Mona Charen (archive)
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September 20, 2002
The moral authority of the U.N.
The United Nations is one of those institutions, like the Women's National
Basketball Association, that sails above its failures because it just seems to
so many people like a good idea.
Despite its corruption, bias, indolence and waste, the U.N. retains so much
moral authority that former President Bush felt he had to appeal to the U.N. in
order to get Democrats to authorize the Gulf War in 1991. And today, George W.
Bush had to punch his ticket in Manhattan before being able to count on support
from a number of U.S. allies abroad, as well as the same Democrats in the U.S.
Congress his father had to worry about. (It's worth pausing to note that the
current President Bush struck just the right note at the U.N., challenging the
institution to enforce its own resolutions.)
The United Nations, like the League of Nations before it that crumbled at the
first challenge from armed thugs, is an exercise in utopianism. It embodies the
hope that the nations of the world can cooperate to eliminate scourges like
dysentery and river blindness, and settle their differences over polished
conference tables rather than with machetes and M-16s. The U.N. can boast some
modest success in battling disease and poverty, but its record on peace and
reconciliation is abysmal.
Though blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeeping forces have been deployed around the
globe, they have proved highly vulnerable to political manipulation -- in other
words, they've been useless. In 1967, U.N. forces were summarily ejected from
the Sinai desert -- where they were theoretically keeping the peace between
Egypt and Israel -- when President Nasser waved them off with a flick of his
wrist. In 1991, when the Croats counterattacked against the Serbs, the blue
helmets were left standing impotently in the dust as tanks and APCs rolled
through.
The fantasies of the U.N.'s founders were limitless. Roosevelt's secretary of
state, Cordell Hull, imagined that the U.N. would rid the world of "spheres of
influence, alliances, balance of power, or any of the other special arrangements
through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their
security or to promote their interests."
It isn't the fault of the U.N. per se that the unrealistic hopes pinned on it
have been punctured. The U.N. reflects its membership. Before the end of the
Cold War, the great blocs that held sway there consisted of communists and a
variety of other criminals, potentates and presidents for life. In those days,
the Commission on Human Rights was always looking into the situation in Puerto
Rico and Tel Aviv, but never in Havana or Moscow.
Even today, when more of the world's nations are free and democratic than
ever before in history, China still holds a seat on the Security Council and the
Arab nations still comprise the largest bloc vote. Israel has been condemned
countless times (though Israel is not, as callers to talk radio and C-SPAN
constantly assert, in violation of resolutions 242 and 338), but the Security
Council has never once condemned Arab terrorists, far less the Chinese
occupation of Tibet, the massacre in Rwanda, the Indonesian occupation of East
Timor, Russian conduct in Chechnya or Serbian acts in Bosnia.
And yet, most Americans and an overwhelming majority of Europeans believe
that the moral imprimatur of the United Nations is necessary before any military
action can be contemplated. When people tell pollsters what high regard they
have for the U.N., they are forgetting about the "Zionism is racism" resolution;
the orgy of America and Israel-bashing at the Durban conference on racism; the
instant pronouncements by U.N. personnel that Israel had committed an "atrocity"
in Jenin (only to be contradicted by the facts later); and so on. They are
engaged in the same sort of utopianism that motivated the U.N.'s founders.
But the world does not and probably never will run on cooperation, peaceful
dispute resolution and friendship. Peace is maintained today as it always was,
by armed force and balance of power. We are fortunate to live in a time -- most
unusual in human history -- when the good guys also have the biggest guns. That
is the source of our security and the world's hope, not the fond figment on the
East River.
"What happens in the Security Council more closely resembles a mugging than
either a political debate or an effort at problem-solving." -- Jeanne
Kirkpatrick
Contact Mona Charen | Read her biography
©2002 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
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