Showing posts with label united states. Show all posts
Showing posts with label united states. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Sunday, June 03, 2007
UNcle Sam, the UN Deadbeat
Uncle Sam the UN deadbeat
How can the United Nations be expected to listen to the US when Congress reneges on every funding promise?
June 1, 2007 8:00 PM |
Congress won't pay the UN the money it promised - and wonders why the US loses influence abroad. And the presidential candidates are silent about it.
Between John Bolton and Iraq, it is not difficult to find reasons why America's diplomatic currency is plunging along with the dollar. But another reason has nothing to with the White House - but the congressional circus's latest performance.
At a time when the US is proposing and voting for UN peacekeeping operations on a huge scale, and when its new Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is trying to foist more responsibility for Iraq on the organisation, the US is running a tab of almost $1bn in arrears with the UN - and that will increase even more by the end of the year based on the latest amounts budgeted by Congress.
In effect, the Capitol Hill circus has ignored an intricate compromise crafted by the former US Ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, under which the other 190 members agreed to accept the unilateral congressional calculations, wink at a substantial amount of arrears, and to reduce the percentage paid by the US in future from 33% to 27%.
Ted Turner agreed to sweeten the deal for the General Assembly by paying off some of the US arrears himself, but the clincher was the now-broken promise from the US to pay off the arrears and to pay promptly in future.
But Congress ratted on the deal, and has maintained a 25% cap on contributions, even though the other members agreed to reduce the US assessment again from last year, to 26%, which is why the US is again running up massive arrears - massive that is to the UN.
In fact, the sum that Congress is sitting on is the equivalent of two days of Pentagon spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, and one-tenth of the amount of the UN oil-for-food surplus that the US took for reconstruction in Iraq and still cannot account for.
The US general accounting office studied UN peacekeeping and found it was one-eighth of the cost of using US forces - even if one discounts the Pentagon being otherwise engaged at the moment, surging and losing in Iraq. Partly at the urging of the same Congressional geniuses, the US has pushed the UN into a massive expansion of peacekeepers in Lebanon, and wants an even bigger expansion into Darfur, in addition to supporting new and renewed operations ranging from Haiti to East Timor.
For an interesting contrast in how American politicians look at foreign affairs, one only has to contrast the total agreement of almost every presidential question to contribute to the Jerusalem Post on their (favorable) attitude to Israel with their almost equally total silence on the United Nations on which any successful candidate will have to rely for dealing with foreign countries.
So far, Joe Biden is the honourable (in this instance, at least) exception, who has publicly called for the arrears to be paid. It makes diplomatic sense for a nation to honour its pledges, but sadly the other candidates do not think it makes political sense to talk about it. Presumably they assume that it will get them few extra votes, while getting the assorted America-firsters and Likudniks on their case.
Since the candidates now have half a year of trawling around pressing the flesh, perhaps some of the more far-sighted voters can put them on the spot. For more background on the questions they could ask, the Better World Foundation is attempting to stir up some interest. Perhaps voters could thank the UN for refusing to endorse the invasion of Iraq by telling their representatives to pay up.
How can the United Nations be expected to listen to the US when Congress reneges on every funding promise?
June 1, 2007 8:00 PM |
Congress won't pay the UN the money it promised - and wonders why the US loses influence abroad. And the presidential candidates are silent about it.
Between John Bolton and Iraq, it is not difficult to find reasons why America's diplomatic currency is plunging along with the dollar. But another reason has nothing to with the White House - but the congressional circus's latest performance.
At a time when the US is proposing and voting for UN peacekeeping operations on a huge scale, and when its new Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is trying to foist more responsibility for Iraq on the organisation, the US is running a tab of almost $1bn in arrears with the UN - and that will increase even more by the end of the year based on the latest amounts budgeted by Congress.
In effect, the Capitol Hill circus has ignored an intricate compromise crafted by the former US Ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, under which the other 190 members agreed to accept the unilateral congressional calculations, wink at a substantial amount of arrears, and to reduce the percentage paid by the US in future from 33% to 27%.
