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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Media: Darkness and Light (March 26, 2003) Embedded journalists are giving the Iraq story a visceral immediacy that's been lacking from coverage of recent wars. By William Powers. Political Pulse: War Has Its Reasons (March 26, 2003) There's evidence Bush's team was contemplating war with Iraq even before 9/11. By William Schneider. Legal Affairs: This War May Be Legal, But Arrogant Diplomacy Could Kill Us (March 26, 2003) The administration's problem is its perceived indifference to the need for legal justification and to world opinion. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Media: Civilian Casualties: A Media Primer (March 18, 2003) Five guidelines for assessing news reports of civilian casualties. By William Powers. Social Studies: Yes, Bush Has a Policy on North Korea. It Might Even Work. (March 18, 2003) Bilateral talks could lead all too easily to precisely the catastrophe they're supposed to prevent. By Jonathan Rauch. Political Pulse: A Worldwide Tide of Anti-Bush Feeling (March 18, 2003) The president's black-and-white vision is regarded as dangerously simplistic. By William Schneider. Legal Affairs: Falsely Accused 'Enemies' Deserve Due Process (March 18, 2003) Congress should now force the administration to assign military tribunals to interview every detainee. By Stuart Taylor Jr. More from National Journal. |
Wealth of Nations 
The U.N. Can Serve the Greater Good,
or Undermine ItIt's clear that France, Russia, and other countries have aimed to use the U.N. to constrain America. by Clive Crook .... Where does the decision to attack Iraq despite lack of support from the Security Council—indeed, despite its outright opposition—leave the United Nations? Some are arguing that once the war is over, things will be much as they were before, with the U.N. no more or less important. Forget the idea that the organization will be crippled, these people say. America will want the U.N.'s help in reconstructing Iraq, and in conducting peacekeeping and humanitarian tasks there and elsewhere. When tempers have cooled, America will again be willing to treat the organization with courtesy, and even with the occasional show of deference—a small price to pay for the valuable services the U.N. is still capable of supplying, the argument goes. Anyway, the U.N. has never been much use at mobilizing resources for military action. There is nothing new about that. In the long run, people will see that nothing much has really changed. I do not believe it. At times like these, admittedly, the tendency is to read too much significance into the run of events. Those who strike a seen-it-all-before posture usually turn out to be right. Now and then, however, things happen that really are of profound significance. This pre-emptive, internationally "unauthorized" attack on Saddam Hussein seems to me no less historic than the attacks of September 11, 2001. After all of the events of recent months, and those that are currently unfolding, the idea that it can ever again be business as usual for the U.N. strikes me as absurd. America was not wrong, as some in the administration believe, to go to the United Nations in the first place. True, it was a gamble, and the odds of success were never that high. The resulting delay has been costly, too, both militarily and diplomatically. Disagreements that might have been disguised or finessed have been exposed and underlined. For all that, the risk was worth taking. It would have been better for the world if the Security Council had strongly backed America's position. While there was a chance that this could happen, it was worth pursuing. Broader military support might have been slow to follow (or of little practical use once offered); again, even so, a solid consensus for action might have dislodged Saddam without a fight. That, too, was worth a try. Unfortunately, Resolution 1441 proved to be a phony consensus. The Security Council unanimously told Iraq to disarm immediately or face serious consequences—but most of the nations that voted to make that threat had no desire to see it carried out. Very soon, they were making that obvious. They voted for the resolution to delay war, not to make war a credible threat. The point was not lost on Saddam, who redoubled his efforts to divide the West, using the U.N. inspectors as the lever. And in this he succeeded, of course (though, in the end, much good it did him). The Cold War condemned the U.N. to irrelevance as an active security organization. Agreements to do things, as opposed to agreements to refrain from doing them, were virtually impossible to achieve given that rival superpowers sat across the table from each other. The aim was to manage tensions and avoid conflict. The collapse of the Soviet Union gave the organization a chance to grow into something more purposeful and ambitious-something more than a venue for strained discussion and an agency for humanitarian relief. And September 11 gave it a compelling purpose, one that almost all of the world's governments could subscribe to: defeating terrorism and the states that support it. The U.N.'s response to the Iraq crisis has shown that