There seems to be a small revolt in progress at the UN over the ever-growing demand for its peacekeepers. There are currently more than 100,000 of them around the world, a record, and UN-watchers have been muttering darkly about “overstretch” for a while. But now there’s a new mood of frankness among senior officials too. Last week, Ban Ki-moon declared that sending a UN force into Somalia is not “a realistic and viable option” right now. That will have irritated Washington, which badly wants to the UN to go in to take some pressure off its Ethiopian allies, bogged down in Mogadishu.
This week, it’s been the turn of Ban’s Under-Secretary for Peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno to tell it like it is. Reviewing the lack of hi-tech assets like helicopters available for the UN force in Darfur, he told the press that the mission there “may become a failure.” Guehenno has been blunt about such issues in the past. But these two statements, coming so close together, may foreshadow a growing fight over high-risk missions like Darfur and Somalia between a cautious UN Secretariat and those governments (most obviously the US and UK) that strongly favor these deployments.
So it’s worth noting the disconnect between these short-term warnings from the UN and some of the big picture thinking on peacekeeping that Gordon Brown laid out in his Mansion House speech on Monday. As Alex Evans pointed out in his review of the speech on this blog, Brown had much to say about the need for a “a new framework” to handle fragile states and peace operations. And much of it was absolutely right in theory: “Security Council peacekeeping resolutions and UN Envoys should make stablisation, reconstruction and development an equal priority”, for example. The problem is that you can’t make the theory work (or get onto reconstruction or development) if you don’t have the troops and helicopters you need to do stabilization.
In fairness, they know this in London. In a lecture on the EU as “Model Power Not Superpower” today, David Miliband had all the details on rotary wing aircraft:
EU countries have around 1,200 transport helicopters, yet only about 35 are deployed in Afghanistan. And EU member states haven’t provided any helicopters in Darfur despite the desperate need there.
Miliband went on to say that “increasing our capacity to put peacekeepers into the field – whether on UN, EU or NATO missions – is a crucial part of cooperation.” Again, this is absolutely right in principle. But even if the Europeans did have much greater capacity, would they be prepared to risk their assets and personnel in Somalia?
Er, no. Fewer than 2% of UN forces in Africa come from Europe. Give credit where it is due: the Norwegians and Swedes do want to send engineers to Darfur, and the EU is deploying (mainly French) soldiers to Chad alongside UN police. The UN will continue to have to bear the burden of new missions with troops from Africa and Asia. As that becomes ever more difficult and dangerous, the Secretariat may start to do what Bill Clinton told the UN to do after the last Somalia debacle in the 1990s: learn to say no.
Just spotted this Avaaz.org video from July, entitled ‘Stop the Clash’ [of civilisations]. It won this year’s Progressive Source award for best awareness-raising video. The soundtrack’s by DJ Spooky. It’s very good.
Benedict Brogan brings us this newsflash from his blog at DailyMail.co.uk:
Downing Street has announced that Alex Allan is to become the new chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He is currently permanent secretary to the Ministry of Justice and has held a number of senior Whitehall posts, including PPS to John Major in the final days (he knows what the inside of a bunker looks like). He is also a committed Deadhead, who runs a website devoted to the oeuvre of the Grateful Dead. And as you would expect of a man who is ahead of the game on all things IT, he has his own website (which I suspect will be dismantled fairly shortly by the nice folk down Millbank way).
In the National Review, Grover G. Norquist (slogan: “Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives”) wonders why Warren Buffet opposes the abolition of America’s inheritance tax (or ‘death tax’ as Norquist prefers):
At first blush, you might expect “the Oracle of Omaha” to be a big proponent of death-tax repeal. The CEO of Berkshire Hathaway is the third-richest person in the world (according to Forbes magazine) and is worth about $52 billion. Yet Buffett is one of the biggest proponents of the death tax.
It’s an interesting question. So what’s the answer? According to Norquist, it’s because Buffet is a ‘leach’, driven by pure cynicism and self-interest:
Buffett has major investments in companies that sell life insurance. The death tax has helped make him rich while it has made other families poor. What’s sad and ironic is that it takes families with the resources of the Buffetts (and the Hiltons and the Kardashians) to set up the trusts and life-insurance schemes that are necessary to avoid paying the death tax.
And yet, nowhere in the article does he even mention that Buffet is so opposed to kids inheriting money that is he giving away most of his:
Buffett does not believe that it is wise to bequeath great wealth… Having put his two sons and a daughter through college, the Omaha investor contents himself with giving them several thousand dollars each at Christmas. Beyond that, says daughter Susan, 33, ”If I write my dad a check for $20, he cashes it.”
Buffett is not cutting his children out of his fortune because they are wastrels or wantons or refuse to go into the family business — the traditional reasons rich parents withhold money. Says he: ”My kids are going , to carve out their own place in this world, and they know I’m for them whatever they want to do.” But he believes that setting up his heirs with ”a lifetime supply of food stamps just because they came out of the right womb” can be ”harmful” for them and is ”an antisocial act.”
To him the perfect amount to leave children is ”enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.” For a college graduate, Buffett reckons ”a few hundred thousand dollars” sounds about right.
Buffet plans to donate $44bn to charity over the next few years – with most of it going to help the Gates Foundation fight poverty around the world. It’s the biggest philanthropic gift the world has ever seen.
You’d think Norquist might have wanted to mention this as he lays into Buffett. After all, he has a reputation for rectitude and honesty to protect… Oh wait, it’s that Grover Norquist, the one who stuck his trout into the trough provided by disgraced (and jailed) lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The one a Senate committee exposed as a money-launderer. I suppose he can distort Buffet’s motives as much as he likes then…
