While some elements are fairly predictable, and almost welcome from a liberal, social democratic point of view, like United States President Barack Obama’s star rating and the dire overall ratings for Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the poll, which interrogated almost 20,000 people across the globe from April 4 to June 12 about which world leaders they trusted, raises some questions with no clear answers. The selection of world leaders about whom respondents were asked reveals some bias.

Chinese President Hu Jintao, Putin, Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ahmadinejad have certain logic. But where were Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, South African President Jacob Zuma, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other Third World luminaries?

Japan provided neither candidates nor voters it seemed. Such shortcomings notwithstanding, the poll was interesting. To no one’s surprise except for the deluded few in the US who believed their own lies, Obama’s support is much higher than George W Bush’s was.

But the results also call into question some Western media assumptions. Yes, it is possible to be repressive and popular at the same time, at home and abroad. In Russia and China, respondents supported not only their own leaders, but also each other’s, and indeed did not trust those who challenged them, with Sarkozy in particular paying the price in declining support in China.

While the Chinese were happy with Obama, in Russia the American president is mistrusted, although whether that was in his own right or as representative of the nation whose advisors and economists did so much damage to Russia, is not clear.

Obama’s high global ratings, 61%, came after his speeches in Turkey, but before he made his most definitive pitch for Muslim support in Cairo. Despite his high global ratings, there were reservations about him in Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt and the Palestinian territories, doubtless reflecting skepticism about the US role in the region and his sincerity in changing that role. On the other hand, India gave him an 80% rating, which marched strangely with the 40% for Ahmadinejad. The mainland Chinese gave him a higher rating than the Taiwanese gave Hu.

Most intriguingly of all, Hu, hardly the most charismatic leader on the bloc, came in big in, of all places, Taiwan, and even in South Korea. He had 60% confidence in Taiwan and over 90% in Hong Kong and Macau matching his 94% in the mainland. How does that reconcile with the concerns about civil liberties in those places, and the definite reluctance of Taiwanese to let Hu run their affairs?

Was this because, or despite, the squeeze on civil liberties in China? Or was it pride in the local boy whose economy was the only one left growing as all the erstwhile colonial big boys took a haircut that looked like a scalping? But then, Hu’s 80% support in Pakistan was balanced by 50% in India with the latter being interestingly high in view of the traditional rivalry. His negative ratings in the US, Germany and France (70%) almost certainly reflect concern over human-rights issues in China – along with what one suspects as some apprehension about the rising power in the East.

Almost the biggest surprise was that United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon came second. No one would suspect from the in-house gossip, Western media coverage and reportage from the UN, that Ban was so well regarded.

One suspects that part of all of this is name recognition. No other world politician got more than a 40% confidence rating and that was Ban, who has certainly been globe-trotting, and more likely to be known internationally than heads of the also-ran states in what is still a US dominated world. He was mistrusted in Turkey, Egypt, Palestine – and the US, very likely because the former see him as pro, and the latter see him as anti-Israel. Overall, the result reflects greater support for, and attention to, the UN in most of the world, which makes him much more visible in his efforts than in the US media.

Of course, the UN has had a perennial beating in the US media, but Obama even got 70% support from US respondents for his handling of world affairs – which includes a call to support the UN. And while Putin and Hu rely on their home base for the big cheers, Obama’s overseas cheerleaders overtake his domestic support. When they like him they like him very seriously, like 92% of the British. But then Brown is much more popular (64) in the US than he is the UK (46).

However, reading the Western media on color revolutions in all their rainbow hues, who would suspect that Putin, a low scorer outside Russia where he gets an almost Stalinist 85% support would be twice as popular in Ukraine (57%) as Obama (35%)? While India has had a long love affair with Moscow, his 65% rating there is almost as surprising as his support in China (64%), taking us way back before Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev started calling each other names.

And if the spirit of non-alignment is so high in India to give Ahmadinejad his only non-Muslim country star status (42% positive, 30% negative) in India, then how come the country has just elected and allegedly pro-Western free economy government whose vote in the International Atomic Energy Agency was instrumental in getting Iran on the Security Council agenda? Indeed, maybe this is the basis for peace talks between the two sub-continental giants since 75% of Pakistanis were also rooting for the Iranian leader – as were, understandably, the Palestinians, whose friendlessness could easily lead them to embrace any oasis in a desert.

