[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
. On the eve of Bill Clinton s election, then-UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali proposed an activist Agenda for Peace thatwon kudos from the Bush administration, the New York Times, and theWashington Post, as well as some top commanders in the U.S.military.His vision: a robust  peace enforcement capability for the UnitedNations, a rapid-reaction force that would fill the gap between the UnitedNations traditional peacekeeping role as a lightly armed bufferÞöthe kindof duty it had performed for decades in places like the Middle East andKashmirÞöand the large-scale war-making capability left to the UnitedStates in the Korean and Persian Gulf wars.Boutros-Ghali s concept seemed to dovetail nicely with the new192 At War with Ourselvesadministration s agenda:  Enlargement of democracy had replaced con-tainment as America s basic foreign policy doctrine, declared AnthonyLake, then national security advisor.The United Nations would not becentral to this, but that was fine; it would take care of the world s basketcasesÞöa kind of World Bank for political conflictÞöwhile the rest of theglobe prospered on a diet of open markets and democracy.MadeleineAlbright espoused a pro-UN policy of  assertive multilateralism thatwould combine forthright U.S.leadership with extensive use of UNpeacekeepers. The time has come to commit the political, intellectualand financial capital that UN peacekeeping and our security deserve, shesaid.u Clinton himself, in a September 1993 speech to the UN GeneralAssembly, proclaimed that  UN peacekeeping holds the promise toresolve many of this era s conflicts. Taken together, it was the last timeanyone offered up a coherent plan for the hopefully named and neverrealized New World Order.It never happened, of course.Instead, mission by mission, UN  bluehelmets who had served low-key roles as monitors of peace agreementsduring the Cold War failed at peacekeeping in the new era of tribal andethnic strife, when so many situations seemed to hover precariouslybetween peace and war.In Somalia, a UN humanitarian mission turnedinto a debacle, as twenty-five Pakistanis and then, later, eighteen U.S.sol-diers were killedÞö one of whose bodies appeared on CNN, gettingdragged through the dust of Mogadishu by cheering Somalis.In Rwandain 1994, a gun-shy Security Council failed to reinforce the UN contingent,opening the way to genocide.The mother of all peacekeeping disasterswas Bosnia, where Dutch peacekeepers were held hostage by snarling Serbforces and meekly handed over seven thousand Muslims at Srebrenica forslaughter.By the time Dayton rolled around, after what Holbrooke called the triple disaster of peacekeeping failures in Somalia, Rwanda, andBosnia in 1993 94, he himself had little use for the UN, which is why heput on such a harsh display of realpolitik; instead NATO would supplythe solution and the peacekeeping muscle.This was the same Holbrookewho, as a New Yorker born of immigrant parents, had more than oncetearfully described the moment when his father took him, as a boy, to thebanks of the East River to gaze upon the UN building and see the greathope of the future.Rethinking Multilateralism 193By the late  90s, nothing seemed to be working.Not only was peace-keeping failing, it was getting very expensive.The overgrown UN secre-tariat, some ten thousand strong, was a  really swollen, sloppy awfulbureaucracy, says Holbrooke, often peopled at its senior level by aging,tenured aristocrats from developing countries who lived well in New Yorkwhile bashing their host nation, America, in the media.As John Mickle-thwait and Adrian Wooldridge put it,  Look around the whole UN, and youfind a haze of duplication among the manifold funds, programs and agen-cies.Even when set alongside national governments, it seems bloated [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]