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Well-timed follow-up
to the thread on missed educational goals and questions posed by REH earlier
this week. Karen Watters Cole Excerpts: Who Needs the U.N.
Security Council? By James Traub in the NYT weekend
magazine, 11.17.02 The Mission of France to the United Nations is located on
the 44th floor of a high-rise building on East 47th Street, just a few blocks
from the U.N. itself. When I went
to visit Jean-David Levitte, France's ambassador to the U.N., in the midst of
the tortured and enormously protracted negotiations over a resolution requiring
Iraq to accept a team of U.N. weapons inspectors and disarm, Levitte drew me to
the south-facing plate-glass window of his office and delivered an
ever-so-slightly defensive speech on Franco-American amity. ''I watched the World Trade Center
buildings come down from here,'' he said. ''At that time, France was president of the Security Council,
and the very next day, Sept. 12, we introduced Resolution 1368, which, for the
first time in U.N. history, described a terrorist attack as a threat to
international peace and security'' -- and thus gave the United States an
unequivocal right to retaliate against Al Qaeda and against the Taliban regime
in Afghanistan. The campaign against Al Qaeda represented one of those rare
moments when the Security Council swings quickly behind American aims. The U.N. itself felt implicated in the
terrorist attack: its headquarters was evacuated both that day and the next,
and there was brief talk of holding a Security Council meeting in a local
coffee shop. But the moment of
solidarity couldn't last. For the
Security Council, Afghanistan was a momentary departure from a tradition of
conflict resolution; for the Bush Administration, it was the first battle in a
global war. It is not only the United States but also the United Nations that has
become a different place after 9/11. Only yesterday, it seems, the great issue was getting an
increasingly disengaged United States to pay its back dues and pay attention;
now the problem is keeping an aroused America from sallying off on what
virtually every other member of the Security Council considers a reckless
crusade. The Security
Council needs the United States in order for it to play a meaningful role in
world affairs, but it appears as though the United States doesn't need the
Security Council -- or at least that many of the leading members of the Bush
administration think that it doesn't. Secretary of State George Marshall had predicted in 1948 that
should there be ''a complete lack of power equilibrium in the world, the United
Nations cannot function successfully.'' And now, for the first time since the U.N.'s establishment, that
state of affairs has come to pass. … The central question
posed by the debate over Iraq remains: Is the blessing of the international community so
valuable a good that even this administration, at this moment of American
power, is prepared to sacrifice something of its freedom of action in order to
secure it? And if it is not, what,
exactly, is the Security Council for? …But something else was happening at the
same time. The process of
''decolonization'' was unfolding much faster than anyone had expected, and new
nations were pouring into the United Nations. Chapter VII was already a memory by the time most of these
third-world nations joined, and in any case, the new members were more
concerned with economic development than with peacekeeping. Starting in the 1950's, the U.N. began
to spawn a whole range of agencies largely directed at the needs of the new
members -- bodies dealing with health, food, education, relief, refugees and so
on. And the culture of the
institution drifted further and further from the muscular principles of Chapter
VII. This is the domain most of us
associate with the U.N. -- high-minded confabulations on intractable global
problems, solar-powered cookers, declarations on the rights of historically
oppressed communities, etc. This
sense of an organization preoccupied with terribly important things it can't
actually do very much about has not done much for the U.N.'s reputation, at
least in the United States. But the U.N. does not, of course, belong to the United
States. David Malone, a former
Canadian diplomat who runs the International Peace Academy, a research group
far more hardheaded than its fuzzy-sounding name implies, notes: ''The U.N. in
its own mind is largely about a positive agenda that the agencies deliver. Many members aren't comfortable with
anything beyond the positive agenda. They view the fight against bad guys and evil as incompatible
with the ethos of the organization and being conducted at the behest of a few
big powers they don't trust.'' By
the end of the cold war, 90 percent of the U.N.'s resources were being devoted
to the agencies; peacekeeping had become a vestigial activity, carried out
largely in quiet places like Cyprus.
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