Posted on 03/17/2003 5:01:39 AM PST by MadIvan
The United Nations is a fine idea. Its members are more of a problem. A membership that can elect Libya to be in charge of human rights and seriously contemplate choosing Iraq to supervise disarmament is overstepping the frontiers of credibility. Delving further into the past yields other absurdities, prime among them the infamous resolution equating Zionism with racism.
It is hardly surprising that serious countries regularly fall out of love with the United Nations, and none more so than the United States, on whose initiative - with the UK - the UN was founded and on whose support it ultimately depends.
The truth is that the United Nations is an organisation of convenience. Countries use it when they think that will serve their interests or convenience and avoid it when they see no likely gain. As we stand within hours of a war that will almost certainly take place without a second Security Council resolution, it is being said that war without such endorsement would be unprecedented, illegal and immoral.
That is pretty good bunkum. You don't even need all the fingers of one hand to tot up the wars which have been authorised by the UN: Korea by the General Assembly and the 1991 Gulf War by the Security Council. The number of wars or military interventions conducted in good, moral and honourable causes which have not been authorised by the UN are legion. The most recent is the war against Serbia to remove a dictator and prevent further massacres in Kosovo. But there are many other examples, including the intervention by African regional organisations in civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Even in the 1991 Gulf War the case for UN endorsement was based more on political convenience than moral or legal necessity. All the legal justification needed to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait was to be found in the right of selfdefence articulated in Article 51 of the UN Charter.
Indeed, Margaret Thatcher argued strongly at the time that no further UN process was needed, not least because it would constrain the scope of action against Saddam.
But the Americans were keen to assemble the widest possible military coalition and saw the UN route as the best means to do so. Both were right. The terms of the UN resolution did help put together a very broad coalition. But the same terms prevented the Allies from contemplating hot pursuit of Saddam's crumbling forces deep into Iraq and even to Baghdad - which would have procured his downfall and saved us a lot of subsequent trouble.
Sophistry is characteristic of UN members. France bases its threat to veto any Security Council resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq on grounds of principle and upholding the UN. But France has never felt the need for UN endorsement of its various military forays into Francophone Africa. It did not seek UN authority to blow up the Rainbow Warrior.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that its sudden predilection for the UN has other motives, like thumbing its nose at American power or possibly its long-standing links with Saddam. Whatever the truth of that, it is difficult to understand the logic of France's position in respect to its own interests.
The UN Security Council is the one remaining stage on which France - and Britain for that matter - can still play the role of a great power. If a French veto is exercised but ignored and circumvented, the authority of the Security Council will be diminished.
Equally, if as seems likely, attempts to pass a second (or actually 18th) resolution are abandoned because of the threat of a French veto and the Security Council is in consequence bypassed, the result will be the same. France's veto will be less credible in future and France's ability to strut the Security Council stage will be diminished. Either way, France is the loser.
A similar dilemma faces the holier-than-thou opponents of military action in the Labour Party. They were happy enough with humanitarian intervention in Kosovo without UN Security Council endorsement, but have inexplicably developed cold feet in the case of Iraq. If upholding the United Nations was really their motive one would expect to see them championing enforcement of its resolutions on Iraq.
One inevitable result of the present machinations will be growing disenchantment with the UN on the part of the US. President George W Bush took the UN route over Iraq last September - probably against his own instincts - and it has landed him in a quagmire of indecision and evasiveness.
The vaunted unity of the Security Council around Resolution 1441 rapidly dissolved when confronted with the need for action. American presidents will understandably be more inclined to bypass the UN on major international crises in future, with the result that its relevance will decline.
But that is a far cry from predicting the UN's demise. I don't believe it will go the way of the League of Nations. It has never been the incipient world government which its more idealistic supporters proclaim. Rather it is the world's parliament: a useful forum for debate, a graveyard for insoluble disputes, a valuable mechanism for assembling peacekeeping forces, a humanitarian agency. But any pretension to unique moral authority has long ago been tarnished.
That is not the fault of the institution but of its members. The UN is only a mirror held up to our untidy world and if we do not like what we see, there is no point in cursing the mirror.
We could rebuild the UN's authority, but not by failing to implement its resolutions and ignoring obvious evils. That way it will remain a cockpit in the Tower of Babel, to use the vivid phrase in Winston Churchill's Fulton speech.
We need to recognise that the world has moved on since 1945 when the UN Charter was drafted and that the main threats to international peace and security are not so much from states going to war over territory as from rogue states determined to acquire WMD, from terrorist organisations which practise terror worldwide, from genocidal dictatorships, from crumbling states.
Those dangers will be dealt with one way or another: through the UN if it can summon the willpower to enforce its decisions; outside the UN if it cannot.
The experience of the past few months is not encouraging for those who believe the UN is the proper forum, but we should not give up hope.
Charles Powell is former foreign policy adviser to Lady Thatcher
YOU got that right !
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