Jonah Goldberg at the National Review talks about this obsession with getting the UN’s approval:
It’s always better to have friends and allies pitching in — many hands make light work, and all that. But if something is in America’s vital national interest, it doesn’t cease to be because Belize or Botswana won’t lend a hand. Posses aren’t more moral in proportion to the number of white hats who sign up.
Somehow this basic fact was lost in the last decade or so. According to liberals in the Bush years, the essence of wise foreign policy boiled down to: “It’s better to be wrong in a big group than to be right alone.”
Anyway, what I really don’t get is the investment of moral authority in the Security Council or the U.N. generally. The permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are France, Great Britain, the United States, China, and Russia. The other nations of the 15-member body rotate on and off the council. They also don’t get a veto the way the permanent five do. But, for the record, they currently are: Argentina, Australia, Azerbaijan, Guatemala, Luxembourg, Morocco, Pakistan, South Korea, Rwanda, and Togo.
Now, taking nothing away from the great and glorious accomplishments of the Luxembourgeois, Togoans, and Rwandans — never mind the invaluable insights the Pakistanis have into what constitute America’s vital interests — I am at a near-total loss to see how gaining their approval for a measure makes that measure more worthwhile. If you believe Bill Clinton was right to bomb the Balkans to stop ethnic cleansing (which I do), do you think that action was any less moral or right because he did it without the support of the U.N. and therefore — according to international law — illegally? I don’t.