THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 25, 1995 TAG: 9510250020
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 52 lines
Fifty years ago the United Nations was born amid high hope that an international body could help prevent war and permit nations to cooperate. But a long Cold War soon followed and reduced the United Nations to a sideshow.
The United Nations has too often played host to vacuous debate or shameless posturing. It has sometimes been useful at peacekeeping, but has failed utterly in attempts at peacemaking.
But for every embarrassment - Khruschev pounding his shoe, the expulsion of Taiwan, the branding of Israel a racist state - there have been high points.
The United Nations has helped broker peace agreements and arrange cease-fires. It has served as a forum in which to expose aggression - as during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It has applied sanctions to rogue leaders like Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi.
In 1968, the United Nations was instrumental in arranging a nuclear nonproliferation regimen. In 1980, the World Health Organization was able to announce that smallpox had been eradicated. Over the years, the United Nations has brought health and development aid to the world's poor, has made international agreements to protect oceans and atmosphere and has helped in uncounted natural disasters.
Unfortunately, the United Nations hasn't always performed its good works very efficiently. Its politicized and disorganized bureaucracy is notorious. The board of directors alone numbers 185.
Critics have certainly been correct in wanting to keep troops out of any command structure whose chief is Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Some in the United States would prefer that we abandon the United Nations, but nothing that drastic is likely to happen. Nor should it.
The United Nations will continue and the United States will be a part of it. We are right to demand reform but would be wrong to refuse to pay a reasonable share of the operating expenses.
The United Nations needs to be leaner. It needs to rethink its missions in a changed world. It needs to take on problems where it can make a difference and drop its grandiose delusions of imposing peace where neither side wants it.
That said, on issues of proliferation, health, the environment and development, if the United Nations didn't exist, something quite like it would have to be created. The first 50 years have been a mixed blessing, but that only means the United States must be actively involved to make the next 50 years an improvement. by CNB