{"product_id":"tower-of-babble-isbn-9781400054947","title":"Tower of Babble","description":"A United Nations insider exposes the ugly truth about the UN—including how UN organizations have been funding terrorist groups!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestseller \u003ci\u003eTower of Babble\u003c\/i\u003e, former United Nations ambassador Dore Gold blows the lid off the UN’s shocking failures to keep international peace, its corruption, its rampant anti-Americanism, and its emboldening of terrorist organizations. Citing previously unpublished documents, a brand-new chapter exclusive to this paperback edition provides the untold story of the infamous oil-for-food scandal—including the real scandal, that the UN let oil-for-food money go to fund terrorist organizations.“Bound to be one of the most controversial critiques in the public debate on the UN.” —Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An exceptionally valuable and timely book . . . Shocking . . . Gold brings us face to face with the reality that, even with the passing of the Soviet Union, the UN’s moral failings have not much diminished.” —\u003ci\u003eCommentary\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Most conservatives, of course, realize by now that abolishing, or withdrawing from, the United Nations is never going to happen. Instead, they’re seeking to bring it to heel. The strategy is outlined by former Israeli ambassador to the UN Dore Gold in his book\u003ci\u003e Tower of Babble\u003c\/i\u003e.” —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Dore Gold’s excellent book \u003ci\u003eTower of Babble\u003c\/i\u003e documents the UN’s shortcomings.” —\u003ci\u003eNew York Sun\u003c\/i\u003eDore Gold, author of the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestseller \u003ci\u003eHatred’s Kingdom\u003c\/i\u003e, served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1997 through 1999 and has been a diplomatic envoy to numerous international leaders. Ambassador Gold, who earned his Ph.D. in international relations and Middle East studies from Columbia University, lives in Jerusalem, where he runs the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.CHAPTER 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Erosion of Standards\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe United Nations was really an American idea. Indeed, as one former  U.S. ambassador to the UN put it in the 1970s, \"At first the UN was  seen as the instrument of American ideologues.\"1 The UN's founders  established the organization to promote American values and principles  on a global scale.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCreated in the aftermath of the Allied victory in World War II, the  world body had actually been conceived well before the defeat of Nazi  Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt  had shown his enthusiasm for an international organization as early as  the 1930s. The United States had never joined the League of Nations,  which had been created after the First World War, but Roosevelt became  the first president to send American observers to Geneva to sit in on  League sessions. Roosevelt was not naïve, however. He saw the League's  flaws. The organization failed to counter the rise of the Axis powers  in the 1930s, the invasions of Ethiopia, Manchuria, and the Rhineland,  and ultimately the outbreak of the Second World War. Thus, when  Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill drew up the  Atlantic Charter in August 1941-even before the United States had  entered the war-they called for \"a wider and permanent system of  general security.\" It was in fact FDR who first used the term \"United  Nations.\" On January 1, 1942, less than a month after Pearl Harbor, the  countries allied against the Axis powers signed the \"Declaration by  United Nations,\" a title that Roosevelt proposed. Churchill had  preferred the name \"Allied Nations.\"2\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMonths later, according to the notes of his trusted aide Harry Hopkins,  President Roosevelt explained to British foreign secretary Anthony Eden  that the new international body he envisioned \"should be world-wide in  scope . . . but, finally, that the real decisions should be made by the  United States, Great Britain, Russia, and China, who would be the  powers for many years to come that would have to police the world.\"3\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt 1944's Dumbarton Oaks Conference outside of Washington, FDR  reiterated his conception of the new international body. Specifically  he described an organization that would enforce peace through the  world's \"four policemen\": the United States, Great Britain, China, and  the USSR.4 If an aggressor \"started to run amok and seeks to grab  territory or invade its neighbors,\" FDR explained to reporters at the  time of Dumbarton Oaks, the UN would \"stop them before they got  started.\"5 This was precisely the model the great powers drew up for  the UN at the conference. As such, the UN was designed first and  foremost to avoid the failures that had plagued the League of Nations.  FDR was a realist, a point he drove home in an October 1944 campaign  address in New York City in which, when he spoke about the UN, he  reminded his listeners, \"We are not fighting for, and we shall not  attain a utopia.\"6 For Roosevelt, the engagement of the United States  and the other great powers was vital to give teeth to the  organization's international security measures.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFranklin Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, but the plan for the UN  survived. In fact, within two weeks of Roosevelt's death, the UN's  founding conference would convene in San Francisco, where the UN  Charter would ultimately be drafted and signed. The four policemen,  along with France, became the permanent members of the UN Security  Council, which would eventually include ten additional rotating  members. It would be responsible for safeguarding international peace  and security. Yet the UN that emerged also reflected the more  idealistic notions of the State Department planners who wanted the  United Nations to be a community of equals that included all countries.  They stressed that the new world body would be a universal  organization, for they did not want to repeat one of the key mistakes  of the League of Nations, which had never included the United States  and from which Germany, Italy, and Japan had withdrawn. The UN General  Assembly, separate from the Security Council, would eventually include  all of the world community. While the Security Council would be the  body that intervened militarily to preserve world order, the General  Assembly would give voice to the values on which that order was based.  