When future generations write the definitive history of the 12 year standoff with Iraq, it may well be that a few weeks of United Nations dithering at the very end will occupy a minor part of the narrative. Of much more consequence are the conclusions being drawn at the present moment about the effectiveness of the United Nations as an organization in managing international conflict.
Some parts of the United Nations clearly have a worse track record than others. The General Assembly, in which the vote of Andorra cancels out that of India, has been worthless from the beginning. The authors of the U.N. Charter saw that its ultra-democratic character would be a weakness and decided to limit its power to passing non-binding resolutions. That makes it akin to a police officer who only hands out "payment optional" traffic tickets.
The two sources of power wielded by any political authority are the purse and the sword. The U.N.'s purse is not big enough to be of interest to anyone. Its only recourse when confronting wayward members is through threats, which is the realm of the Security Council. In theory, every country has pledged to abide by the Charter and thus follow the Council's resolutions to the letter. In practice, as the example of Iraq shows all too well, its binding decisions are frequently ignored.
After the invasion of Kuwait, the council's first resolution made a simple and straightforward demand - Iraq's army had to withdraw. It was not a request or a suggestion; Saddam Hussein's government was legally obligated to comply. What happened, of course, repeated a pattern that was seen previously in Korea, the Falklands and many other wars that the United Nations tried in vain to prevent. Quite simply, collective security failed because there are countries who consciously choose not to abide by their treaty obligations.
In a total of two cases - Korea in 1950 and Iraq in 1990 - the council made bold decisions to authorize multilateral use of force to stop an aggressor. The problem is that these represented the most flagrant, obvious breaches of the peace imaginable. Thankfully, full-fledged wars of aggression just don't happen that much anymore. Condemning them and even stopping them is the easy part. A harder task is recognizing when to use force in more ambiguous circumstances. Surely, the collective security system was not intended to be used twice in a half-century.
As cruise missiles were on their way to Baghdad and Hans Blix was presenting his ill-timed final report, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of Germany accidentally revealed what many had long suspected. "The Security Council," he asserted, "is not responsible for what is happening outside the United Nations." That seems to limit its sphere of influence to a few blocks in midtown Manhattan and perhaps Geneva on a good day. Fischer was trying to say that the war in Iraq was not authorized by the council, but it is yet another example of how the United Nations all too often abdicates responsibility. If it acted vigorously to restore inspections and pressure Iraq to comply fully - not in 2003, but at least five years earlier - there would be no war now.
In fact, it doesn't make much sense to speak of the council as a single entity in practical terms. Like any multilateral body, it is the sum of its parts - no less and certainly no more. When we say that it failed to finish the job started in 1991 and kept on deferring the inevitable showdown, what we mean is that most of the countries who make up its membership did not live up to their obligations.
Peacekeeping is also an area in which the United Nations has good intentions but fails to follow through on many occasions. Sending a squad of lightly-armed peacekeepers to a war zone is the easy way out when deployment of a more muscular force is blocked by political infighting. But it can only exacerbate the situation. In 1995, a battalion of inexperienced Dutch soldiers guarding the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica was threatened by Serbian troops. There was no air support. There were no reinforcements. With barely a gunshot fired, the peacekeepers left. They are not to blame, since they could not realistically defend the enclave. The Security Council's response? Yet another resolution. The result was Europe's worst massacre since 1945.
It is true that Bosnia was not a typical situation, and there are genuine peacekeeping success stories, such as Cyprus and East Timor. But the United Nations has shied away from sending strong, well-armed, multinational forces to create peace where it does not exist. Instead, this responsibility is assumed by NATO or individual countries. France, incidentally, is now doing a great deal for stability in Africa by enforcing a cease-fire in the Ivory Coast.
The Security Council veto is a significant cause of the United Nations' ineffectiveness. It is wrong to single out individual countries for exercising the veto at ostensibly bad times. President George W. Bush and Tony Blair denounced Jacques Chirac for "unreasonably " vowing to veto the use-of-force resolution on Iraq, apparently forgetting that their countries have historically used the veto far more than France - 76 and 32 times, respectively, versus France's 18. About 10 percent of all proposed resolutions have been blocked, and I'm sure that in every case someone felt that the veto was "unreasonable."
As the only truly global political forum, the United Nations remains important even when conventional wisdom calls its influence into question. Nonetheless, it suffers from serious structural problems, which can be fixed through initiative and compromises by the organization's dominant members, particularly America. One can guess, however, what will happen if proposed reforms seriously challenge the status quo and threaten the interests of one or more permanent members. Let's just say that the veto won't go away anytime soon. And when great powers want to fight wars on their own, they still will.
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