So are there conclusions? A poll like this deals in broad-brush strokes. One can support the foreign policy stand of a leader without endorsing domestic policies, so for example, Taiwanese partiality to Hu may reflect a recent lack of bellicosity from China and the improvement in cross-strait relationships. In the Muslim world, perceived attitudes to the Israel-Palestinian problem are clearly the big issue – Sarkozy and Brown for example, are punished for their support for Israel. Obama certainly knows that and is acting on it.

In China and Russia, national pride is a big factor, which is why, whatever you think of his principles, Sarkozy has blown it with the Chinese, between meeting the Dalai Lama and the boycott threat to the Olympics. In contrast, India wants it all ways and seems to have taken sentimental alignment with all as the logical extension of its non-aligned history.

The numbers do suggest a hard core of mistrust for the US, and indeed the West, in major parts of the world. It is clear that in many places democracy and human rights are not as big an issue either in country or in assessing other countries’ leaders as Western politicians and policy makers would assume.

That is not just the neo-conservatives but genuine human-rights advocates and so the figures would tend to support Obama’s neo-realist foreign policy of negotiating with regimes that he would otherwise deplore. World public opinion seems to support those who do not threaten with missiles, which is, as they say, hardly rocket science. But it is a lesson that seems to bear constant repetition in some quarters.

He castigated Spanish civil society — which is very active on the issue since Western Sahara is a former Spanish colony that Franco threw to the Moroccans to protect his own “Gibraltars” in Morocco, the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta — for encouraging the Sahrawis in their resistance.

Van Walsum almost has a point when he says the UN security council “is not ready to exercise its authority under article VII of the UN charter, and impose it.” But why is he attacking the victims and their friends? One would have thought a Dutch diplomat, with the record of acquiescence to “facts on the ground” in Srebrenica, would be more circumspect. Why has he not pilloried Morocco and its friends in the Security Council — the US, France and Britain?

The silence of the UN Secretariat over the years has been stunning, since Morocco reneged on its 1991 agreement to allow a referendum in the territory. Indeed, there has often been complicity and connivance, as when then UN secretary-general Perez de Cuellar, in his last week in office tried to get the security council to adopt a pro-Moroccan resolution over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.

I was at the press briefing back in 1991 when Johannes Mantz, the Swiss diplomat charged with heading MINURSO announced that it would only take a year to identify the voters and hold the referendum. I asked him at the time if he had consulted the King of Morocco, who had made it plain that the only referendum he would allow was one that he was guaranteed to win. Since then, Hassan and his heir Mohammed each refused to allow the referendum while the UN has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the sand dunes in preparation for it.

There is a deafening sound of silence about Morocco’s refusal to accept international law and security council resolutions, let alone honour its own promises. Initially backed strongly by France, Morocco now has American support, which nowadays always carries automatic British acquiescence as an added bonus.

At least partly, Washington’s support is because Morocco is Israel’s closest partner in the Arab world, even though the King hedges his bets by being chair of the Arab League committee on Jerusalem. The latter position ensures that Arab states perennially concerned about Palestinian refugees and the separation wall are calmly insouciant about the Saharan refugees and the huge sand berm that Morocco has built across the territories it has occupied.

However, there is a solution from the example of the British Commonwealth, which has been endlessly inventive in finding ways to maintain symbolic ties without real authority or responsibility. When the Moroccans referred the issue to the World Court, the ICJ, the judgement found no evidence “of any legal tie of territorial sovereignty” between Western Sahara and Morocco and said that the territory needed an act of self-determination. Neverthless, it did detect “indication of a legal tie of allegiance between the [Moroccan] Sultan and some of the tribes of the territory.”

So, enter King Mohammed of Western Sahara, with all the powers and honours of Queen Elizabeth in her realms of Canada, Australia, Barbados and so on. The security council can then tell the King that he gets his due, while the Western Saharans clearly get what they want: effective independence. Polisario would surely be happy to offer a 21-gun salute and a few garden parties every time the King visited — maybe even build him a royal sand-castle somewhere.

But first, the western members of the security council have to put some truth to the rumours they keep spreading about their attachment to international law, democracy and the rights of small countries not to be bullied and occupied by their neighbours.

And now the administration is backtracking on Bolton’s self-proclaimed proudest achievement — the “unsigning” of the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court. John Bellinger, state department legal adviser told scholars at DePaul University: “We do not disagree over the statute’s end goals, and we are prepared to work with those who support the court in appropriate circumstances.” If not exactly a ringing endorsement, it signals an end to the war of attrition waged by Bolton and his ilk.

