rericbaume -- for you after iraq: -the un
Jan. 25, 2003 EDITORIAL: After Iraq: The UN
In a fittingly surreal curtain-raiser for America's impending war on Iraq, the world's powers have engaged in an embarrassing bickering match that only a year ago would have been unthinkable.
The farce on the East River, where France, Germany, and Russia are trying to arm-wrestle the US out of a showdown on the Euphrates, should serve as a reminder that US President George W. Bush's questioning of the relevance of the UN was exactly on target.
The US did not have to go the UN in order to act in Iraq. With Saddam Hussein having publicly, in front on TV cameras, praised the September 11 terrorist attacks on America's financial, political, and military solar plexus, the Iraqi leader had for all intents and purposes asked for American retaliation. Such an attack, if waged back then, would have been perceived no less naturally as the attack on Afghanistan, even if technically Osama bin Laden was not directly linked to the Iraqi arena.
Back in the fall of 2001, what mattered was that America had been viciously attacked, and that those who helped spread terrorism, whether by commission, omission, or petition, were universally seen as a global threat worthy of an uncompromising global war. It was against that backdrop that America attacked Afghanistan, without asking for the UN's permission and without meeting any opposition of the sort it is currently facing from a plethora of governments, NGO's, celebrities, and intellectuals for whom the UN is offering inspiration.
Founded by the victors of World War II, the UN was originally designed as a forum where the world's governments could safeguard the peace through collective self-defense, thereby advancing the cause of freedom and human rights.
In its first four decades of existence its conduct was dominated, for better or worse, by the Cold War's dynamics. In those years the UN often irked many in the West, but on the whole was perceived as something between an anecdote and a nuisance, a glorified debating society of sorts.
Now, however, the UN is actively standing in America's way as it unabashedly seeks to delay, dilute, and obstruct the impending attack on Saddam Hussein's regime.
Ironically, the UN is in the position to do all this not despite, but because of US action. In the narrow sense, it was the US that brought the Iraqi situation to the UN, following the advice of Secretary of State Colin Powell. In the broader sense, the very precedent for such an approach was also set by the US, when it chose the UN as the vehicle through which to launch the 1991 war on Iraq.
However, in 1991 there was a need to rally dozens of countries around a cause that did not victimize the US directly, namely a second country's invasion of a third, and the general upholding of the principle of national sovereignty. Still, the UN apparently misunderstood that precedent as a license to manage not only America's foreign policy, but limit its right of self-defense. America must not allow that.
In the short term, the US must conduct its post-9/11 counteroffensive freely, and the rest of the world must respect its democratically elected leaders' right to craft and execute a foreign policy of their own. In the longer term, the UN must be reformed, so that it responds to the specific needs and changing circumstances of the post-Cold War era.
First, the UN's decision-making mechanisms must be reviewed. France was treated by the organization's founders as a superpower for many good reasons, including its distant past, which was glorious, and its immediate past, which was traumatic. Today, however, it deserves that position no more than, say, India, Brazil, or Japan.
More importantly, the UN's system of one government, one vote should be abandoned. In a world where dozens of former dictatorships, from Chile to Mongolia, have embraced political freedom, it is no longer necessary to pass UN resolutions by simple votes. Nor is it prudent - allowing the representatives of self-appointed despots to participate in democratic-looking votes, besides being a travesty, leads their regimes to the conclusion that the world actually does not mind their political conduct.
Such a sea change could only come about following a frontal challenge to the UN's betrayal of its own charter and the hope it was to bring to humanity.
Bush's warning that the UN could prove irrelevant if it allowed Saddam Hussein to violate its binding resolutions with impunity was a start.
Having thrown down the gauntlet, Bush must follow through: either by moving ahead without further UN approval, or by shaming the security council in to ratifying the use of force. In either case, Bush will have taken an important step reshaping the post-Cold War global architecture in a way that will help make the help make the world a safer and freer place.