Ted Turner agreed to sweeten the deal for the General Assembly by paying off some of the US arrears himself, but the clincher was the now-broken promise from the US to pay off the arrears and to pay promptly in future.
But Congress ratted on the deal, and has maintained a 25% cap on contributions, even though the other members agreed to reduce the US assessment again from last year, to 26%, which is why the US is again running up massive arrears - massive that is to the UN.
In fact, the sum that Congress is sitting on is the equivalent of two days of Pentagon spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, and one-tenth of the amount of the UN oil-for-food surplus that the US took for reconstruction in Iraq and still cannot account for.
The US general accounting office studied UN peacekeeping and found it was one-eighth of the cost of using US forces - even if one discounts the Pentagon being otherwise engaged at the moment, surging and losing in Iraq. Partly at the urging of the same Congressional geniuses, the US has pushed the UN into a massive expansion of peacekeepers in Lebanon, and wants an even bigger expansion into Darfur, in addition to supporting new and renewed operations ranging from Haiti to East Timor.
For an interesting contrast in how American politicians look at foreign affairs, one only has to contrast the total agreement of almost every presidential question to contribute to the Jerusalem Post on their (favorable) attitude to Israel with their almost equally total silence on the United Nations on which any successful candidate will have to rely for dealing with foreign countries.
So far, Joe Biden is the honourable (in this instance, at least) exception, who has publicly called for the arrears to be paid. It makes diplomatic sense for a nation to honour its pledges, but sadly the other candidates do not think it makes political sense to talk about it. Presumably they assume that it will get them few extra votes, while getting the assorted America-firsters and Likudniks on their case.
Since the candidates now have half a year of trawling around pressing the flesh, perhaps some of the more far-sighted voters can put them on the spot. For more background on the questions they could ask, the Better World Foundation is attempting to stir up some interest. Perhaps voters could thank the UN for refusing to endorse the invasion of Iraq by telling their representatives to pay up.
Monday, January 29, 2007
Full Writing on the Wall
Here is the full text of my Guardian "Comment is Free" piece on Carter which I can now post here.
Writing on the wall
The manufactured row over Jimmy Carter's criticism of Israel risks obscuring a real chance for peace.
Ian Williams
January 26, 2007 04:01 PM
The fuss over Jimmy Carter and his new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, gained new momentum this week as the former president spoke at Brandeis University, near Boston.
Carter's critics - of whom there are many - demanded that he use his speaking engagement to debate Alan Dershowitz, the prominent defender of torture and Israel. I look forward to similar demands that every time Dershowitz speaks, he give space to one of his opponents - Noam Chomsky, say, or Al Sharpton - and lets them counter his arguments.
Dershowitz, writing in the Jerusalem Post, claimed he just wanted "a real dialogue." But when overtly racist Israeli minister for strategic affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, who has advocated mass killings of Arabs, let alone apartheid, came to the US to speak at the Brookings Institute's Saban Center, did Dershowitz call for his remarks to be balanced by a riposte from a speaker from Peace Now, let alone Palestinian Envoy Afif Safieh?
This manufactured furor against Carter's book could not happen in any other country except the USA - and it has certainly not happened in Israel, where many clear-sighted Israelis would agree entirely with the book's message. More to the point, those with intimate experience of apartheid in South Africa, ranging from Archbishop Desmond Tutu in this space, to 200 prominent South African Jews in a letter last year, make much more explicit comparisons.
Carter has been called bigoted and anti-Semitic. In his book, however, he comes across as rather mealy-mouthed. In his speech at Brandeis he re-emphasized what he says in his book: that his warnings are against Apartheid to the territories, when the discrimination faced by Bedouin and Arab citizens in Israel on, for example land ownership, or access to social services, bears some very critical examination.
"I realize that this has caused great concern in the Jewish community," he said. "The title makes it clear that the book is about conditions and events in the Palestinian territories and not in Israel."
