Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is about to end. His Baathist government, however, will not go alone. In a fitting irony, the UN is going down with him.
Perhaps the entire UN will not disappear. Those parts devoted to "good works" (ie, the low-risk peacekeeping bureaucracies or those that fight AIDs and malaria or protect children) will remain. The looming chatterbox on New York's East River will also continue to bleat. What died with the UN Security Council's unwillingness to sanction force to implement its own resolutions on Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was the decades-old fantasy of the UN as the bedrock of world order.
As we sift the debris of the war to liberate Iraq, it will be important to preserve -- the better to understand -- the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of security through international law administered by international institutions.
As free Iraqis document the quarter-century nightmare of Saddam's rule, we must not forget who supported this war and who did not, who held that the international community's moral authority was enshrined in pleas for more time for the UN arms inspectors, and who marched against "regime change." In the spirit of post-war reconciliation that diplomats are always keen to engender, we must not reconcile ourselves to the timid, blighted notion that world order requires us to recoil before rogue states that terrorize their citizens and menace our own.
Decent, thoughtful, high-minded, the millions who marched against holding Iraq to account were catalyzed by the idea that only the Security Council has the authority to legitimize the resort to force. A voluntary coalition of liberal democracies willing to put their own soldiers in harm's way isn't good enough. It does not seem to matter that such troops are being used to enforce the UN's own demands. If a country or coalition of countries other than the council uses force, even as a last resort, "anarchy," not international law, would prevail, destroying all hope of world order.
Or so the protesters believed. But this is a dangerously wrong idea, an idea that leads inexorably to handing great moral (and even existential politico-military decisions) to the likes of Syria, Cameroon, Angola, Russia, China, and France. If a policy is right when the Security Council approves, how can it be wrong just because communist China or Russia or France or a gaggle of minor dictatorships withhold approbation? Those who opposed the actions of the coalition in Iraq usually fall back on the answer that "order" must have primacy over "anarchy."
But is this right? Is the council the institution most capable of ensuring order and saving us from anarchy? History suggests not. The UN arose from the ashes of a war that the League of Nations was unable to avert. The League was simply not up to confronting Italy in Abyssinia, much less (had it survived that debacle) taking on Nazi Germany.
In the euphoric aftermath of the victory in World War II, the hope that security could be made collective was reposed in the Security Council -- with abject results. During the Cold War the council was hopelessly paralyzed. Indeed, the decision to defend South Korea from attack in 1950 was taken by the council only because Stalin ordered his diplomats to boycott UN proceedings, which meant that no Soviet ambassador was around to cast a veto.
It was a mistake the Soviets would not make again. In both 1967 and 1973, with war looming, the UN withdrew from the Middle East, leaving Israel to defend itself. The Soviet empire was wrestled to the ground, and Eastern Europe liberated, not by the UN but by the mother of all coalitions, NATO.
Facing Milosevic's multiple aggressions, the UN could not stop the Balkan wars or even protect its victims. Remember Sarajevo? Remember Srebrenica and the slaughter of thousands of Muslims under the supposed protection of the UN? It took a coalition of the willing to save Bosnia from extinction. When the war was over, peace was made in Dayton, Ohio, not at the UN. The rescue of Kosovo's Muslims was not a UN action -- their cause never gained Security Council approval. This century now challenges the hopes for a new world order in new ways. We will not defeat or even contain fanatical terror unless we can carry the war to the territories from which it is launched. This will sometimes require that we use force against states that harbor terrorists, as we did in destroying the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The most dangerous of these states are those that possess weapons of mass destruction, the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that can kill not hundreds or thousands but hundreds of thousands. Iraq was such a state, but there are others. Whatever hope exists that they can be persuaded to withdraw support or sanctuary from terrorists rests on the certainty and effectiveness with which they are confronted.
The chronic failure of the Security Council to enforce its own resolutions (with respect to Iraq) is unmistakable -- it is simply not up to the task. So we are left with coalitions of the willing. Far from disparaging them as a threat to a new world order, we should recognize that they are, by default, the best hope for that order, and the true alternative to the anarchy caused by the dismal failure of the UN.
Richard Perle, a former US assistant secretary of defense, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a member of the US Defense Department's policy advisory board.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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