Management...

A friend sent a link to a scathing report on the failure of the UN to provide security for its people in Iraq. it doesn't seem to have received much attention...

UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 22 � An independent panel appointed to investigate the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad in August said on Wednesday in a scathing report that security breaches, inadequate security analysis and poor management left the organization vulnerable to attack....

....The panel said the organization had failed to assess thoroughly security in Iraq or respond to warnings, including intelligence reports that said the headquarters could be a target of an attack. United Nations officials, the panel said, also dismissed offers of protection from the United States coalition in Baghdad.

Although the report acknowledged that improved security might not have prevented the bombing, which killed 22 staff members and visitors and injured more than 150 people, the investigators said the management and staff had failed to take steps that would at least have reduced the vulnerability of the mission and minimized casualties.

The panel, sounding an alarm throughout the United Nations network of missions, declared that the security system was "dysfunctional" and "provides little guarantee of security to U.N. staff in Iraq or other high-risk environments and needs to be reformed."

The 40-page report echoed in its severity the conclusions of the independent panels that Mr. Annan named to investigate the United Nations role in the massacres in Rwanda in 1994 and Srebrenica in 1995....

It's not really surprising that the UN has management problems. Good management requires honesty. Truthfulness. And the UN is built of layer upon layer of lies.

Posted by John Weidner at October 23, 2003 9:11 PM