Minor bruise

The Vienna-based International Narcotics Control Board  is a UN agency which has a quiet but important role in the war against illegal narcotics. One of its key jobs is to monitor the cultivation and processing of drugs and maintain a picture of the trafficking routes used by international crime syndicates. As such, it is a clearing house for large quantities of crucial intelligence which may just give law enforcement agencies around the world the upper hand in their constant struggle against the drugs barons.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

The United States is the major world market for illegal narcotics. That is why Washington has long spearheaded the war against drugs, particularly in South America. American anti-drug enforcement agencies have built up an unrivaled fund of knowledge about the whole spectrum of narcotics from growing to distribution on the streets.

It ought to follow therefore that the United States would play a pivotal role in the International Narcotics Control Board. And indeed until this week, it did. But in an extraordinary decision, the board’s supervisory body, which has 54 member countries, has just decided to vote off the US representative, Herbert Okun, who had been standing for a third five-year term.  There has been no suggestion that Okun had been anything but good at his job. And no one in Vienna could have believed that the Bush White House was any less dedicated to the war on drugs than the Clinton administration. So what was the problem?

Last week virtually the same thing happened to another United States nominee, this time for the UN Human Rights Commission. The US came last in a ballot and so lost a seat that it has held since the UN was founded in 1947. The argument advanced against Washington was that it had a poor voting record on key issues such as land mines and the wider availability of cheap pharmaceutical products such as those for AIDS and malaria. There is without doubt justice in this charge. The US needed a wake-up call, because of its dominance in armaments and pharmaceutical production.

But now that another UN vote has gone against the US, Washington is starting to smell a rat. And since the Republicans have in their ranks a great number of hard-core believers in the conspiracy theory against the United states, the rat they are smelling is a pretty big one. The ballot that ousted Okun from the INCB was secret but there is speculation that European countries ganged up against the Americans for a range of reasons. Of course, that is not entirely a case of conspiracy complex. There are a variety of reasons why the Europeans would not be unhappy to see the US getting a minor bruise.

Perhaps one of them is the US refusal to pay its fair share of the UN budget. The US argument is that despite reforms, much still remains to be done in terms of cutting UN bureaucracy and waste and corruption. So the White House, backed by Congress, continues to sit on its check book. There is also a suspicion that some European states, dismayed at the far more America-centric policy of the Bush White House, wanted to teach the new administration a lesson.

Well, one lives and learns. And no one, not even elder Bush has said that Junior doesn’t have things to learn.