In fact, the word apartheid appears only three times in the entire text of his book - and always in the context of the Occupied Territories. The one time that he mentions it most explicitly, he is quoting an Israeli who feared that "we are moving towards a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arab subjects with few rights of citizenship," in the context of describing future options for the Occupied Territories.
This is doubly interesting; because of course the Israeli press often makes the comparison with apartheid, since Israelis have to live with the consequences of their policies. It is only in the US that the legions of front-line fund-raiser banqueteers brandish their silverware in horror at the description.
Another time, Carter uses the word is in his description of the effect of the Separation Wall, "imposing a system of partial withdrawal, encapsulation, and apartheid on the Muslim and Christian citizens of the occupied territories." But he adds: "The driving force of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa - not racism but the acquisition of land." This is somewhat inaccurate, since apartheid in South Africa involved massive confiscations of the best land and corralling the dispossessed into small areas.
His third use of the A-word is the most interesting. Rabin had just returned from the apartheid state, and described to Carter "the close relationship Israel had with South Africa in the diamond trade ... but commented that the South African system of apartheid could not long survive."
Israel's sanctions-busting trade with the racist state helped it to survive longer than it would otherwise have done. And Israeli collaboration on arms programs may have gone beyond missiles and planes as far a joint nuclear test, with a pariah regime whose antecedents were Nazi sympathizers. If apartheid is such dreadful concept that we can't use it about Israeli polices, where were Carter's critics when Israel was the mainstay of the apartheid regime in South Africa?
I cannot recall that one of the shrill denouncers of President Carter's book ever taking exception to this conspiracy. Did one of them ever protest Israeli support for South Africa, or the hobnobbing of Israeli leaders with men who had been interned as Nazi sympathizers during the second world war? In contrast, the State Department told Carter not to talk to Hamas during his visits.
Apartheid is both understandable and abhorrent; it is the truth of the analogy that hurts. Clearly, the row about Carter's use of the word is a cynically contrived effort to detract from the book's plain and irrefutable message, accepted by the whole world community and much of Israel, and indeed by many American Jews: that the road to peace involves implementation of the UN resolutions, and a return to the 1967 borders, with some adjustments mutually agreed.
Dershowitz himself admits this, but still looks for straws to beat at Carter. After Brandeis he depicted one sentence, which Carter himself admits was sloppily phrased, as an endorsement of suicide bombing. Carter wrote that the Arabs "make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel." Dershowitz knows that Carter does not support terrorism. This is a manifestation of an intellectual pogrom of the most distasteful kind.
As the engineer of the most successful peace agreement in the region - the settlement between Egypt and Israel, for which he was vilified for decades across the Arab world - Carter's claim that obstruction from expansionists in Israel, and their friends in the US, is the main obstacle to a peace has particular authority.
That, of course, is why the settlers and their American supporters would prefer you not to read his book or hear from him. Still, we should push the comparison further: the architects of South Africa's apartheid saw the writing on the wall, and came to a settlement before it was too late. It has left their country the most successful and prosperous on the continent.
We already have the wall; Carter has now provided some of the writing. Will Israel have the courage to follow his advice? jimmy carter apartheid south africa israel united states alan dershowitz
Writing on the wall
The manufactured row over Jimmy Carter's criticism of Israel risks obscuring a real chance for peace.
Ian Williams
January 26, 2007 04:01 PM
The fuss over Jimmy Carter and his new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, gained new momentum this week as the former president spoke at Brandeis University, near Boston.
Carter's critics - of whom there are many - demanded that he use his speaking engagement to debate Alan Dershowitz, the prominent defender of torture and Israel. I look forward to similar demands that every time Dershowitz speaks, he give space to one of his opponents - Noam Chomsky, say, or Al Sharpton - and lets them counter his arguments.
Dershowitz, writing in the Jerusalem Post, claimed he just wanted "a real dialogue." But when overtly racist Israeli minister for strategic affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, who has advocated mass killings of Arabs, let alone apartheid, came to the US to speak at the Brookings Institute's Saban Center, did Dershowitz call for his remarks to be balanced by a riposte from a speaker from Peace Now, let alone Palestinian Envoy Afif Safieh?
