Where What When

The United Nations

What Moynihan and Kirkpatrick Saw; What Bush Has Done

A number of remarkable men and women have served as the United States Ambassador to the UN. These include Arthur Goldberg, who previously served as a Supreme Court Justice; Adlai Stevenson, a two-time candidate for president; George H. W. Bush, before he became president; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later a United States Senator; John Danforth, a former Senator; the recently deceased Jeane Kirkpatrick; and the recently retired John Bolton.

Two of them – Moynihan and Kirkpatrick – wrote important articles about the shenanigans of the institution.

Moynihan Blasts the Carter Administration

In March 1981, Commentary magazine published “Joining the Jackals – The United States at the UN, 1977-1980” by Senator Moynihan. Moynihan wrote not of his own tenure at the UN (though a Democrat, Moynihan served during the Ford Administration) but of the later Carter Administration’s approach to the UN.

In March 1980, towards the end of the Carter years, the Security Council passed Resolution 465, which was extremely anti-Israel. The United States voted in favor. Belatedly realizing the political repercussions, the Administration, underwent contortions to downplay the significance of the vote. The damage had been done, however. Carter’s UN stance cost him the support of Jewish voters during the New York primary election later that year, when he was making a bid for the Democratic nomination for a second term in office.

Moynihan shows that the Resolution 465 vote was not an isolated occurrence but a culmination of Carter’s UN policy. Upon coming to power, in 1977, the Carter Administration felt that the United States had been too confrontational in the past and must be more conciliatory to other nations whose views did not coincide with our own. As Moynihan observed: “There was a fateful avoidance of reality in the new Administration’s view: a denial that there is genuine hostility toward the United States in the world and true conflicts of interest between this nation and others – an illusion that a surface reasonableness and civility are the same as true cooperation.”

In general, this new conciliation gained the United States nothing; there was no “cooperation,” said Moynihan, unless the United States adopted the views of its adversaries. While the views of the United States diverged widely from the majority of the UN member states, during votes on the Middle East, the U.S. didn’t always stand up for its ally; it often abstained, instead. But, according to Moynihan, “For the United States to abstain on a Security Council resolution concerning Israel is the equivalent of acquiescing.”

Moynihan also describes how the malignant influence of the Soviet Union increased after the signing of the Camp David Accords, in 1978. One would assume that Israel’s diplomatic position would be more secure once it made peace with its biggest Arab neighbor. One would be wrong. The Soviet Union, upset that it had been shut out of the Middle East, conspired with the Arab rejectionists to condemn Israel in ever-stronger terms in order to upset the nascent peace process. This lay the groundwork for Resolution 465. It wasn’t simply a matter of criticizing Israel but of declaring Israel illegitimate, as Moynihan explained:

On March 1, 1980, a resolution (465) was submitted to the Council that was as viciously anti-Israel – and as destructive of the Camp David accords – as any that has ever been encountered or could readily be devised. Israel was found to be in “flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention”: the first nation in history to be found guilty of behaving as the government of Nazi Germany had behaved.... In a word, according to resolution 465, Israel is an outlaw state, guilty of war crimes. (Not the Vietnamese invaders of Cambodia or the Soviets in Afghanistan. Israel!) Its alleged capital is not its capital at all – ‘Jerusalem or any part thereof’ – and it is in illegal occupation of territory now for the first time designated “Palestinian.” Here, then, was the triumph of everything the Soviets and the rejectionists had stood for: the repudiation of everything Sadat, and for that matter Begin and Carter, had sought. Yet the United States had voted in favor of this resolution.”

So, the Carter Administration in its zeal to please everyone, voted for an effort designed to undermine its greatest achievement, the Camp David Accords. In the end of his article, Moynihan stated his hope that the lessons of the past had been learned. Unfortunately, this did not happen.

Jeane Kirkpatrick: Inverting Morality

The four years of the Carter Administration should have taught us that foreign policy cannot be conducted under the pretense that we have no enemies in the world. But, as Jeane Kirkpatrick showed, in her July 1989 article “How the PLO Was Legitimized,” the lessons were not learned. While Moynihan’s focus was on the delegitimization of Israel, Kirkpatrick focused on the legitimization of the PLO.

Dr. Kirkpatrick observes that the PLO learned to use violence effectively. It was the first to hijack airplanes, and, starting in 1965, murdered countless Israeli civilians as well as the Israeli athletes at Munich, in addition to Palestinian rivals and Arab critics (including the Jordanian prime minister). Each highly publicized act of violence enhanced the PLO’s visibility as a terror organization. What the UN allowed the PLO to do was to remake its image. But the PLO didn’t become legitimate by renouncing terror. Rather, the UN – working in concert with the PLO and its supporters – redefined terrorism. PLO terror became a legally recognized form of legitimate resistance.

