Perle Declares U.N. 'Dead'
As Saddam Hussein's reign of terror comes to an end, he will take the U.N. down with him, predicts Richard Perle.
Writing in Friday's edition of Britain's Guardian, Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to the Pentagon, said that the "good works" part of the international forum 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 U.N. as the foundation of a new world order."
Noting that time and again the U.N. has failed in its responsibilities, Perle ticked off examples of its ineffectiveness:
"During the cold war the security council was hopelessly paralyzed. 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.
"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."
Perle's conclusion: "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 recognize 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." |
