When, shortly before his resignation from the Defense Advisory Board, Richard Perle, one of the architects of the war on Iraq, wrote an article for the Guardian gloatingly announcing the demise of the United Nations, he had a point.
In this case, the validity of a death certificate is not diminished if it comes from one of the killers; and while Perle was serving the ends of the hawks in the White House by declaring the UN’s demise — to justify an unjustifiable war — he put his finger on the essential failure of the UN; the failure, again and again, to stop countries from doing what they were always going to do.
The contempt with which regime after regime and country after country have defied UN resolutions, and the failure of the UN to respond to such defiance with anything that would overcome, rather than encourage, such contempt, have been brought, with the war on Iraq, to a head where the UN as it is currently constituted cannot go on. With hindsight, the solemn reports of the chief weapons inspector Hans Blix to the assembled UN Security Council prior to the war in Iraq seem like an empty charade.
The United States knew that the tedious formality of these occasions concealed a body that was essentially impotent to stop any of its members doing what they pleased as soon as it pleased them to do it. The US knew this from the bungled peacekeeping operations in Kosovo and Somalia. It knew this from the way the UN had failed in Rwanda, where 800,000 Rwandans were killed in 100 days under the eyes of UN peacekeeping forces, a genocide of unparalleled swiftness and brutality. It knew this, finally, from the way its own ally, Israel, had blithely continued for 40 years to ignore any resolution the UN had taken to halt its continuing occupation of sovereign territory.
Now, calls from both those who were for the war and from those who were against it that the United Nations must have a role in postwar Iraq — vital, central, or otherwise — sound like empty invocations, figures of speech.
If the UN is ever to have a role other than what the likes of Perle have envisaged for it — as no more than a sort of international ambulance service that mops up after more energetic and more deadly forces have done their worst — it must reform itself radically.
Former General Assembly President Razali Ismael has suggested just such a radical overhaul of the UN Security Council. The Americans, he said, “had worked out months in advance that they would go to Baghdad one way or the other.” To help the US realize that its best interests lie through the UN, he suggested expanding the Security Council from five to ten permanent members and from ten to 14 non-permanent members, primarily to increase the presence of developing countries in a body that is dominated by the victors of World War II.
That America needs help in realizing that its best interests are served if it does not go it alone is beyond doubt. Whether an expanded Security Council will have the persuasive power to help it realize this remains to be seen. But there can be no question that one of the most urgent tasks before the world at the moment is to find a way of shaping a United Nations that has such power, and will use it effectively when necessary.
