James Traub, Who Needs the U.N. Security Council? nytimes.com
[ Another one I'd be tempted to post elsewhere, but I see from a quick peek that the Godwin's Law demonstrators are out in force as usual . Goodbye to all that. ]
The Security Council need not be wholly reduced to its legitimacy-granting function. The U.N. and its various agencies have built up enormous expertise in the thankless task of nation building; one U.N. official says that the Bush administration even approached the organization to take over the civil administration of Afghanistan after the Taliban had been dislodged, a role that it has played in East Timor and elsewhere. (The U.N. had the good sense to decline.) The American resolve to engage in strategic nation wrecking may increasingly force the Security Council, which will be asked to authorize these missions, into the role of picking up the pieces.
But in a world defined by the fight against terrorism, which is to say a world shaped by a single power overwhelmingly preoccupied with the fight against terrorism, the Security Council's central role will be to shape the terms and establish the conditions under which that fight becomes broadly acceptable. Its job is both to restrain and to license the superpower.
Conservative critics of the U.N., some of whom now occupy important posts in the Bush administration, have long argued that the Security Council is useful only when it accepts American leadership and embraces American interests -- which, they would add, is virtually never. And yet what has become obvious in recent weeks is that with only the most modest gestures toward multilateralism on the part of the U.S., the Security Council is prepared to offer that embrace. And the Bush administration is likely to hug back when it suits its needs. It's a relationship of convenience. But it's a relationship.
One Security Council diplomat who finds this prospect both professionally pleasing and deeply gratifying to his sense of irony points out that the final draft of the Iraq resolution essentially gives Hans Blix, the head of the U.N. inspection team, the power to decide whether or not the Iraqis are in compliance (though Blix has told the Council he doesn't want to bear that burden). Blix, he points out, ''is a nice, soft-spoken, grandfatherly Swede, not an American, not a warmonger'' -- the perfect legitimator of the American war effort. ''If the war comes,'' he adds, ''I see Bush making an 8 o'clock speech to the nation, with Hans Blix mentioned at least 10 times.'' |
