Global Policy Forum

By Julia Preston

The United States has lost influence within the United Nations because of years of ambivalence towards the organization and should re-engage it forcefully to build a coalition of democratic nations, says a report to be issued on Thursday by a bipartisan task force.

As the Bush administration struggles to negotiate a resolution on Iraq through the Security Council, the group found that the United States has undermined its position in the world body by neglecting or sending mixed messages to the much larger constituency of countries active in the General Assembly. "The United States is frequently outmaneuvered and overmatched at the U.N.," says the report, sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and Freedom House. The group was led by Rep. David Dreier, a California Republican, and Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic representative from Indiana.

While many senior administration officials have been wary of the United Nations as a diplomatic sand trap that can only slow Washington down, the report advocates much deeper American involvement, including building up the United States mission and sending out American diplomats to lobby as if they were on Capitol Hill. "We should practice a little old-time politics," said Mr. Hamilton, a former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "We should be working the back rooms very hard to promote the democracy agenda."

Of the scores of proposals for changing the United Nations in the last decade, this is the first to focus on the behind-the-scenes influence of bloc politics. Since the end of the Cold War, most nations in the organization are now democracies, said Lee Feinstein, one of the group's directors. But the United Nations still does much of its business through five unwieldy regional groups and the Non-Aligned Movement, which "continues to bind many democracies with highly repressive tyrannies and is an outdated obstacle" to more efficient action, the report said.

The United States could restore its reputation in the organization and win backing for its goals by forging a new alliance based on "the effective promotion of democracy, human rights and counterterrorism." Washington should press the General Assembly to adopt a resolution ensuring the "right to multiparty democracy," the report says, and mobilize democracies to vote and work together across the traditional group boundaries.

The report calls on the United States to pay its dues on time. During the 1990's, Washington's arrears became crippling to the organization and fueled resentment. Washington should also avoid long delays on appointments of American ambassadors and beef up the political section of the mission, the task force says.

It recommends a more aggressive approach to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, where the United States lost its seat in 2001, then regained it a year later. The loss of the seat was "a major setback to U.S. diplomacy," the report said.

The group also said that the United States should support the counterterrorism committee that is working to establish global guidelines to fight terrorism.

The group said that the Bush administration's reluctance to sign on to international treaties, like an international criminal court and global warming, have been a "sharp disappointment" to many nations that rallied behind the United States in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

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