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International-UN-NGOs
ElBaradei calls for UNSC reform
2006-03-26
The head of the UN nuclear watchdog agency on Saturday called for the reform and expansion of the UN Security Council, saying its engagement in maintaining world peace and security is often “inadequate, selective or after the fact”.
... and it was originally designed to be that way...
Mohamed ElBaradei said the Security Council’s efforts to control arms have not been systematic or successful in the case of Iraq, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. “When dealing with threats of nuclear proliferation and arms control, the Security Council has too often fallen short. It has made little effort to address nuclear proliferation in context,” said ElBaradei, head of the Vienna, Austria-based International Agency for Atomic Energy. “It has not responded or followed up effectively to the emergence of new countries with nuclear weapons. It is clearly time for the Security Council to be reformed, expanded and strengthened,” he said in a speech.
The UNSC is rendered ineffective because of the veto power retained by the major powers. None is going to give it up, because they don't want their interests threatened, which would happen regularly given a simple majority rule. Adding numbers does nothing to make the council more effective. All the non-veto members are mere window dressing, for one thing. For another thing, adding members to a committe has the net effect of lowering its effectiveness. See Parkinson, C. Northcote, just about anything he ever wrote. The man was a saint.
He also said: “the case of Darfur ... continues to suffer from the inability of the Security Council to muster sufficient peacekeeping troops.” ElBaradei noted that in the civil war in Rwanda in 1994, the Security Council was “unable to move much beyond hand-wringing, with the result that 800,000 people lost their lives in the span of a few months.”
In virtually every crisis the League of Nations UN as a whole has been unable to move much beyond hand-wringing. That's why it should be abolished and replaced with a series of regional alliances.
Posted by:Fred

#10  El Baradei has gone FAR BEYOND THE SCOPE of the Peter Principle. We need some kind of equivalent of the Unified Field Theory to explain the UN and the IAEA.

Maybe I will contact the Rantburg RAND Corporation tomorrow morning and we can slap a study on it.
Posted by: Alaska Paul   2006-03-26 23:23  

#9  Fred, Have your read Norm Augustine's book?
Posted by: Nimble Spemble   2006-03-26 20:10  

#8  Thrive?
Posted by: Darrell   2006-03-26 19:49  

#7  Actually, it was to the British Colonial Office, which had a small number of people and many colonies in 1850, and a large number of employees for a much smaller number of colonies in 1950.

Parkinson pointed out the tendency of organizations to grow at a rate that's totally divorced from the actual amount of work done.

One of his corollaries was that small committees are more effective than large ones (take the total IQ of a committee, divide by membership, and the average IQ drifts closer and closer to average or even subnormal, a kind of reversal of synergy -- Pruitt's corollary to Parkinson's corollary. I believe you can also subtract a set number of IQ points for each member over a dozen to get the exact figure...) These committees, including the cabinet, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the UN, and the boards of major corporations, tend naturally to become larger, both through the addition of members and through the expansion of member's staffs, which gets them prestige points whether productivity increases or not.

The Peter Principle (people rise to their level of incompetence) came several years after Parkinson.

I love management theory. If you can pick up a copy of In Search of Excellence, do so, and read it from cover to cover. Virtually all the examples of effective companies used in the middle 80s (Fluor, People Express, Delta) are now out of business or also-rans, with the single exception of IBM, which ain't what it used to be.

What would we do without experts?
Posted by: Fred   2006-03-26 19:45  

#6  Was Parkinsons Law first applied to office opace, closet space or static memory?
Posted by: 6   2006-03-26 12:32  

#5  Mohamed ElBaradei said the Security CouncilÂ’s efforts to control arms have not been systematic or successful in the case of Iraq, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but some of those aren't signatories to the NPT.
Posted by: Robert Crawford   2006-03-26 12:00  

#4  Paul, No that's the Peter Principle, i.e. rising to the level of one's incompetence.

Parkinson's Law says that the capacity of a system (think computer memory or hard drive capacity, for example) will be overloaded by growing demand which was enabled by the increased capcity and that the capcity will need increasing which leads to a new cycle of overloading, etc.
Posted by: Slarong Flirong5626   2006-03-26 09:08  

#3  Great observation about Parkenson's Law, Fred. I learned about it when I was a kid. It's a fundamental law of the Universe. And when committees get to 21 members, the committee is doomed, doomed, I tell ya, doomed!
Posted by: Alaska Paul   2006-03-26 01:31  

#2  When I was Manager of a completely dysfunctional Department, known mainly as a serious drain on the company, I always found it effective to lecture the Board, too.
Posted by: Snise Angomosing6920   2006-03-26 01:15  

#1  Given the Kofi succession plan, El Baradei must be the next incompetent in line for the job.
Posted by: Captain America   2006-03-26 00:18  

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