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The other day someone on the blog asked me if there were any conservative female politicians I like. Well in addition to Nikki Haley, Jan Brewer, and Susana Martinez, I am very much impressed by Florida congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinin and her bills regarding the United Nations. There is no purpose whatsoever for the U.N. Human Rights Committee – a committee that has had Syria, China, Cuba, and Libya as members – to exist outside of an Orwellian universe. UNRWA has become a racket which keeps solely for political reasons Palestinians in refugee camps for 63 years – only a tiny portion of whom actually were ever even born in Israel.
by Caroline Glick
US Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, kicked up a political storm this week. On Tuesday, Ros-Lehtinen introduced the United Nations Transparency, Accountability and Reform Act. If passed into law it would place stringent restrictions on US funding of the UN’s budget.
The US currently funds 22 percent of the UN’s general budget. That budget is passed by the General Assembly with no oversight by the US. America’s 22% share of the budget is nonvoluntary, meaning the US may exert no influence over how its taxpayers’ funds are spent.
If Ros-Lehtinen’s act is passed into law, the UN will have two years to enact budgetary reforms that would render a minimum of 80% of its budget financing voluntary. If the UN does not make the required reforms, the US government will be enjoined to withhold 50% of its nonvoluntary UN budget allocations.
Beyond this overarching demand for UN budgetary reform, the act contains several specific actions that are directed against UN institutions that advance anti-American and anti-Israel agendas.
Ros-Lehtinen’s act would defund the UN Human Rights Committee until such time as it repeals its permanent anti-Israel resolution, and prohibits countries that support terror and are under UN Security Council sanctions from serving as its members. It would also prohibit the US from serving as a member of the UNHRC until such reforms are enacted.
Ros-Lehtinen’s bill defunds all UN activities related to the libelous Goldstone Report, and the anti- Semitic Durban process. It vastly curtails and conditions US funding of UNRWA, the Palestinian refugee agency permeated by members of terrorist organizations. UNRWA’s facilities are routinely used to plan, execute and incite terrorism against Israel and to indoctrinate Palestinians to seek Israel’s destruction.
The bill pays special attention to the Palestinian Authority’s plan to have the UN Security Council and General Assembly vote in favor of Palestinian statehood later this month. The bill would cut off US funding to any UN agency or organization that upgrades the Palestinian mission to the UN in any way in the aftermath of a General Assembly vote in favor of such an upgrade in representation.
Ros-Lehtinen’s bill, which has 57 co-sponsors, provides detailed explanations for how the targeted UN agencies and activities harm US interests. It notes that the US’s membership since 2009 in the UN Human Rights Council has had no impact whatsoever on the UNHRC’s anti-Israel and anti- American agenda. The US has been unable to temper in any way the UNHRC’s actions and resolutions, including its decisions to form the Goldstone Committee and to endorse the findings of the Goldstone Report, and its continued support and organization of the anti-Semitic Durban conferences in which Israel is attacked and libeled as an illegitimate, racist state.
[…]
Ignoring its fact-based assessment of UN failings, the Obama administration has rejected the Ros- Lehtinen bill out of hand. Speaking to Politico, an administration source panned the bill, claiming, “This draft legislation is dated, tired and frankly unresponsive to the positive role being played by the UN.”
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland attacked the bill, saying it would “seriously undermine our international standing and dangerously weaken the UN as an instrument to advance US national security goals.”
Since taking office, Barack Obama has taken concerted steps to place cooperation with the UN at the top of his foreign policy agenda. Through word and deed, Obama has shown that he believes that the US should minimize the extent to which it operates independently of the UN on the global stage.
Obama and his advisers give four arguments to support their view that the UN should effectively replace the US as the global leader. First, they say that the US cannot operate unilaterally on the global stage.
Second, they insinuate that operations undertaken outside the UN umbrella are somehow illegitimate.
[…]
States do not oppose the US at the UN because they consider it bossy. They oppose the US at the UN because they believe it serves their national interests to oppose the US and its interests.
It is due to clashing interests, not the comportment of US representatives, that the Obama administration to fail to exert any influence over the UNHRC’s agenda despite its commitment to “engagement.”
Clashing national interests are the reason the Obama administration has failed to secure Security Council support for anything approaching effective measures against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
The final administration argument – that it is déclassé to demand that the UN stop advancing the causes of America’s enemies – is not simply peevish and insulting. It is indicative of the culture that motivates the administration to cling to its UN-centered agenda despite its obvious and repeated failure.
As the easy refutation of all the administration’s arguments makes clear, the agenda is not a product of rational thought. It is the product of the groupthink that is endemic at the universities whence Obama and his advisers have emerged. This groupthink is directed by unquestioned clichés that are passed off as sophisticated reasoning. These include such pearls of wisdom as “global governance,” “Twitter revolution,” “multilateralism” and “interdependence.”
These clichés have become articles of faith that are impermeable to fact and reality. As a consequence, those who adhere to them will never acknowledge their failure to deliver on their utopian promises. Instead they attack anyone who points out their failure as “dated,” and as “tired” old fogies who are too unsophisticated to understand the world.
We see this attitude at work in all aspects of Obama’s foreign policy. For instance, Obama came into office with the view that the reason all efforts to date to successfully complete a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians failed because the Palestinians didn’t trust the US to “deliver” Israel. To remedy this perceived problem, Obama has consistently sought to “put daylight” between the US and Israel. This policy has failed abysmally, as the PA’s current UN statehood bid shows. And yet the administration continues to cling to it, because acknowledging its failure would involve renouncing a cliché.
[…]
Ros-Lehtinen’s bill is expected to be blocked in the Democrat-controlled Senate before Obama has the opportunity to veto it. This is a pity not simply because the bill would advance US interests and the cause of freedom. It is a pity because it shows that the foreign policy debate in the US is now a fight between those who trust facts and those who trust clichés.
Read the rest: Cliche based foreign policy
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Tags: Caroline Glick