Kirkpatrick names the documents that began to invert the morality of international law to serve terrorist aims:

Where the UN Charter permitted force by member states only to defend themselves against attack, General Assembly Resolution 2708 XX (1970) created a new category of “legitimate” force, one that could be used against member states. This new right, confirmed in subsequent resolutions, approved the struggle of “liberation” groups against “colonialism” by “all necessary means at their disposal.”...The General Assembly thus subordinated the principle of the “sovereign inviolability” of states to the struggle of “peoples” against “colonialism.”

As Dr. Kirkpatrick observed, this had a real legal effect, in that it put important new restrictions on the right of states to self-defense. If you recall the kidnapping and killing of the Israeli soldiers across the international border with Lebanon in October 2000, you might recall that the UN protected Hezbollah. It would appear that the UN’s unconscionable behavior – protecting a terrorist organization in conflict with a member state – was not an aberration but was in line with the parody that the UN has become.

Dr. Kirkpatrick goes on to show how the PLO meshed its Covenant with this new definition, claiming the rights of a “people” under the redefined UN Charter and denying the State of Israel any rights whatsoever. The UN General Assembly, too, began to adopt key elements of the PLO Covenant into its resolutions.

That’s why Arafat and his spokesmen were so keen to cite Resolutions 242 and 338 and other relevant resolutions in all conflicts with Israel. The resolutions invariably denied Israel’s right to exist or defend itself. Arafat thus pursued not conciliation but confrontation – a confrontation ratified by the hopelessly corrupt UN.

In recounting this shameful history, Kirkpatrick concluded:

Thanks in large part to this relentless campaign, much of the world is now confused about who is the aggressor and who is the victim, who is the terrorist and who is the victim of terrorism...The long march through the UN has produced many benefits for the PLO. It has created a people where there was none, a claim where there was none. Now the PLO is seeking to create a state where there already is one. That will take more than resolutions and more than an “international peace conference.” But having succeeded so well over the years in its campaign to legitimize itself and to delegitimize Israel, the PLO might yet also succeed in bringing that campaign to a triumphant conclusion, with consequences for the Jewish state that would be nothing short of catastrophic.

Both Moynihan and Kirkpatrick saw through the noble sounding rhetoric and exposed it for the hatred that it masked.

The Bush Administration’s Decency

Given this inversion of good and evil at the UN, the current Bush Administration adopted a policy insisting that any resolution about the Middle East had to be “fair” and “balanced.” If the Security Council resolutions were unbalanced, the United States would veto them. Ambassadors John Negroponte, John Danforth, and John Bolton have faithfully carried out this policy.

Yet Israel’s enemies have little interest in fairness or balance. In a remarkable statement in October 2004 about a proposed resolution, Ambassador Danforth said:

Now consider what this resolution does not say. It does not mention even one of the 450 Qassam rocket attacks launched against Israel over the past two years. It does not mention 200 rockets launched this year alone. It does not mention the two Israeli children who were outside playing last week when a rocket suddenly crashed into their young bodies. It does not mention the undisputed fact that Qassam rockets have no military purpose – that they are crude, imprecise devices of terror designed to kill civilians. It does not mention that Hamas took “credit” for killing these Israeli children and maiming many other Israeli civilians – calling these deaths and woundings a “victory.” It does not mention that the terrorists hide among Palestinian civilians, provoking their deaths, and then use those deaths as fodder for their hatred, lawlessness, and efforts to derail the peace process. It does not mention the complete failure of the Palestinian Authority to meet its commitments to establish security among its people. It does not mention any of these facts, nor does it acknowledge the legitimate need for Israel to defend itself. The resolution is totally lacking in balance.

A few months ago, Ambassador Bolton made similar observations in vetoing another resolution:

We are disturbed at language in the resolution that is, in many places, biased against Israel and politically motivated. Such language does not further the cause of peace.... [It] equates Israeli military operations, which are legal, with firing of rockets into Israel, which are acts of terrorism.

The consistency with which the Bush Administration has fought the UN’s stance on Israel has led to what Jerusalem Post writer Evelyn Gordon called the “Frequent Abstainers Club.” Gordon argued that the certainty of an American veto of unbalanced resolutions emboldened other countries to join the United States in the veto or simply abstain. True, there are only a handful of other countries, but in the moral cesspool that is the UN, even small victories have to be appreciated. The Bush Administration’s courage means that Israel is being defended not by a single country but by a handful of countries. It also exposes the agenda of Israel’s critics. No longer can they say with any degree of credibility that their resolutions are fair.

What is sad is how an organization that was founded to foster understanding among the nations of the world has been corrupted to make a single state a pariah. The UN is not a well-meaning organization. It is an organization whose depraved morality is dictated by the dictators, tyrants, and their sympathizers, who are the majority of its members. These tyrants deny their own constituents the right to vote but parade their bogus majority as proof of their own morality.

A number of politicians have taken courageous stands against this. Others simply pretend that the United Nations has value. President Bush and his representatives deserve credit for following the trail blazed by the likes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick.

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Article List - February 2007