These palaeocons viewed the court as a direct threat to American sovereignty, and they used the Bush administration to fight it in every way. One was to refuse military cooperation to any country that ratified the treaty and refused to sign a bilateral agreement with Washington that uniquely protected Americans from being extradited.

The treaty itself, at least before Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, had so many defences built in against “politically motivated” prosecutions that Bolton and company feared that foreign observers could never really see what the problem was. Never mind that this was like developing air-fresheners for astronauts in case the moon was made of green cheese. The administration harassed small countries to sign bilateral agreements. Underlining the element of bullying already inherent in trying to exclude Americans uniquely from the court’s jurisdiction, Washington did not apply the rules to its major allies, all of whom were among the 106 ratifiers of the treaty.

In fact, many of the so-called bilateral agreements extorted from small countries were as substantial as the “coalition of the coerced” that Bush pulled together for the invasion of Iraq, not ratified by parliaments, and in any case, according to many legal experts, illegal.

Bolton’s now-abandoned policy was based on the Three No’s he outlined to the Senate foreign relations committee: “No financial support, directly or indirectly; no collaboration; and no further negotiations with other governments to improve the statute … This approach is likely to maximise the chances that the ICC will wither and collapse, which should be our objective.”

The beginning of the end for Bolton’s no-surrender campaign came even while he was still at the UN, when reality impinged to the extent that the US had to abstain on the resolution siccing the ICC on those responsible for the massacres in Darfur.

Now the turnaround seems to be based on pressure from, of all places, the Pentagon, whose troops the agreements were supposed to protect. The American Serviceman’s Protection Act meant that the Pentagon could not work with the military of the many independent minded countries such as Chile that refused to bow to the Bolton diktat.

And, of course, since Bolton’s departure and his scathing comments on the state department and Bush policies, there must also be some retributive factor: dancing on Bolton’s political grave by downplaying the deed of which he was most proud, “unsigning” the treaty that Clinton, along with Israel and Iran, had signed in the last weeks of his second term.

But even then, all the main candidates left in the field are somewhat, well, Clintonian, on the issue. They all talk about cooperation with the ICC, and are prepared to entertain signing (or perhaps withdrawing the withdrawal) with proper safeguards. John McCain will be pulled to the right on the issue, at least during the election. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both sound warmer toward the ICC, not least since it began to investigate Sudan, where the ICC has been the only, albeit somewhat blunted weapon that the world has been able to wield against the perpetrators. Clinton says she will decide to work with the ICC based on American interests, while Obama, heading off a future wave of vigilantes, says he wants to consult the military before going ahead.

However, now that the US has stopped trying to strangle the ICC and is even cooperating over Sudan, it really makes no sense to stay outside, and certainly not to boycott meetings of states parties where any legitimate (if any) US objections could be dealt with.

It is a sad commentary on what this administration has done to the US’s standing that when the treaty was under negotiation the other parties were quite prepared to accept that the US military justice system was exemplary and that war crimes committed by its troops would be prosecuted domestically. After waterboarding, rendition, illegal military commissions and sentences for Abu Ghraib more commensurate with a ticket for jaywalking than wholesale violations of the Geneva Conventions, US delegates will not be addressing their colleagues from any moral high ground.

Any new president who really wanted to draw a line under the US’s shameful scofflawishness under the Bush administration should really ratify the ICC treaty immediately without reservations.

Twenty-five years after negotiators finally put down their pens on the Law of the Sea Treaty, Bush and the Pentagon have joined with rational Republicans like Richard Lugar and the Democrats to support its belated ratification, pushed along by oil, maritime and telecom lobbies that see the need to end oceanic anarchy.

The Senate foreign relations panel voted 17-4 on October 31 to send it to the full floor for a vote, where it seems likely to win the two-thirds majority needed for passage. Quite apart from the significance of the treaty itself, there is a certain symbolism: this would be the first multilateral treaty of its kind that the US has ratified since Ronald Reagan.

Reaganites may indeed appreciate one of the impulses behind the ratification: the Russian claim to the north pole. Outside the treaty, the US has no means of contesting the claim, which, if successful, would be recognised by almost every nation in the world.

