which he has absolutely no 
business doing, he really insulted the American people. And he insulted 
us.
  I want to say that my recommendation would be on the United Nations, 
they are going to come to us and say they need a lot of money to 
renovate that old building up there. My recommendation is that they 
take the United Nations to the Sudan. They build a building in the 
Sudan, and they move the entire United Nations to Africa.
  Then I would like to see how many of those people who are currently 
serving in the United Nations would like to move there and use their 
expertise to help Africa get out of the poverty that it suffers. I do 
not think you are going to see many of those people want to go there. 
They come here and they like to live the life that they live in the 
United States, but they do not want to respect what we do in the United 
States and how we have gotten to where we have gotten.
  I want to thank Congressman Wamp for bringing this Special Order here 
tonight. I think you are right. We need to talk about this. What is 
going on in the Middle East right now is because of the failure of the 
United Nations, not the failure of the United States, not the failure 
of the Bush administration, not the failure of President Bush. It is 
the failure of the United Nations to keep peace in this world.
  Mr. Speaker, I think we need to keep the pressure on them to reform 
the way they do things, and if they do not, I think we need to get out.
  Mr. WAMP. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for all she 
contributes here in the House of Representatives. Let me say in 
closing, this is not now a far-out wild kind of a position that we are 
taking.
  You know, I am a very reasonable person, with friends all around the 
world. The last 12 years I have, through the National Prayer Breakfast 
and other ways, engaged friends all around the world. I am very much 
for us being engaged in the world, investing in the world. This is not 
a close-minded kind of a position. This is not a paranoid position. 
This is looking at the facts, really analyzing the bottom line of the 
United Nations. It is not meeting its mission. It has become 
ineffective, inefficient. It has lost credibility. The very people that 
are criticizing our country are enjoying the multimillion-dollar 
townhomes they live in in Manhattan. They enjoy the fruits of our free 
enterprise system, but they do not recognize the human rights and the 
responsibility.
  The original charge of the United Nations was to ensure international 
peace and security. So I would just say if we want to be guaranteed 
international peace and security and sleep comfortably at night, we 
better not put our faith and trust in the United Nations. Put it in the 
men and women in the uniform of the Armed Forces of the United States 
of America and our allies who are willing to stand against tyranny and 
terror and destruction. That is the last best hope for freedom, not the 
United Nations.

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