It would set international standards for the future. It would also be  empowered to deal with decolonization, disarmament, economics, and even  development of international law.7\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlthough the UN's architects created a clear division of labor between  the Security Council and the General Assembly, there was a certain  built-in tension between Roosevelt's earlier idea of an exclusive  great-power club and the all-inclusive international body that  eventually emerged. FDR had maintained a strong conviction that small  nations not be allowed to complicate the great powers' task of keeping  the peace.8 But as the Second World War had drawn to a close, wild  utopian proposals were coming out of America, as many called for \"world  government\" or a \"federation of democracies.\"9\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike Roosevelt, the American commentator Walter Lippmann recognized  that the United States could not rely on a broad global organization to  establish peace. Near the end of World War II he had warned that the  victorious powers must not delegate the responsibility for world order  \"to a world society which does not yet exist or has just barely been  organized.\"10 He had made an important point. The problem with a \"world  society which does not yet exist or has just barely been organized\" is  that it can share no common values. What joint interests would bring  the diverse countries of the new UN together? What common principles  would bond the UN together as its membership expanded? What would be  their agenda for a better world?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWalter Lippmann had identified what would become the Achilles' heel of  the United Nations and why it was bound to fail despite the high ideals  of its architects.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMORAL CLARITY\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll the original UN members in 1945 shared one characteristic that  might have offset the Lippmann critique: In order to be invited to the  UN's founding conference in San Francisco, a state had to have declared  war on at least one of the Axis powers and to have adhered to the  \"Declaration by United Nations\" that was originally announced in  January 1942. The UN's founding members, in other words, had to make  choices and take a stand. The UN might have been a universal  organization, but at the time of its creation it was also a military  alliance, united by a common strategic purpose and by declared  commitment to certain common values.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe UN's American founders assumed that it would be possible to freeze  the wartime alliance of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet  Union, China, and France. Further, they believed that it could become  an alliance around certain principles. Political commentators called  the idea collective security. Henry Kissinger has articulated this  point well: \"Alliances always presume a specific adversary; collective  security defends international law in the abstract.\"11 For the UN's  proposed notion of collective security to work, the organization would  have to undertake two actions. First, the UN would have to identify  that an act of aggression had indeed occurred and that some state had  violated the world organization's founding principles. Second, once it  determined that aggression had occurred, the UN would have to mobilize  a determined response; that is, its member states would have to act as  though their own vital national interests had been threatened. This  revival in the Wilsonian belief that collective security around  principles of world order could replace the old European balance of  power, with its secret alliances, was able to come about only because  of the postwar circumstances in which the UN was born.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this historical  context. The UN was created in a moment of extraordinary moral clarity,  in which its founding members could distinguish between the aggression  of the Axis powers and their own role as liberators-indeed, between  evil and good. After all, the Nazis, against whom they had fought, had  committed acts of mass murder unprecedented in recorded history. As the  UN held its first meetings in 1946, the Nuremberg trials against Nazi  war criminals were well under way. The Second World War cast a long  shadow over the UN and its first covenants. Consider, for example, the  UN Charter, which begins by making reference \"to the need to save  succeeding generations from the scourge of war\" and reaffirms  \"fundamental human rights,\" something the Covenant of the League of  Nations had made no reference to. Moreover, in December 1946 the UN  General Assembly adopted a resolution condemning genocide and tasked a  UN committee to draft a genocide convention.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne of the flaws of the early UN was that because of Stalin's wartime  cooperation with Roosevelt, the organization's architects had an  excessively benign, if not naïve, view of the USSR. One commentator has  written of \"starry-eyed Rooseveltian illusions about Great Power  Unity.\"12 This might be somewhat overstated, but the signing of the UN  Charter did create a short-term period of euphoria that affected  judgments about the USSR. Excusing Soviet behavior became common. For  example, in November 1945, Secretary of State James Byrnes compared  what he revealingly called the \"effort of the Soviet Union to draw into  closer and more friendly relations with her central and eastern  European neighbors\" to inter-American organizations in the Western  Hemisphere.13 This put the Iron Curtain over Eastern Europe on the same  plane as the American-led Rio Treaty. The Soviets took advantage of  their position to corrupt some important early UN documents. Most  notably, they carved out a dangerous loophole in the Genocide  Convention of 1948; the convention did not outlaw mass murder against  political opponents, as distinct from religious or ethnic groups. It  should also be noted that the acting secretary-general at the UN's 1945  founding conference, Alger Hiss, was probably a Soviet spy (although  there is little evidence that he used his position at the conference to  lobby extensively on