- 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 UN
down with him. Well, not the whole UN. The "good works" part
will survive, the low-risk peacekeeping bureaucracies will remain, the
chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy
of the UN as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris,
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.
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- As free Iraqis document the quarter-century nightmare
of Saddam's rule, let us not forget 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.
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- 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, 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. For Lady 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.
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- This is a dangerously wrong 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".
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- But is the security council 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. It was simply
not up to confronting Italy in Abyssinia, much less - had it survived that
debacle - to taking on Nazi Germany.
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- In the heady aftermath of the allied victory, the hope
that security could be made collective was embodied in the UN 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 UN, but by the mother of all coalitions,
Nato. Apart from minor skirmishes and sporadic peacekeeping missions, the
only case of the security council acting during the cold war was its use
of force to halt the invasion of South Korea - and that was only possible
because the Soviets were not in the chamber to veto it. It was a mistake
they did not make again.
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- Facing Milosevic's multiple aggressions, the UN could
not stop the Balkan wars or even protect its victims. 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 UN. 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.
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- 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 Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
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- The most dangerous of these states are those that also
possess weapons of mass destruction. Iraq is one, 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 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 UN.
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- Richard Perle is chairman of the defence policy board,
an advisory panel to the Pentagon.
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
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