US turns warily back to the UN
Washington - The Bush administration, which once derided the United Nations as an "irrelevant debating society", has been obliged by multiple and escalating foreign policy crises to again work through the world body.
But the relationship on the eve of this year's UN General Assembly (UNGA) meeting remains a wary one, with senior administration officials still highly sceptical that Washington can achieve its aims via the multilateral forum, analysts say.
Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's packed agenda when the General Assembly opens next week in New York is an indication of the greater US readiness to tackle its thornier diplomatic problems in tandem with allies on the UN security council.
Iran, Darfur
High on her to-do list will be a US-driven effort to impose sanctions on Iran for its refusal to comply with UN resolutions requiring the suspension of a uranium enrichment programme which Washington believes is a cover for development of nuclear weapons.
Rice will also be pressing for implementation of a security council resolution to put peacekeepers in Sudan's war-torn Darfur region, despite opposition to the deployment from the Khartoum government.
Other issues that Washington has chosen to address through the security council include following through with the ceasefire in Lebanon, confronting North Korea's nuclear programme and pressing for democratic change in Myanmar.
UN refused to back Iraq war
It's a far cry from the days when President George W Bush heaped scorn on the UN for refusing to back the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Speaking in February of that year, Bush raised the spectre of the world body fading "into history as an ineffective, irrelevant, debating society".
That the subsequent war in Iraq has gone so wrong is widely seen as the impetus for Bush's new willingness to try the UN path.
US 'needs security council' to deal with crises
"Iraq may be the worst foreign policy disaster the US has ever made, and part of that was a complete thumbing of their nose at the UN, their go-it-alone policy," said Roberta Cohen, a former UN and US state department official now working with the Brookings Institution in Washington.
"They now realise that to deal with the various crises, the Lebanon-Israel conflict, Iran, Dafur and Sudan, they need the security council," she said, describing the new US approach as one of "cautious collaboration".
"They can't go it alone - they don't have the authority, they don't have the power and they don't even have the capacity," she said.
Rice key in policy shift
Rice, Bush's former national security advisor who took over at the state department in January 2005, is seen as a key player in the policy shift.
A pragmatist close to Bush, Rice has had more success than her predecessor, Colin Powell, in promoting diplomacy over the unilateralism favoured by administration hawks like vice president Dick Cheney and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
"Rice realises that if she wants to maintain practical working relationships with the countries that can help her get things done, one of the places she has to go to do that is in UNGA," said Esther Brimmer, a former state department official and expert on the United Nations.
Posted by: www.SouthAfrica-CarHire.com
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