Talking It Over

When I was 10, my family took a trip to New York. One of my best memories of that trip was a visit to the United Nations building. I remember thinking how beautiful it was and loving the wooden doll my father bought me in the gift shop.

Other than collecting money for UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund) at Halloween, that was my only firsthand experience with the United Nations. Of course, I knew the United Nations was a body of representatives from nations around the world, and occasionally, I watched on television as our U.N. delegates debated with those from other countries.

Since my husband became president, however, I've learned more about the United Nations and the things it does every day that we don't hear about on the evening news.

Not long ago, when an epidemic of ebola virus threatened to spread out of Zaire, doctors and nurses coordinated by the U.N.'s World Health Organization and our Centers for Disease Control went in and sanitized hospitals filled with disease and death.

When people around the world were stunned by the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986, the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency took action, sending professionals needed for the cleanup.

Today, in countries like Bangladesh, UNICEF is dramatically improving literacy rates among girls and boys in the poorest regions of the world through financial and technical help to schools.

And generations to come will be able to learn about the history and share the beauty of cultural treasures such as the pyramids in Egypt and the Taj Majal in India thanks to the preservation efforts of the United Nations.

On another front, a U.N.-sponsored immunization campaign has succeeded in wiping out polio from the Western Hemisphere, which is good news for those of us who live here. When I visited Latin America last month, the results of the campaign were evident in every country.

In the aftermath of disasters like the earthquake in Armenia in 1988 and the floods last year in Nigeria that displaced 400,000 people, the United Nations was there, feeding the hungry, tending to the sick, healing the wounded and sheltering the homeless.

Still, I know from my mail that if you ask many Americans for their view of the United Nations, you are likely to get an earful about the failure of U.N.

peacekeeping troops to stop ethnic conflict in Bosnia.

You might also hear some grumbling about why the United States remains so involved in an organization that focuses on problems worldwide when we have so many of our own challenges here at home.

While the U.N.'s difficult and sometimes unsuccessful peacekeeping missions grab the headlines, its humanitarian efforts are quietly saving lives and ending bloodshed around the world.

We don't, for example, hear much about war and carnage in Cambodia or Mozambique anymore or about refugees streaming out of Afghanistan. Why? Because the United Nations helped resolve those conflicts through courageous peacekeeping and humanitarian activities that in some cases stretched over years.

I've had a chance over the past three years to see for myself the work of the U.N. in many different countries. And I am convinced that U.S. support for the United Nations is very much in our own country's interests. Not only does this international body offer the world a moral alternative to war, it helps bring economic and political stability to nations and regions whose futures are tied to ours.

Clearly, like many of our homegrown institutions, the United Nations needs reform. Just as we are working to make our federal government smaller and more efficient, the U.N. needs to do away with unnecessary bureaucracy and streamline its operations. Americans, who support the U.N. more generously than people from any other country, have a right to demand as much.

The United Nations is far from perfect. But it offers a forum where talking instead of fighting is valued. It provides assistance that helps people around the world and even here in the United States. And it holds out the promise of peace, prosperity and democracy, which make the world safer for Americans.

My husband is fond of saying, "Progress can spread quickly, but trouble can too." In a world far more complicated today than it was when the United Nations was founded 50 years ago, we Americans are faced with this choice: Either we pool our resources with other countries to promote peace, eradicate hunger and disease, improve education, protect the environment, assist refugees, and fight terrorist and international drug cartels, or we venture forward alone.

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