[Mb-civic] FW: Article by Amb. F. Hoveyda

[Golsorkhi]

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From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Sat, 9 Apr 2005 22:43:42 -0400
Subject: Article by Amb. F. Hoveyda

Ambassadors vs. Ambassador

  The Unites States and the  United Nations

Fereydoun Hoveyda
 

  April 9, 2005
iranian.com

  Some fifty-nine former ambassadors and officials have signed  a letter
to the U.S. Senate against the nomination of John Bolton  as U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations. The gist of their argumentation boils
down to the fact that the nominee has always been disdainful  of
multilateral diplomacy in general and the world organization  in
particular.

  On Friday April 8, an editotial of the  New York Times added: "When
the country chooses an ambassador to the United Nations, it ought  to
avoid picking someone whose bulliying style of leadership symbolizes
everything that created the current estrangement between the United
States and most of the world.²

  Curiously enough in the world at large the only other people  opposed
to Mr. Bolton are members of the North Korean dictatorial  government
who despise the Proliferation Security Initiative, Bolton  is said to
have helped to design and which is a multilateral initiative  that,
among other things, drew attention to the spread of nuclear  secrets by
a Pakistani scientist.

  I don¹t know Mr. Bolton and have not followed his career  at the State
Department. Moreover I don¹t mind if he is or  not confirmed, because
this is certainly not the most important  problem facing the United
States and the world at the present time.  The question of a radical
reform of the scandal-ridden United Nations  and his Secretary-general
is much more urgent and significant.

  But as a retired ambassador, something bothers me with the action
undertaken by his 59 colleagues and the criticism uttered by a  part of
the medias. Indeed if one follows their line of reasoning  to its very
end, one would come up with the rule that diplomatic  envoys should be
chosen according to their sympathy in favor of  the country and/or the
international organization where they are  supposed to represent their
governments. The New York Times editorial  states : "At a minimum, the
United States representative to the United Nations should be a person
who believes it is a good  idea "

  If this was the yardstick of diplomatic nominations, as a writer  in
the French language and a long time friend of French culture,  I should
have been posted in Paris and not at the United Nations  in the 1970s.
Following the line supported by the above-mentioned  59 distinguished
American officials and their friends in the media,  President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt should have sent to pre-World  War Berlin and to the
former Soviet Union ambassadors who believed  in the "good ideas" of
Hitler and Stalin! Which certainly  would have been an aberration!

  Actually most foreign offices avoid  to nominate ambassadors who are
sympathetic to the governments  of the countries where they are to
serve on the grounds that their  reports might be biased and would not
reflect the reality of the  political situation. Because some European
countries have deviated  from this practice for instance in the case of
the Islamic Republic  of Iran, Tehran¹s theocratic regime is still in
power notwithstanding  the opposition of a majority of the population.

  What the world organization needs in the first place especially  from
democratic countries is the nomination of ambassadors capable  of
imposing the implementation of basic reforms.

---
About
Fereydoun Hoveyda (www.hoveyda.org)  is a Senior Fellow at the National
Committee on American Foreign  Policy. As a young Iranian diplomat , he
was involved in the  preparatory work for the San Francisco Conference
that adopted  the Charter of the U.N. (1945) In 1947 and 1948 he
participated  in the drafting and voting of the Universal Declaration
of Human  Rights. From 1952 to 1966 he became an international civil
servant  in UNESCO's Department of Mass Communications where he
specialized  in development of free flow of information in the
developing  countries. From 1966 to 1970 he represented Iran in the
annual  General Assembly sessions of the U.N , as Iranian deputy
foreign minister in charge of international organizations. From 1971
to 1979 , he served as Iran's ambassador and chief delegate to  the
United Nations. He is the author of The  Broken Crescent: The Threat of
Militant Islamic Fundamentalism (2002), The  Shah and the Ayatollah,
Iranian Mythology and Islamic Revolution (2003) >>> See his  articles
in iranian.com


URL:  
http://www.iranian.com/FereydounHoveyda/2005/April/Ambassador/
index.html

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