The very first case to go to the Hamburg-based International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea demonstrated the need for it. In 1997, the MV Saiga, an oil tanker registered in St Vincent and the Grenadines, owned by Cypriots, chartered by Swiss, managed by a Scottish company, officered by Ukrainians and crewed by Senegalese, had been bunkering fishing vessels off the coast of Guinea when patrol boats from there seized the ship and detained the crew. Guinea claimed a customs zone that extended 250 miles from its coast. The tribunal ordered the release of the ship and crew on payment of a bond, and, after consideration, it threw out the Guinean claim and ordered the ship and its crew freed. Under the convention, Guinea was not entitled to claim more than 200 miles for its exclusive economic zone.

The Law of the Sea should be an important cause for internationally minded liberals and Democrats, representing as it does a global commitment to the health of the oceans and the rule of law. But their silence is stunning. A quick internet search shows that most of the clucking comes from loony right-wing Chicken Littles who think the sky is falling down. There is a certain ironic satisfaction that the White House is now under fire from the ideologically hardcore foundations that have so far been barraging its liberal enemies.

At this year’s hearings on the treaty at the Senate foreign relations committee, the groups that spoke against ratification, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Centre for Security Policy (CSP), depicted the treaty as an undercover version the Kyoto protocol — reminiscent of earlier far-fetched accusations of an undersea land grab by the United Nations.

But money talks as the know-nothings cluck. Last year, Exxon — Big Oil’s last-ditch opponent of the UN Convention on the International Law of the Sea — dropped its financial support for CEI. The lobby now left in the field against ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty reveals the wacko money tail that has been wagging the Republican dog, and, more often than not, converting many Democratic politicians into fawning puppies.

The process was described in an email that Mike Scanlon, the lobbyist who once worked for Tom DeLay, sent to his Indian tribal clients. It was released by the Senate Indian affairs committee when it was investigating disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff:

Our mission is to get specifically selected groups of individuals to the polls to speak out AGAINST something. To that end, your money is best spent finding them and communicating with them on using the modes that they are most likely to respond to. Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them. The wackos get their information form [sic] the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet, and telephone trees.

The wackos are now in the spotlight. But the sane wing of American politics does indeed seem to be letting the ratification of the Law of the Sea slip past them, even though it presents a unique opportunity to break the conservative hold on multilateralism. If the Senate cannot ratify this treaty when the White House, the Pentagon and former Republican chair of the Senate foreign relations committee are onside with a Democratic majority, then Americans had best resign themselves to being all at sea in a world of international anarchy.

For many people, the incident is ancient history. But it is one of those seemingly inconsequential, “for want of a nail”, events that change the course of history in profound ways.

To mark the occasion, this weekend I was on PressTV, Iran’s international network, along with Massoumeh Ebtekar, the spokeswoman of the students and known to the hostages, without fondness, as “Sister Mary”. She is still active politically and now a reformist — but totally unrepentant about the hostage-taking. She has just written a book about it, which was published in Canada because she could not find a publisher in the US prepared to take the risk of associating with the wrong side in the “war on terror”; and to be fair, the surviving hostages would almost certainly have litigated any royalties she was due.

She felt that occupying the embassy preserved the Islamic Revolution against American counter-coups. I differed. The student occupation was understandable in the context of American support for the Shah, but totally reprehensible when, unplanned, it turned into long-term hostage taking.

Of all recent American presidents, Jimmy Carter is the one who would have tried to accommodate a democratic regime in Iran. But he was a strongly moral man, and to turn away the cancer-stricken Shah from medical treatment would have been unthinkable. But for obvious reasons of history, Iranian students and Ayatollahs did not think in terms of American presidents having moral qualms. They were happier to come to a deal with Ronald Reagan.

By ensuring Reagan’s defeat of Jimmy Carter, the hostage crisis ushered in one of the most regressive eras in US history. It also represented the end of the New Deal and Great Society era, and the resurrection of Gradgrindism as a philosophy in the domestic governance in the US. Since then, the rich have prospered beyond measure while working Americans have, if they are lucky, trodden water.

And it was not only at home in the US that it marked the end of any sense of community. Globally as well, it heralded the triumph of American militarism and unilateralism.

We are still living with the unintended consequences of the bushy tailed, bright-eyed enthusiasm of those Iranian students, and in Iraq, Americans and Iraqis alike are dying with them.

The crisis had its results closer to home as well. The Iranian revolution, which had joined more secular democratic and Islamist elements, became the hybrid theo-democracy it is now, with the Ayatollahs able to over-rule democratically elected politicians. Ms Ebtekar thinks this is a good thing. Many, not necessarily pro-American, inside and outside Iran would differ, and both the new regime and the hostage crisis left Iran pretty much friendless when Saddam Hussein invaded a year later.