This manufactured furor against Carter's book could not happen in any other country except the USA - and it has certainly not happened in Israel, where many clear-sighted Israelis would agree entirely with the book's message. More to the point, those with intimate experience of apartheid in South Africa, ranging from Archbishop Desmond Tutu in this space, to 200 prominent South African Jews in a letter last year, make much more explicit comparisons.
Carter has been called bigoted and anti-Semitic. In his book, however, he comes across as rather mealy-mouthed. In his speech at Brandeis he re-emphasized what he says in his book: that his warnings are against Apartheid to the territories, when the discrimination faced by Bedouin and Arab citizens in Israel on, for example land ownership, or access to social services, bears some very critical examination.
"I realize that this has caused great concern in the Jewish community," he said. "The title makes it clear that the book is about conditions and events in the Palestinian territories and not in Israel."
In fact, the word apartheid appears only three times in the entire text of his book - and always in the context of the Occupied Territories. The one time that he mentions it most explicitly, he is quoting an Israeli who feared that "we are moving towards a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arab subjects with few rights of citizenship," in the context of describing future options for the Occupied Territories.
This is doubly interesting; because of course the Israeli press often makes the comparison with apartheid, since Israelis have to live with the consequences of their policies. It is only in the US that the legions of front-line fund-raiser banqueteers brandish their silverware in horror at the description.
Another time, Carter uses the word is in his description of the effect of the Separation Wall, "imposing a system of partial withdrawal, encapsulation, and apartheid on the Muslim and Christian citizens of the occupied territories." But he adds: "The driving force of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa - not racism but the acquisition of land." This is somewhat inaccurate, since apartheid in South Africa involved massive confiscations of the best land and corralling the dispossessed into small areas.
His third use of the A-word is the most interesting. Rabin had just returned from the apartheid state, and described to Carter "the close relationship Israel had with South Africa in the diamond trade ... but commented that the South African system of apartheid could not long survive."
Israel's sanctions-busting trade with the racist state helped it to survive longer than it would otherwise have done. And Israeli collaboration on arms programs may have gone beyond missiles and planes as far a joint nuclear test, with a pariah regime whose antecedents were Nazi sympathizers. If apartheid is such dreadful concept that we can't use it about Israeli polices, where were Carter's critics when Israel was the mainstay of the apartheid regime in South Africa?
I cannot recall that one of the shrill denouncers of President Carter's book ever taking exception to this conspiracy. Did one of them ever protest Israeli support for South Africa, or the hobnobbing of Israeli leaders with men who had been interned as Nazi sympathizers during the second world war? In contrast, the State Department told Carter not to talk to Hamas during his visits.
Apartheid is both understandable and abhorrent; it is the truth of the analogy that hurts. Clearly, the row about Carter's use of the word is a cynically contrived effort to detract from the book's plain and irrefutable message, accepted by the whole world community and much of Israel, and indeed by many American Jews: that the road to peace involves implementation of the UN resolutions, and a return to the 1967 borders, with some adjustments mutually agreed.
Dershowitz himself admits this, but still looks for straws to beat at Carter. After Brandeis he depicted one sentence, which Carter himself admits was sloppily phrased, as an endorsement of suicide bombing. Carter wrote that the Arabs "make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel." Dershowitz knows that Carter does not support terrorism. This is a manifestation of an intellectual pogrom of the most distasteful kind.
As the engineer of the most successful peace agreement in the region - the settlement between Egypt and Israel, for which he was vilified for decades across the Arab world - Carter's claim that obstruction from expansionists in Israel, and their friends in the US, is the main obstacle to a peace has particular authority.
That, of course, is why the settlers and their American supporters would prefer you not to read his book or hear from him. Still, we should push the comparison further: the architects of South Africa's apartheid saw the writing on the wall, and came to a settlement before it was too late. It has left their country the most successful and prosperous on the continent.
We already have the wall; Carter has now provided some of the writing. Will Israel have the courage to follow his advice? jimmy carter apartheid south africa israel united states alan dershowitz
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