LONDON – It was Dag Hammarskjold, the greatest of UN secretary-generals, practitioner and contemplator in one, who observed that the UN was not established to take humanity to heaven but to save it from hell. He would have been in his intellectual element wrestling with the present situation. Is it better if the US does go to war against Iraq that the UN approves it? It didn’t do the UN any good to be left on the shelf when the US and its main European allies bypassed it and decided to bomb Belgrade without a Security Council mandate. Or is it better that the U.S. goes ahead without the approval of the UN? If things go wrong with the war which well they might- Mahathir Mohamad, the prime minister of Malaysia told the Financial Times on Tuesday that he despairs at a “racist” war that could spark communal violence across the globe- then the UN will at least be in a position to use its diplomatic influence, its aid machinery and even its peacekeeping forces to help quell these eruptions.

It was one of Hammarskjold’s appointees, the Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien, who summed up the dilemma that confronts the UN on these life and death occasions, “The feeling that the thing feared may be averted, and the thing hoped for won, by the solemn and collective use of words. This prayer still converges on the UN -as on a holy place- at times when, as in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, in the Middle Eastern crisis of the summer of 1967, the scourge of war seems once more about to descend. It is the prayer that makes the drama sacred.”

Although not much remarked upon these days we went through a similar crisis in March 1998. There was plenty of talk of going to war and Secretary General Kofi Annan rode off to Baghdad, to talk and talk and to pull Saddam Hussein’s sting. On his return he was treated like a hero and his friends likened him to Hammarskjold. Well, he brought four and a half year’s of peace, which is not bad. But what is worrying is that a re-read of the debates of the time show that nothing has changed in substance. It was exactly the same fear of weapons of mass destruction that drove the U.S. to the brink of war and it was the promises to Annan by Saddam to allow more intrusive inspections that drove it back. But the inference then was that if Saddam didn’t deliver on his part of the bargain that Annan would use his influence to persuade the Security Council that it would have to vote to support armed action. Professor Martin van Creveld of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem made perhaps the profoundest comment on the crisis: “Clinton’s wrangling with the UN Security Council and its emissary, Secretary General Kofi Annan, brings to mind the way in which medieval rulers once required the Pope’s consent before going to war. Now even the world’s sole remaining superpower finds it extraordinarily difficult to go to war without obtaining the sanction of international law. Thus the recent crisis may be remembered more as a stepping stone towards delegitimizing war between nations.”

Remembering this, the French and the Saudis- with the connivance of Secretary of State Colin Powell who seems to have trumped Vice President Dick Cheney on the going-to-the-UN issue- are perhaps walking the U.S. into a trap. By acknowledging that they may change their own position on the need for a war, but only as long as the Security Council approves one, are they  leading the Americans into what O’Brien called “the solemn and collective use of appropriate words” as a substitute for war?

Probably not, because this time the U.S. appears determined to go to war to depose Saddam, irrespective of whether Iraq does allow in unfettered inspection and whether it wins UN approval or not. Nevertheless, Washington has consciously chosen to make things more difficult for itself, which is a brave or foolish position, depending upon the vantage point. On the other hand, given Cheney’s predilection for war, it is doubtful if President George Bush would have sanctioned this course if Powell hadn’t been able to assure him that he would go along with the larger American game plan if the UN gambit- and it was never meant to be more than that- failed.

Perspective on Saddam has evaporated before the determination of the one and only superpower. One can say that the invasion of Kuwait a decade ago was not the Anschluss. An invasion of the Saudi oil fields would not be the Sudetenland. The Republican Guard is not the 5th Panzer division. The weapons of mass destruction that Iraq possesses are primitive and are to be used only if Saddam fears that he is going to be toppled by an invading force. But all these arguments now seem to be blowing away in the wind. The U.S. has decided to go to war. The time for “the solemn and collective use of appropriate words” is probably almost over.

I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com

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