The Iranian anchorwoman wanted to know if I could think of anything positive to conclude from the incident. The one small point I could think of was that it showed Americans how unpopular abroad their government’s policies were. But as we saw after 9/11, there is strong trend in the US, in fact, the one now in power, that feels fortified by foreign disapproval. And, after all, taking diplomats hostage violated international law, as indeed the US forces have done by taking Iranian diplomats prisoner in Iraq — despite the protests of the Iraqi government.

In the past the US has found it convenient to overlook direct and indirect attacks against it, such — for example — Franco’s past as a Nazi ally, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, not to mention the Korean and Vietnam Wars. If the embassy hostage issue were brought up in arguments against talking to Iran, after 28 years, it would be an excuse, not a reason — and not a very good one either. Perhaps Washington could apologise for the Shah, Tehran for the embassy — and the students to the world for the dark ages they inadvertently ushered in.

Instead of punishing his persecutors, last Thursday UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon suspended Toh for two months without pay and demoted him. This is like fining a witch at the stake for fire-raising, or as the indignant Singapore foreign ministry colourfully put it: “Toh is like a pedestrian deliberately hit by a speeding car as he crosses the street, only to be cited for jaywalking as he lies injured, while the culprit goes unpunished”.

Almost two years ago, under pressure from the US, the UN sent more staff to help the OIOS investigate the UN’s procurement office. The new procurement task force began in January 2006, with its head a former assistant district attorney from Connecticut, and its first official act was to put Toh on leave while they investigated. Toh was been ground down in a Kafkaesque process ever since. When they could not find any evidence to back their original corruption charges against him, they expanded their investigation and demanded that he submit details of all transactions in his family exceeding US$10,000, as well as any gifts received exceeding US$250, for the previous decade.

The UN’s joint disciplinary committee has now cleared Toh of fraud, but obviously leery of being accused of wasting the UN’s resources, reprimanded him for negligence in filing his financial disclosures.

This should be no surprise to anyone who has watched the OIOS at work. For years, American politicians and media wanting to score quick political points have raised allegations of “waste, mismanagement and corruption” at the UN. Instead of rebutting false charges, successive secretary generals have pandered to them, throwing accused staff to the wolves. Any UN staff member who comes under investigation, particularly from an American accusation, is presumed guilty, even if like Toh he is proven innocent.

During the Iraq “oil for food” storm, the Volcker commission’s release of OIOS’s internal reports fed the media frenzy, helped along by malicious leaks from investigators. Half-digested, with no notice taken of any rebuttals from the “accused,” a typically memorable charge was that the UN’s border inspectors had wasted money by being on station at the Iraqi border months before the food and oil trade was up and running. But, as an exasperated staff member pointed out, that was because the UN security council had ordered them to be there. And if they were not, doubtless, he suggested, there would have been a nitpicking OIOS report complaining about their failure to comply with the council’s instructions.

In 2001 I wrote a story about a company using the planes that it was contracting to the UN to smuggle “blood diamonds” from central Africa. I approached OIOS for comment. They did not return my calls, but internal sources told me its response was not to investigate the company, but to investigate who had leaked me the story. Even professionals inside its ranks have quit and tried to blow the whistle on the OIOS’s methods.

The UN needs an adequate justice system that exonerates the innocent, punishes the guilty and dissolves the OIOS and its procurement task force, the acting head of which — despite being guilty of this wasteful and malicious vendetta against Toh — is confidently expecting to be promoted next year. The Wall St Journal is already campaigning to retain the task force in the face of Singapore’s objections.

The UN panel on Toh’s claims recommended that OIOS and the UN should review their rules on investigations and “bring them in line with the judgements of the United Nations administrative tribunal and the existing international instruments on human rights”.

That is long overdue. The impunity that used to be enjoyed by perpetrators in the UN has been replaced with a lack of accountability and a total impunity by the OIOS, whose malicious incompetence is aimed more at glory in the Murdoch press than at justice.

Since the UN has been quick to remove the diplomatic immunity of any staff member suspected of criminal behaviour, not least anyone fingered by the Fox-hunters of the far right, Toh wants reciprocation. He wants the secretary general to lift the immunity of his persecutors so he can sue his persecutors for the egregious abuses of natural justice and established procedure which the UN’s own courts have found.

