To Save America

by Newt Gingrich

  These are the kinds of figures who run the UN bureaucracy. Attempts by Western democracies to elect responsible people with successful track records are routinely stymied, since we’re outnumbered at the UN by the various interest blocs of the developing world. As a result, the UN has descended into an abyss of anti-Western extremism that will almost certainly grow even worse before it ever gets better.

  INSTITUTIONALIZED CORRUPTION

  Like all socialist machines, the UN is rife with corruption. It starts with the budgeting process. The UN website says the budget for 2008-2009 was $4.171 billion.3 But this number does not include “extra-budgetary” items such as peacekeeping operations or UN organizations such as the UN Development Program and the World Food Program, which consume as much as $12 billion a year.

  In fact, the UN’s finances are so opaque that nobody knows what the annual budget really is. In 2009, when pressed by Forbes magazine about budget figures, the spokesperson for the Secretary General shockingly admitted that the budget is “not something that we keep track of in any systematic way.”4 Predictably, this lack of transparency facilitates massive corruption, the most infamous scandal being the Oil-for-Food program, from which Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party siphoned off an estimated $10 billion. A UN committee later found that the program’s head, Benon Sevan, had received bribes and illicit kickbacks from the Iraqi government.

  Since then, numerous reform efforts have been blocked or rendered toothless. The Procurement Task Force, an anti-fraud unit created in 2006 following the Oil-for-Food scandal, is a great example. After identifying fraud and waste in numerous UN programs, the program was shut down in 2009 due to pressure from Russia and Singapore, whose citizens had been cited by the task force for corruption.

  Simply put, corruption is accepted and expected at the UN. And like the Left’s political machine in the United States, reform efforts run up against systemic resistance. UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon has yet to approve a permanent director of investigation for the Office of Internal Oversight Services after more than two years. In fact, he has repeatedly blocked the person recommended by an independent panel, apparently because he’s American.

  Consequently, even after the Oil-for-Food scandal, corruption still runs rampant at the UN. For instance:• One of the local UN Office for Project Service directors in Afghanistan spent $200,000 of UN funds to renovate his guesthouse.5

  • The UN’s auditors in the Sudan mission found UN personnel wasted $1.2 million in unused hotel rooms.6

  • The UN’s estimate for renovations to its New York City headquarters in 2003 was initially $953 million, then revised to $1.2 billion. By 2009, the estimate reached $1.9 billion.7 The United States initially offered to finance the entire renovation with a low-interest loan, thus isolating the funding stream to create more accountability. But that method apparently didn’t provide enough opportunity for graft, so the funds were routed through the regular, unaccountable budgeting process. Even Donald Trump testified to Congress that his company could have taken over the project and completed the renovation for $700 million but was turned down.8

  • Investigations into the UN Development Programme (UNDP), whose executive committee is chaired by Iran, showed that Kim Jong-Il’s regime siphoned off aid sent for the North Korean people and also embezzled computers, software, and satellite receiving devices and spectrometers that can be used in military and nuclear weapons.9

  • A 2007 audit by the Office of Internal Oversight Services of $1.4 billion in peacekeeping contracts showed that $619 million was subject to corruption—an astounding 44 percent corruption rate.10

  The UN’s culture of corruption begets more severe acts of lawlessness. UN personnel have been accused of sexual exploitation, including rape, in eleven countries. The worst cases were in the Congo, with thirty-eight allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation reported in 2008 alone. Additionally, the BBC11 and Human Rights Watch12 have both reported the UN has suppressed evidence of crimes committed by their peacekeepers in the Congo, including arms trafficking with the Congolese militia.

  The UN tolerates corruption for a specific reason: it’s viewed as another way to transfer wealth from developed to developing countries. But the beneficiaries of this graft are not poverty-stricken families suffering under dictatorships. To the contrary, the illicit funds go straight to their oppressors—the privileged, powerful bureaucrats that prop up despotic regimes.

  BETRAYING HUMAN RIGHTS

  Even though it was created in part to defend human rights, the UN has amassed an abysmal human rights record.

  The UN Human Rights Council is a perverse, Orwellian institution that mainly acts to protect human rights abusers from international condemnation. With membership extended to oppressive nations like China, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba, the council focuses on condemning two countries: the United States and Israel.

  In 2008, the council condemned Israel for human rights violations 120 times and the United States twenty-seven times, respectively. Meanwhile, dictatorships in China, Iran, and Cuba were condemned just nineteen, seventeen, and six times, respectively.

  It’s bad enough that human rights abusers use the council to protect each other. But in one unconscionable episode, the council has even abetted mass murder. In 2007, the UN recalled its human rights monitors from Sudan in the midst of the Darfur genocide due to pressure from China and Egypt. Just months later, in a stunning display of moral depravity, the G-77 selected the butchers of Sudan to chair its block for the 2009-2010 sessions.

