ON Wednesday, the lead editorial in this paper suggested that President Bush name Rudy Giuliani to be this nation’s ambassador to the United Nations. The idea is so exciting that it deserves to be shouted from rooftops.
The mayor’s signal ability to confront dysfunction, disorder, corruption and decay and – through sheer force of will and intellect – become a force for change transformed the lives of New Yorkers for the better. The United States desperately needs those very skills at work this year at the United Nations.
Never before has the job of U.N. ambassador been more important. The world body needs to be confronted and challenged in new ways. The United States is depending on the United Nations to play a constructive role in helping to guide the new government in Iraq, which means that we need a viable and functional U.N. in place for this critical task.
Rudy wouldn’t be running the U.N., of course, but he could take on the bully-pulpit aspect of the job so brilliantly filled nearly 30 years ago by Pat Moynihan and use moral suasion as his tool for change.
The United Nations is now at the center of what may turn out to be the largest and most far-reaching political-financial scandal in world history. It now appears that Saddam Hussein skimmed tens of billions of dollars from Oil-for-Food – the U.N. program that let Iraq sell oil so that humanitarian relief could flow to the suffering Iraqi people – and was able to do so because he bribed officials across the planet.
The United Nations had a vested interest in turning a blind eye to Saddam’s thievery. Documents uncovered since the end of the Iraq war indicate that one of the officials bribed may have been the U.N.’s own administrator of the program, Benon Sevan (who has conveniently vanished from view on a vacation that dovetails with his retirement).
Even more important, as Claudia Rosett details in an extraordinary summary of the Oil-for-Food scandal in the new issue of Commentary magazine, is the way the United Nations itself was corrupted by the flow of Saddam’s oil. Its Secretariat received a commission of 2 percent for every barrel of oil sold.
The Secretariat is, in effect, U.N. honcho Kofi Annan’s private office.
So Annan’s peculiar defensiveness toward Saddam Hussein – from the time he kicked U.N. inspectors out in 1998, to the time Annan assented to Hussein’s rejection of Rolf Ekeus as chief U.N. inspector in 2000, to his efforts to prevent war in 2003 – now have a ready explanation. The Oil-for-Food program was simply too valuable to give up.
Giuliani’s skills as a prosecutor could come into play here. The only way for the United Nations to recover from the horrors being uncovered is to bring them out into the open – to clean house and start from scratch. The United States will have to take the leadership role here in exposing the crimes and insisting on the changes.
There are some political dangers for the president here. Rudy is an outsized personality, to be sure. He is not controllable. He will say what he thinks needs to be said. He will come into conflict with the State Department (as forceful U.N. ambassadors always do). But he is not only eminently capable, he also shares the president’s vision of the need to democratize the Arab world, confront terror and – not insignificantly – defend Israel against the depredations to which it is constantly exposed at the U.N.
After all, five years before George W. Bush said he’d no longer deal with Yasser Arafat, Rudy kicked the Palestinian thug out of a Lincoln Center concert during the celebration of the U.N.’s 50th anniversary.
What’s in it for Rudy? If he wants to be president, he needs foreign-policy credentials. Here they are, on a silver platter, big guy.
Plus, it would just be so damn much fun to watch.
John Podhoretz’s new book is “Bush Country.”