By the time the UN appeals procedure rules that Toh’s suspension and demotion were wrong, and awards him substantial compensation, his persecutors will be safely drawing a substantial salary. Ban Ki Moon has made the promotion of human rights a priority of his administration. He should begin inside his own organization by ignoring US pressure and putting a stop to the persecution of Toh.

After the invasion of Iraq, a BBC reporter backed Kofi Annan into a corner. Beleaguered by the conservative media, Annan had never explicitly endorsed the war but had tried to keep lines open to Washington by not attacking it either. However, the persistent reporter wrung an admission that the war was “illegal”.

That extorted comment put him on the firing line with those American politicians and media commentators for whom the United Nations is axiomatically always wrong anyway, but who are always eager to find new reasons to back their prejudices.

In contrast, this week, when a German reporter from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was asking Ban Ki Moon how he proposed to resolve that perennial friction between the US and the UN, the new secretary general seemed to be occupying a parallel universe. He replied, “The US plays the main role in the coalition forces in Iraq. America has suffered many casualties. Nobody can doubt that America has played a major role in stabilizing Iraq. We have to appreciate the contribution of the US and their sacrifices. How the US will develop their military presence and strategies in future, they will have to decide themselves, in close cooperation with the coalition forces. The UN will not directly be involved in this.”

Even most Americans now seriously question just how much “stability” the US has contributed to Iraq, so this seems to be taking politeness to rather unrealistic extremes. Or it could reflect a South Korean foreign office view, which sees the world with an event horizon encompassed by Russia, China, Japan, North Korea — and the US as an essential counterbalance. It is not, incidentally a view shared by all South Koreans, a surprising number of whom resent the American presence even in the face of the unprepossessing Kim Jong Il whose response to global calls for downsizing government has been to wear platform shoes.

Certainly Ban has betrayed some lack of appreciation of the finer points of the Middle East until now, instinctively taking the American view — on a recent visit to East Jerusalem where he met a group of Palestinian notables he seemed to be under the impression he was in Israel an impression shared only by the Knesset — since no other government recognizes the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem, and the official position of the UN and its members is that until there is a peace settlement, both East and West Jerusalem are supposed to be a UN-administered “corpus separatum”, which precludes them being either Palestinian or Israeli capitals without a further resolution.

There are some signs that he is learning about the region quickly — aided in part by the Guardian’s leaking of his former envoy Alvaro de Soto’s accurate critique. Only last week, Ban broke with his previous precedent by suggesting that the Israelis should be less eager to use tanks to fire in built up areas.

But he seems to be having difficulty understanding the US-UN relationship, and has not learnt from its history. Both Boutros Ghali and Kofi Annan went as far they could to accommodate a demanding Washington, but in the end had to draw a line when they realized that anything other than unconditional surrender to every whim of the White House and Congress would be attacked as an anti-American posture.

Ban’s uncritically enthusiastic adoption of an American “reform agenda”, and his applied acceptance of neocon critiques of previous secretaries-general distorts reality. The UN’s under-secretaries for management under both Boutros Ghali and Annan were American presidential patronage appointees, which should have made him think twice about the American media’s ritual incantations of waste, mismanagement and corruption at the UN.

There is little doubt that Ban Ki Moon sincerely believes in what he is doing. He differs strongly with the US on the International Criminal Court, on the death penalty and other issues, and was clearly miffed when the US disrupted his arduously relentless diplomatic pressure on the Sudanese President with an ill-timed bout of sanctions.

In fact, that, along with the funny business about UN peacekeeping dues where the US votes for operations, indeed often proposes them, and then does not fund its full share of their costs, should have taught Ban a lesson. There is a significant constituency in the United States, ranging from reincarnated isolationists to uninhibited unilateralists, for whom the UN is always wrong. Pandering to them will get him no favours, and alienates most other members of the organization, which is most countries in the world. Indeed, it could alienate most Americans who now see the failures and costs of faith-based policies.

He should put some distance from the failed policies of a failed administration. Perhaps to establish his own credibility the best thing he could do is to provoke the former uncomfirmed US ambassador John Bolton, who has so far been praising him, into denouncing him. Maybe a long speech of support for the International Criminal Court, attacking the bilateral agreements that Bolton secured, opting Americans out of its jurisdiction, would do the trick. It would do wonders for Ban’s image with members and staff alike.