Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly, but not
alone: in a parting irony he will take the United Nations down with him.
Well, not the whole United Nations. The ‘good works’ part will survive, the
low-risk peace-keeping bureaucracies will remain, the looming chatterbox on the
Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die in Iraq is the fantasy of the
United Nations as the foundation of a new 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 safety through international law administered by international
institutions.
As free Iraqis document the quarter-century nightmare of Saddam’s rule, as we
hear from the survivors able to speak from their own soil for the first time,
let us not forget who was for this war and who was not, who held that the moral
authority of the international community was enshrined in a plea for more time
for inspectors, and who marched against ‘regime change’. In the spirit of
postwar reconciliation that diplomats are always eager to engender, we must not
reconcile the timid, blighted notion that world order requires us to recoil
before rogue states that terrorise their own citizens and menace ours.
A few days ago Shirley Williams argued on television against a coalition of the
willing using force to liberate Iraq. Decent, thoughtful and high-minded — like
many of the millions who have marched against military action — she must surely
have been moved into opposition by an argument so convincing that it overpowered
the obvious moral case for removing Saddam’s regime.
No, for Baroness Williams (and many others), the thumb on the scale of judgment
about this war is the idea that only the UN Security Council can legitimise the
use of force. It matters not if troops are used only to enforce the UN’s own
demands. A willing coalition of liberal democracies isn’t good enough. If any
institution or coalition other than the UN Security Council uses force, even as
a last resort, ‘anarchy’, rather than international law, would prevail,
destroying any hope for world order.
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.
When challenged with the argument that if a policy is right with the approbation
of the Security Council, how can it be wrong just because communist China or
Russia or France or a gaggle of minor dictatorships withhold their assent, she
fell back on the primacy of ‘order’ versus ‘anarchy’.
But is this right? Is the United Nations Security Council the institution most
capable of ensuring order and saving us from anarchy? History would suggest not.
The United Nations 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 — to taking on Nazi Germany.
In the heady aftermath of the Allied victory in the second world war, the hope
that security could be made collective was reposed in the United Nations
Security Council — with abject results. During the Cold War the Security Council
was hopelessly paralysed. The Soviet empire was wrestled to the ground, and
Eastern Europe liberated, not by the United Nations but by the mother of all
coalitions, Nato. Apart from minor skirmishes and sporadic peace-keeping
missions, the only case of the Security Council acting in a serious matter
affecting world order during the Cold War was its use of force to halt the
North’s invasion of South Korea — and that was only possible because the Soviets
had boycotted the Security Council and were not in the chamber to cast their
veto. It was a mistake they did not make again. With war looming, the UN
withdrew from the Middle East, leaving Israel to defend itself in 1967 and again
in 1973.
Facing Milosevic’s multiple aggressions, the UN could not stop the Balkan wars
or even protect its victims. Remember Sarajevo? Remember Srebrenica? It took a
coalition of the willing to save Bosnia from extinction. And when the war was
over, peace was made in Dayton, Ohio, not in the United Nations. The rescue of
Muslims in Kosovo was not a UN action: their cause never gained Security Council
approval. The United Kingdom, not the United Nations, saved the Falklands.
This new 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 harbour terrorists, as we did in destroying the
Taleban regime in Afghanistan.
The most dangerous of these states are those that also possess weapons of mass
destruction, the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that can kill not
hundreds or thousands but hundreds of thousands. Iraq is one such state, but
there are others. Whatever hope there is 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 — 17 of them with respect to Iraq, the most recent,
1441, a resolution of last resort — is unmistakable: it is simply not up to the
task.
We are left with coalitions of the willing. Far from disparaging them as a
threat to a new world order, we should recognise that they are, by default, the
best hope for that order, and the true alternative to the anarchy of the abject
failure of the United Nations.
Richard Perle is chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to
the Pentagon