March 21, 2003
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Au Revoir, Security Council
The United Nations has failed to live up to its responsibilities in disarming Iraq, but at least the process has been educational. Americans have learned anew that they can never trust their security to that dysfunctional body. So now is an appropriate time to rethink the U.S. role.
This is not, to be sure, how the U.N.'s friends and family see it. Having failed to block the U.S. from deposing Saddam Hussein, Kofi Annan now says "the effort to relieve the suffering of the Iraqi people may yet prove to be the task around which the unity of this Council can be rebuilt." Already the French and their American allies are saying that once the war is over the U.S. is obligated to return to the Security Council to rebuild Iraq, not to mention rebuild the U.N.'s own legitimacy.
But why? The U.N. does a few things well enough sometimes -- refugee relief, disease tracking, a forum for talk. These columns have often said that if the U.N. ever lived up to its principles it could be a valuable institution. It would be even better if the U.N. decided to become a League of Democratic Nations, throwing out the dictators who gain legitimacy from membership.
Yet even that wouldn't fix the fact that, on its grand mission of "collective security," the Iraq fiasco is the U.N. rule and not the exception. The list of its failures includes most of the great human tragedies of our times -- Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. Today the U.N. is also failing to address North Korea's brazen rejection of its nuclear commitments. In a post-September 11 world of terror and nuclear weapons, the U.N.'s dereliction is dangerous.
The dysfunction starts with the Security Council and the veto. The process gives outsized influence to a country like France, which hasn't been a great power for 60 years and has as its main modern goal containing American power. One solution would be to replace France on the Security Council with a more deserving nation such as Japan or India, but that's nearly impossible under the U.N. charter.
A cleaner option would be for the U.S. simply to drop out of the Security Council, while retaining its seat in the General Assembly and a couple of other U.N. affiliates. This would strip the Council of the pretense of legality and seriousness and remove it as an obstacle to genuine collective security.
Far from being runaway "unilateralism," this would finally give multilateralism a chance to work. As Vice President Cheney outlined on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday, we're moving to a world of shifting coalitions. The strategies and institutions that kept the peace during the Cold War against a single great power threat are unsuited to this century's threats from terror and proliferating weapons.
In Iraq, this "coalition of the willing" means Britain, Spain, Australia and 40-plus other nations, which constitute one-quarter of the U.N.'s membership. In Korea, such a coalition could end up including the U.S., Japan, South Korea, China and Russia. And of course in Europe there's NATO, which found a way to work around France's veto to send missile defenses to the Turks.
Notwithstanding Mr. Cheney's remarks, the pressure on President Bush to revive the U.N. after the Iraq war will no doubt be intense. Tim Wirth, a Clinton-era official, has already sent out an APB to editorial writers urging all to write about "the value and importance of the United Nations." (Consider this our contribution, Mr. Wirth.)
But Mr. Bush would do better listening to others who've learned something watching the Iraq flop. Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh told Fox News this week that, "In terms of the United Nations being a legitimate vehicle for restraining tyrants with weapons of mass destruction, for restraining aggressors, I think they have done themselves grievous damage."
A new U.N. without a Security Council might even be better for the U.N. itself. It could focus on the things it does well and not embarrass itself by failing again and again on its grander ambitions. It would certainly be better for the freedom and safety of Americans.
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