Moscow's behalf).14\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn those early days, the Soviet Union could not stand in the way of  every important measure the UN tried to pass.15 The USSR and its  Communist allies had minimal influence because most of the UN's  founding members still spoke a similar political language as allies  emerging from the Second World War, and the minority of states that did  not accept the prevalent values of the time were reluctant to challenge  the postwar ethos. For example, one of the General Assembly's earliest  acts was to adopt a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in December  1948. The Soviets were hardly enthusiastic about the defense of  personal liberties at the expense of the state, and they had sent their  prosecutor from Stalin's purge trials, Andrei Vyshinsky, to the UN to  argue against the declaration. But they recognized that the  overwhelming majority of UN members, mostly democracies still tied  together with a common sense of political purpose, supported this moral  statement. The Soviets could not even bring themselves to vote against  the resolution; they abstained, as did other Eastern bloc nations. The  declaration passed by a vote of 48-0.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThose drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights understood  that the General Assembly was not a \"world parliament\" and thus could  not create binding international laws. Eleanor Roosevelt, the first  chairman of the UN Commission on Human Rights, referred to the  declaration as a \"common standard.\" But this common standard could be  powerful in the future: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights could  provide guidelines for international conventions, or for the  constitutions of newly independent states.16 And by outlining a code of  behavior expected from members of the world community, the UN General  Assembly might be able to constrain the behavior of states.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Universal Declaration of Human Rights offers a striking example of  the overwhelming political agreement among the early UN member states.  Some critics have condemned the UN in this era for its clarity of  purpose, arguing that the original UN reflected only Western standards  and was not a truly universal organization. Yet among the original UN  members were states such as Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia, and India-Muslims,  Christians, and Hindus. Besides Eleanor Roosevelt, the authors of the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights included René Cassin, a French  Jew with Orthodox Jewish training; Charles Malik, a Lebanese Christian;  and P. C. Chang, a Chinese intellectual who had lectured on  Confucianism and Islam. Islamic scholars had also been consulted. With  the exception of Saudi Arabia, which abstained, all UN member states  with large Muslim populations voted for the Universal Declaration,  including Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey. The Saudis' chief concern was  that the declaration allowed for a Muslim to change his religion.17 By  1994, Hassan al-Turabi's militant Islamist regime would argue that the  UN Human Rights Commission had no standing to criticize Sudan's right  to enact punishments like amputation, crucifixion, stoning, or  flogging.18\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat was the difference between the UN of 1948, in which Saudi Arabia  merely abstained from voting for the Universal Declaration of Human  Rights, and the UN of 1994, in which Sudan thundered about the right to  behead prisoners? The fact is that the UN had become a totally  different organization by the 1990s. From the original 51 member  states, its membership jumped to 83 in 1959, up to 132 states in 1972,  with the dissolution of European colonial empires, and to 184 by 1993.  The addition of the new states posed a problem not because of race,  religion, or nationality. Nor were the new Third World members added  from the 1970s through the 1990s a problem because of their cultural  background. Rather, the trouble related to their political systems.  They were for the most part completely new states that had emerged  after some struggle with former imperial powers. Many were the  authoritarian offspring of the Soviet Union or the Communist Chinese.  They were joined by totalitarian Islamist regimes such as the Islamic  Republic of Iran or Sudan. What was emerging was a clash of ideologies,  not a clash of civilizations. Many of these new states wanted  international rules that would suit the needs of dictatorships rather  than democracies. Even after the breakup of the Soviet bloc, only a  minority of UN member states-75 out of 184-were free democracies,  according to Freedom House.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMoreover, the new members had power disproportional to their actual  population. Many were tiny states. By 2003, the 114 Third World states  that made up the Nonaligned Movement, which voted as a bloc in the UN,  at best represented a little more than a half the world's population,  but it could claim nearly two-thirds of the 191 UN member states.19 The  UN had gerrymandered itself to give dozens of these authoritarian  regimes a greater voice in the shape of world affairs than they  deserved.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the beginning, authoritarian regimes could not exert much influence  on the machinery of the UN secretariat. Had that political  configuration survived into the 1990s, the UN could have made a  considerable contribution to international security. But the states who  gained so much authority in the 1990s looked at the world very  differently from the way the United States did. Support for U.S.  positions in the UN General Assembly continued to decline during the  1990s, despite the Clinton administration's declared support for  multilateralism. In 1995 members of the General Assembly voted along  with Washington 50.6 percent of the time, but by 1999 that number had  dropped to 41.8 percent.20 The United States was motivated by different  political values and interests-values and interests that had helped  define the UN at the outset.New York Times Bestseller","brand":"Forum Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301885792485,"sku":"NP9781400054947","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400054947.jpg?v=1767742865","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/tower-of-babble-isbn-9781400054947","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}