  Efforts to reform the UN human rights apparatus have failed. Ironically, the Human Rights Council itself stems from an attempt to reform its predecessor, the UN Commission on Human Rights, which also protected human rights abusers and condemned Western democracies.

  Replacing the commission with a new, functioning human rights body was one of the recommendations of the Task Force on UN Reform, which I co-chaired with former Senate majority leader George Mitchell in 2005. Although this general idea was adopted, it couldn’t survive the UN machine which, by refusing our recommendation to set strict standards for membership in the new council, insured the new body was just as much of a farce as its predecessor.

  The Bush administration rightly withheld funding for the new council and boycotted its meetings in 2007 and 2008. But the Obama administration reversed course and joined the group, claiming the United States could reform the corrupt council by “engaging” it. The results have been appalling. While U.S. participation has not improved the council one iota, it has made the United States complicit in suppressing human rights throughout the globe.

  For instance, at the behest of the Islamic bloc, the Human Rights Council has passed resolutions calling on governments to outlaw “defamation of religion.” Typically, Islam is the only specific religion mentioned in these statutes, showing their true purpose is to ban criticism of Islam worldwide. This gives Islamic dictatorships the cover of international law to assault free speech, both at home and internationally, such as their efforts to censor the Danish Mohammad cartoons of 2005. While most Americans were horrified by the deadly rioting that broke out after the cartoons’ publications, the UN’s Islamic bloc insisted the problem was really that Western governments allowed newspapers to publish these “defamatory” cartoons in the first place.

  Under Presidents Clinton and Bush, the United States rightly opposed UN anti-defamation measures. But that’s changed under the Obama administration. Although it voted against some anti-defamation resolutions, it has not only supported but even co-sponsored one such measure. Condemning broad abstractions like “negative stereotyping of religions and racial groups,” the resolution contradicts the spirit, if not the letter, of the First Amendment.

  Furthermore, its overwhelming support for the Goldstone Report suggests the council is not being improved by United States membership. The report, assessing the 2008-2009 conflict between Israel and Hamas, accused both sides of war crimes. This was a textbook case of moral equival
ence between a victim acting in self-defense—Israel—and an aggressor—the terrorist group Hamas, which provoked the conflict by targeting Israeli civilians with hundreds of rockets. The report even denied Hamas endangered Gaza civilians, a claim disproved when Israel released the 500-page Malam report, which published declassified photos, videos, interrogation records, and other evidence showing Hamas committed gross war crimes by operating out of mosques, schools, and hospitals.

  THE LONG, HARD ROAD TO REFORM

  It has now been almost five years since the Task Force on UN Reform, which I co-chaired, issued its recommendations. The task force was bipartisan, so its recommendations were not as aggressive as I would have preferred. Still, we agreed upon practical reforms that would turn the UN into a more effective champion of freedom and human rights around the globe.c Among them:• Create an independent internal oversight board, functioning like a corporate independent audit committee, and create an official COO position.

  • Develop a clear-cut definition of terrorism, emphasizing that violence against noncombatants or civilians is intolerable.

  • Implement better targeted, better enforced sanctions against human rights abusers.

  • Create a human rights body with strict membership standards.

  The United States should champion a sustained anti-corruption drive to clean up the UN. Highlighting the cost of corruption to the world’s poor, we must implement comprehensive, independent audits and insist on transparency on UN staff salaries, expenses, and all other spending. The United States should place our UN funds in escrow until these provisions are implemented, and encourage other democracies to join us in fighting UN corruption and human rights abuse.

  As we’ve seen with the Human Rights Council, the corrupt UN machine will twist reforms to its own advantage. Therefore, until the UN drops its resistance to anti-corruption measures, the United States should work to minimize the organization’s importance. Wherever possible, we should operate through well-functioning bilateral and regional organizations outside the UN framework.

  The UN could make an immense contribution to world peace, human rights, and the spread of democracy. But it is not doing that—and that’s a tragedy. Having proven impervious to all attempts at reform, we need to sideline this dysfunctional, self-perpetuating, bureaucratic machine until it stops acting as a vehicle for the world’s most oppressive states to exert their will over the world’s free democracies.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The First Step in Defeating the Machine

  As described in previous chapters, the secular-socialist machine gained power through dishonesty, deceit, and deception. But the American people have not been entirely innocent in this process. For years, we avoided hard choices by retreating into a fantasy world where difficult problems simply didn’t exist. We thought our country could have wealth without working for it and security without defending it.

  The inescapable truth is that we have not been honest with ourselves. We are emerging from a pattern of self-deception that transcends partisan and ideological lines. Repeatedly refusing to face the facts, we have been surprised by obvious events that we only missed due to our determination to deceive ourselves.

  The most devastating example is the 9/11 attack—it should not have been a surprise.

