Gwynne Dyer: UN reform brave but useless

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan's plan for United Nations reform, unveiled last week, is a brave attempt to square the circle, but it will not work.

It acknowledges the Bush Administration's strident demands for changes at the UN, accommodates a few of them, and proposes a new structure that will appeal to those who are really fed up with the organisation: the majority of members who are non-Western and non-great power.

But it will not appeal to President George W. Bush, and he has the power to thwart it.

Bush spends a lot of time criticising the UN, but he will not be satisfied by reforms that just make it a more effective or representative institution; what he wants is one that obediently supports United States strategies and policies.

Since the whole style of his Administration is unilateralist, and the UN is multilateralist by definition, he is not going to get what he wants - so very few of the 101 reforms proposed by the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change are actually going to happen.

Bush won't mind: a genuinely committed and activist UN is not in his Administration's interest.

He was at it again last week on his visit to Canada.

"The objective of the UN and other institutions must be collective security, not endless debate," he said, adding that it must be "more than a League of Nations".

The rhetoric echoed what he said last year before the US invasion of Iraq, and the implication was that the UN had failed by not supporting America's attack on that country, but the UN didn't fail.

The US wanted to invade a country that had not attacked it, and the UN Security Council refused to endorse that attack, which made it illegal under international law (as Annan admits when pressed very hard).

The Security Council could not condemn the US because the US has a veto, and nobody could stop the invasion because the UN has never been able to coerce the great powers.

But the UN did its job, which was to consider the legitimacy of the US case for an immediate attack and find it wanting. So poor Kofi Annan, who was originally Washington's candidate for the job of Secretary-General, found himself trapped between his sponsor and the institution he served.

His response, a classic bureaucratic manoeuvre, was to appoint a panel that would report on how to reform the UN and make it more effective.

To raise the odds on a favourable response by the Bush Administration, he appointed Brent Scowcroft, a former National Security Adviser to President George Bush snr, to the panel.

To get support from the rest of the planet, he proposed the expansion of the Security Council. Neither move will succeed.

Expanding the Security Council is a good way to placate large countries in the developing world who don't see why the council should be virtually a Western monopoly: four of the five veto-wielding "permanent members" who dominate the council are Western countries who gained their special status at a time when most non-Western peoples lived in colonial servitude.

Unfortunately, the idea of adding some new permanent members to the council breaks down over the details.

Nobody can agree on which countries should become new permanent members. Should Portuguese-speaking Brazil be Latin America's candidate, or is Spanish-speaking Mexico more representative?

Should South Africa, the continent's richest country, or Nigeria, its most populous, be Africa's permanent member? Which Muslim country should get a permanent seat?

Handing out vetoes to new permanent members would just paralyse the Security Council, but why should China have a veto if India doesn't?

The expansion proposals open many cans of worms and do not win Annan much support from the intended beneficiaries - while the panel's thoughts on making it easier to intervene in countries that abuse their own citizens are unlikely to win over the US either.

It is "pre-emptive" intervention in countries that allegedly pose some threat to the US that interests the Bush Administration, and UN approval for that would still have to come by means of a Security Council vote that the US would not necessarily win.

The disdain and outright hostility towards the UN that now threaten the institution will not be ended by the changes that Annan and his panel are recommending, though they would be useful enough in their own right.

Nothing will do much good so long as the Bush Administration sees the UN and the whole structure of international law as irritating constraints on the exercise of US power.

The wise men have laboured long and thought deeply, and their 101 recommendations for change are mostly sensible and in some cases long overdue. Debating them will give the delegations at the UN something to do while they wait to hear their fate. But if the US turns against the UN permanently, then it does not have a future.