Now that President Bush has called off diplomacy and given
Saddam Hussein and his family a final deadline to leave Iraq or
face war, the president has put the final nail in the coffin of the
United Nations as a world security force.
The United Nations faced a no-win situation in dealing with U.S.
demands: If it did not authorize the use of force to please the
United States and Britain, the two countries would attack
regardless. And if it did, the Security Council would become
nothing more than a “yes-man” for the dominant global
power.
Bush has now decided for them: the United Nations will drift
into international irrelevance.
The original concept behind the United Nations is simple: the
sum is greater than its parts. By forming a democratic coalition of
nations to maintain international order instead of relying on
nations to independently keep the peace, the United Nations’
goal was collective decision-making that would counteract any
rogue, imperialist superpowers.
Since its inception by the allied nations during the beginnings
of World War II, the United Nations has been more effective as a
worldwide peacemaker than any country, no matter how powerful,
could have been on its own. From 1945 until 1996, the United
Nations is credited with 172 peaceful settlements including the
Iran-Iraq War, El Salvador’s Civil War, and the removal of
Russian troops from Afghanistan. In 2001, the United Nations was
commended with the Nobel Peace Prize for its consistently laudable
peacekeeping efforts.
Peacekeeping is not the only thing the United Nations does,
though. The organization has subdivisions to monitor human rights,
international debt and refugees. Other U.N. contributions include
clearing activated land mines in countries ravaged by war,
providing health care to the populations of less developed nations,
and providing clean drinking water ““ over 1.3 billion people
benefited from U.N. water programs during the last decade alone.
Global problems of disease, famine or sanitation can be best dealt
with by the United Nations because it pools resources from various
countries together, rather than letting one country carry the whole
burden. It allows the world to decide together what the most
pressing international issues are, and forms task forces to deal
with them.
The problem is that countries have to treat the United Nations
with respect for it to be effective; and for countries to treat it
with respect, it must be effective enough to earn it. Again, it is
up to the United States to decide whether a world coalition will
remain viable.
Even if the United States and Britain considerably weaken U.N.
security by attacking Iraq, the world can at least be assured that
the United Nations’ humanitarian and relief projects will
remain largely unaffected ““ projects they may need if, say,
they’re ever faced with an antsy superpower’s
preemptive war.
We can only hope Hussein leaves Iraq and Bush lives up to his
word of not attacking the country if he indeed leaves. Let us hope
that when the war starts in the next couple of days, no one from,
or close to, our community dies or suffers.
While dismantling the government of Iraq and preparing to
establish a “democracy” there, Bush must also be
thinking of how ““ or whether ““ he will help rebuild the
trust in international cooperation and peace efforts that is now
dead.