Before letting the UN get a grib on Iraq (and it's oil billions), maybe we should look at their track record in Kosovo. Here's a good place to start: UN, Go Home:

Maybe it seems unimaginable that Iraq, with its immense oil resources, could ever be without electric power in its cities. But, to repeat, Kosovo once exported electricity, and its power plants were undamaged by the NATO bombing. The Kosovars themselves blame the chaotic state of their power system on the foreign reconstruction authorities. Koha Ditore editor Veton Surroi, in a column published March 22, described his surreal conversation with a Tunisian official of the International Monetary Fund. She was surprised that nobody spoke French in Kosovo, and recommended that money be spent on education. But she had no idea where the money for education would come from, commenting, "We must analyze this." In reality, there is no money, and there is not even a Kosovo state budget law.



The francophone Tunisian recommended an opening to foreign investors, and when confronted with the lack of legal guarantees for investment, repeated, "We must analyze this." As to the lack of electricity, she suggested importing energy from neighbors . . . except that there is no money to pay for it. For that, she had an answer: The Kosovars must pony up for the power they use. Some Kosovars themselves say revenue from power consumers could finance other needs, like education. But this is fantasy. Few Kosovars can afford to pay their current electricity bills; far fewer can pay their arrears; and even if they could, there is no accounting system in place to permit the responsible handling of the resulting revenues. Not surprisingly, Surroi concluded, "I was glad when I read in an article in the Wall Street Journal that the United States had decided to conduct the initial reconstruction of postwar Iraq itself, with contractors who work for the U.S. government. At least the Iraqi people will not have to undergo experiments."

KOSOVARS can offer a valuable insight into the situation we expect to face in Iraq. The U.N., they point out, never supported the NATO bombing of Serbia in the first place, so why should U.N. functionaries care how they carry out a mandate given them for reconstruction? Americans were naive, say Kosovars, to believe that the U.N. would effectively fulfill the tasks ceded to it in Kosovo, after the international organization had opposed the intervention.

Many people seem to misunderstand what the U.N. is. They hear about potential United Nations involvement in Iraq, and believe that the peoples of the world will unite, through their U.N. ambassadors, to make Iraq whole after the war. But this perception is mistaken. The U.N. is not the nations of the world united. It is an enterprise located in a building in New York, with satellite operations around the world, employing a certain cadre of people of many nationalities, most of whom are time-servers and ideologues.

In my six years' experience in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, I never met a U.N. representative who failed to conform to a certain professional profile. They call themselves "internationals," and are generally young and inexperienced, although the heads of their missions tend to be old and uninterested. They have a strong prejudice against privatization, and too many of those chosen for economic responsibilities hail from Sweden and other countries where statist socialism remains the political religion.

Internationals have a bias against administrative regime change, and many rationalizations as to why areas they control should continue to operate under officials held over from totalitarian regimes. Recalling the socialist past of Tito's Yugoslavia, Surroi dubs the postwar regime in Kosovo "UNMIK socialism." After NATO's intervention, the U.N. did everything possible to maintain or restore the positions of former socialist bureaucrats. Nor was restitution of private property seized under the Nazis, Communists, or the Milosevic regime ever considered. When U.N. and USAID officials cooperated to draft a regulation on privatization, Kosovar experts objected that its principal effect would be to reaffirm state ownership of nationalized property rather than to restore private property rights. The website of the Kosovo Trust Agency, the body overseeing privatization, states, "The KTA has been established to preserve or enhance the value, viability, and corporate governance of socially owned and public enterprises in Kosovo."