it is not remotely up to the job. The fact that countries disagreed over Iraq was bad; much worse were the display of bad faith over Resolution 1441 and the nature of the subsequent falling-out. These will indeed prove to have crippled the organization. It is patently clear that France, Russia, and other countries have aimed to use the U.N. not as a way to secure cooperation toward an objective shared by all the main powers, but as a way to constrain America. The truth is, they see America as more of a threat than Iraq; from time to time in recent weeks they have said as much. Substance and rhetoric alike have expressed the overriding goal that France, Russia, and others want the U.N. to be guided by: Contain the United States and hold it to account. It is not merely that France and the others are content to free-ride on American strength—that is, have the United States deal with threats such as Iraq, at no cost to themselves. They also require America to submit to their direction in deciding when it may spend its own blood and treasure in defending both itself and them. Even before September 11, that was an outlandish proposition. Now that America better understands the dangers it is facing, this intended arrangement, made quite explicit of late, is pure fantasy. But where does this leave the "legitimacy" of the operation against Iraq? In my view, it was a mistake all along to think of the U.N. or international law as conferring or denying legitimacy on an action of this kind. The world has no supranational authority capable of issuing (let alone enforcing) edicts that morally command obedience. The U.N. is a place where governments—including many corrupt and tyrannical governments—go to pursue their interests; it is not in its own right a constitutionally well-founded source of law or legitimacy. The war against Iraq may be right or wrong. But the U.N. has no special authority or insight qualifying it to decide that question. The U.N. can help or hinder; it can serve the greater good or undermine it. It has no competence to rule on what is right or wrong. If a second resolution had come to a vote, the outcome of that vote might well have depended on the position taken by the government of Guinea. According to what theory of government should Guinea's view decide the legitimacy of America's going to war with Iraq? The administration has gone to great lengths to secure U.N. backing for the use of force, and, for a time at least, American public opinion was apparently opposed to action without such backing. That says something about the desire for order in international relations, and for consensus among governments. Those things are indeed valuable, but they are not to be insisted on regardless of the cost. Most Americans seem to understand this. Few are going to lose sleep over whether pre-emptive self-defense is legitimate. This is much more of a problem for America's wobbling ally, Britain. Throughout, Tony Blair promised his country a second resolution that would explicitly authorize force. And he assured Parliament that he would take part in no action that violated international law. Out of fear of the humiliation that would follow backing down, I would guess, more than out of a conviction that the cause is just, he has broken the first promise and is bending the second into increasingly improbable shapes. His chief law officer—what a surprise—has ruled that Resolution 1441 legitimizes the use of force. Few other British lawyers appear to agree. Some trouble-making types are even talking about taking Blair to the International Criminal Cour t (which Britain, unlike America, has proudly ratified). Blair and his ministers are still justifying action as an effort to uphold the will of the U.N. Who else in the world believes that? To meet the challenges thrown up by rogue states and the new breed of suicidal international terrorists, pre-emptive action is going to be necessary. Confronting Iraq with force is likely, in my view, to make the world a safer place, but Iraq is unlikely to be the last of these fights. Next time, America will surely expend much less effort, if any, trying to build a coalition of the unwilling before it acts. It goes without saying that the world's new dangers would not necessarily justify every pre-emptive action the administration might care to undertake. The use of force can still be wise or unwise, morally sound or not. It always needs to be justified, and the justifications must be subjected to close and skeptical inquiry. But the mere fact that an action is pre-emptive cannot put it beyond the pale, regardless of what Cameroon or Guinea or the rest of the Security Council might think. As long as leading members of the United Nations see containing American power as the best way to promote global security, the organization stands condemned to irrelevance. In times as dangerous as these, the world cannot expect America to let its hands be tied. If the world had any sense, it would not want them to be.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. Clive Crook is a columnist for National Journal and the deputy editor of The Economist. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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