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"These guys wanted to become cult heroes"
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[11/11/99]

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The media hyped the vice president's dip in the polls over the summer, but ignored his resurgence in the past month.
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[11/10/99]

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With varying degrees of collusion or incompetence from the Clinton administration, it has told the world that it wants to abrogate the anti-ballistic missile treaty, just as last month it refused to ratify the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. The United States had worked hard to persuade countries like India and Pakistan to sign the treaty, which bans all future nuclear tests while allowing existing nuclear states like the United States to hold onto their weapons.

And Congress' response, when the rest of the world asks the United States to do as it asks others, is to give the finger to the United Nations, one of the instruments that may have saved us from World War III by maintaining channels with Moscow even at times when the Cold War looked as if it were about to go hot.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently declared brassily, "We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see farther into the future."

Well, if she looks just six weeks ahead, she should able to see the United States lose its vote in the United Nations, because Congress and Clinton between them have stalled on paying more than $1.5 billion in back dues. Ironically, while the United States would lose its vote in the General Assembly, it would keep its veto in the Security Council.

In an unconscious echo of Bulworth's campaign mantra, the one that drove the befuddled pol into sanity, President Clinton gave an empty reassurance to the U.N. General Assembly in September that the check would be forthcoming. "Today we look ahead to the new millennium," he said. To help us over this brink, "the United Nations is indispensable," he continued. "It is precisely because we are committed to the U.N. that we have worked hard to support the effective management of this body. But the United States also has the responsibility to equip the U.N. with the resources it needs to be effective."

Polls show that the United Nations is actually more popular than Congress, and that most voters think that Washington should pay its debts. So can we expect a resolute presidential battle with Congress to get the U.N. dues paid? Hardly. Clinton has been promising to get the dues arrears paid since he was elected, and his administration repeated that pledge when it single-handedly sacked former Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. However, Clinton has shown no more signs of standing up to the GOP in Congress on this than he has on other foreign-policy issues.

Meanwhile, the Congress of the world's only hyperpower, which can already out-nuke and outshoot the other 187 members of the United Nations put together, decided that it will give billions more to the Pentagon than the Pentagon asked for, but it still can't pony up the cost equivalent of one measly stealth bomber for the organization that the United States founded and has hosted for the past half century. For years, the United States has been promising to pay back its dues but withholding the check as a way to squeeze concessions from the United Nations.

Other U.N. members are growing tired of American promises consistently being tied to new sets of demands. In 1996, then-U.N. Ambassador Albright oversaw the dismissal of the previous secretary general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The only cogent reason she ever gave was that Congress would not pay its back dues until the Egyptian was gone.

Unkind souls linked her part in Boutros-Ghali's departure to Jesse Helms' benign acquiescence in her arrival at the State Department. While it may have been part of a deal the Clinton administration cut with Helms to ensure Albright's confirmation as head of State, the promised check to celebrate the arrival of American nominee Kofi Annan as secretary general never came.

Helms agreed to a deal over U.N. payments which gave him what he wanted, knowing full well that the deal would be scuppered by his GOP soulmates in the House. To the rest of the world, it looked as if the GOP members would rather thumb their noses at the world than see Clinton claim credit for anything.

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