  In the 1990s, we witnessed the World Trade Center bombing, the bombing of U.S. forces at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, two U.S. embassies bombed in East Africa, and the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Tom Clancy even wrote a novel in which an airliner deliberately crashed into the U.S. Capitol building. Yet most Americans, like our government, simply couldn’t imagine a major terrorist attack on the American homeland. We thought we were safe and nothing could harm us, despite suffering terrorist attacks throughout the decade.

  The economic crisis also should not have been a surprise. First, we assumed any information technology stock was guaranteed to rise in value—and created a bubble. Then we decided that houses were guaranteed to rise in value and that clever mortgages could allow people to live in houses they couldn’t afford—and created another bubble. Then Wall Street’s brilliant investors decided truly bizarre paper schemes were surefire winners—and created a third bubble.

  The enormous budget deficits now paralyzing our state governments also should not have surprised us. Government spending is our fourth bubble in a decade. For years, we elected and re-elected self-serving politicians who made budgetary promises they knew they couldn’t keep—and we knew they couldn’t keep. Now the bill has come due and state governments must either cut spending or raise taxes. Guess which choice will win out in the more corrupt state capitols.

  REPLACING DECEPTION WITH HONEST CONVERSATION AND TOUGH DECISIONS

  Our long, bipartisan flight from reality has gotten us into an enormous mess. Fortunately, while Washington and many state capitols continue to live in a fantasy world where they can never run out of other people’s money, more and more Americans are demanding honesty and accountability from our leaders. We are ending our habit of self-deception, and we are no longer so willing to let others deceive us.

  Consider national security. Despite a terrorist massacre at Fort Hood and a potentially catastrophic near-miss terrorist attack in an airplane over Detroit, the Obama administration still refuses to be honest about the immediate threats we face. They hide behind euphemisms (“man-made disasters” instead of terrorist attacks) and political correctness, and insist on treating terrorists as criminals instead of wartime enemy combatants.

  But the American people are not complacent anymore. The administration’s blasé response to the attempted terror attack over Detroit, when Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano declared “the system worked” after the terrorist was subdued by a civilian passenger, provoked widespread outrage and ridicule. That same response forced the administration to backpedal on their much-touted plans to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, in a New York City courtroom.

  The Obama administration is perhaps even more deceptive in domestic policy. Even though the big-government stimulus bill failed to keep unemployment below 8 percent as the administration promised, Congress and the president have refused to rein in spending. Instead, they invented a brand new metric, “jobs saved or created,” that allows them to conjure statistics out of thin air supposedly proving the stimulus worked, even as joblessness hovers around 10 percent.

  The same deception is seen at the state level. Despite the destructive consequences of reckless spending promises to public employee unions that far outstrip what is offered to most private sector workers, state governments refuse to admit their budgets are unsustainable. Instead, they look to more Washington bailouts to keep the union gravy train running.

  But once again, the American people are demanding to hear the truth. The tea party movement, born out of anger at the Wall Street bailouts and fueled by the runaway and brazen rush to socialism pursued by this administration and Congress, is a surefire sign Americans are emerging from our pattern of self-deception. When politicians of either party try to mislead their constituents, tea partiers call them out. They won’t sit down, be quiet, and defer to the “experts.” Insisting on straight talk, tea partiers won’t be deceived, and they won’t deceive themselves.

  And they’re not going away. Increasingly, Americans are pressing our leaders to be honest about how corrupt our state and federal governments have become, and how much of the current bureaucracy must be uprooted if our nation hopes to survive.

  Why “2 + 2=4” Will Be the Most Important (and Most Controversial) Slogan of This Decade

  Writing shortly after the defeat of Nazism, as the world faced the rapidly expanding threat of Soviet totalitarianism, Albert Camus wrote in his novel, The Plague, “Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death.”

  Camus was describing more than the threat of dictatorship. He was describing the power of conformity tha
t coerces people into denying the truth and saying things that are patently false but politically correct.

  Similarly, the fraudulent party slogans the citizen must believe in George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, 1984, are described by the book’s protagonist, Winston Smith, as “2 + 2=5.” Smith writes, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

  The Polish people used the same 2 + 2=4 slogan in their fight against Poland’s Communist dictatorship after Pope John Paul II’s visit there in 1979. They were asserting that the truth would come out no matter what the dictatorship said or did. Ultimately, after a decade of struggle, the dictatorship collapsed and was replaced in free elections.

  America is not a dictatorship, but we are facing a ruthless secular-socialist machine that repeats falsehood after falsehood and then intimidates—through cries of racism, hating the poor, or other spurious accusations—anyone who might challenge their lies. In order to defeat the machine once and for all, we must take inspiration from the brave Communist-era dissidents. We are already emerging from our pattern of self-deception, but we must accelerate this process; we must even more consistently, even more emphatically tell the truth in the face of enormous pressure to conform to the politically correct lies that now dominate our discourse.