08:45 am
Wonk’d: What’s Right with the United Nations
I haven’t talked much about the UN since starting this blog. I want to write a bit about how disastrous the current UN Human Rights Council is, but it needs some context. So I’ve decided to do a series of posts on the UN. Let’s start with what’s right with the United Nations.
Without the UN, the United States would have to do a lot more in the world – and it would cost taxpayers a whole lot more than it does now. Currently, the United States is spending over one billion dollars a week in Iraq. In contrast, we contribute two billion dollars a year to support peacekeeping operations in eighteen other war-torn or unstable countries. And according to several recent studies, the UN does a better job at peacekeeping than we do.
But there is a lot more to the United Nations – and much of it tells a very different story from what wingnuts like John Bolton would like you to believe. No one does a better job than the UN when it comes to coordinating response to natural disasters. The UN is also very good at helping those whose needs don’t show up on the nightly news.
For example, no other organization – no government, no NGO, no other international agency – can match the record of UNICEF. Millions of children are alive today thanks to UNICEF’s efforts to collect, disburse, and coordinate assistance. To single out just one of UNICEF’s life-saving programs, its vaccination campaign has saved the over 20 million lives in the past 20 years.
UNICEF is only one of the many UN bodies that do important and essential work – and do it largely in the shadows. The UN Population Fund, the World Food Programme, the UN Fund for Women, and the UN Development Programme all make a real difference. But you never hear about them in the American press.
The UN also helps promote health and treat disease. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria, and Tuberculosis is fighting diseases that kill six million people every year. The World Health Organization played a key role in preventing a SARS outbreak, and is now fighting bird flu and other emerging diseases. WHO doctors in the Congo have stopped outbreaks of pneumatic plague and Ebola. And it was the WHO that successfully led the campaign to eradicate smallpox.
Those are the good things. More later on the not-so-good.
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