LONDON – If Europe and the rest of the world want to save the UN as an institution that counts and Iraq from the disintegration that confronts it they must let the U.S. back into the UN – and into the driver’s seat. As Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN’s most revered ex secretary general, once said, the UN was created not to get us to heaven but to save us from hell.
It is tempting – and I have been very tempted – to let the U.S. and Britain stew in their own mess in Iraq. They created this pickle and for a few months it has seemed right to let them soak in it, so that next time they might more openly listen to those many critics who warned them that war would probably end up, as it has, creating a worse situation that the one that existed before.
But the price of letting the mess run its course, as is now becoming apparent, is to see the likelihood of al Qaeda extending its reach into a nose to nose confrontation with America, and the intensity of animosity from the Islamic world, already at a high pitch, becoming even more hate filled and irrational, beyond the ability of leaders, whether elected or imposed, to contain. President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair have made Iraq the biggest threat to world peace since the Cuban missile crisis.
This is the crime that Bush and Blair must be made to pay for, the former in a general election, the latter more likely by a revolt in his party. But meanwhile the rest of us have the responsibility to support the recent change heart in Washington that suggests that the U.S. is now ready to internationalize under the authority of the Security Council the responsibility for pacifying and rebuilding Iraq.
The UN as an institution has come out of the Iraq war with its head held high. It didn’t compromise its principles based on its Charter as it did at the time of the misguided Kosovo adventure. Moreover, even in its darkest moments, it kept its popular support- all along the American and British people told pollsters they would have preferred UN backing for their governments’ decision to go to war with Iraq if it could be obtained, which set them apart from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and probably Bush himself, who seemed to be seized with an instinctive abhorrence of the UN.
The Iraq debate at the UN, which Secretary of State Colin Powell convinced Bush was necessary even though it appears the decision to go to war had been taken some months before, made other nations, particularly those who held rotating seats on the Security Council, realize how important the UN was to them. It made Mexico and Canada, the U.S.’s near neighbors and most important trading partners, conclude that there are some overriding matters that simply push aside economic self-interest. It made the Africans,who held 20% of the votes on the Security Council and who desperately need more American aid and trade benefits, decide that on some critical issues principles and judgment had to come first.
In fact the continued and feverish debate at the UN managed to delay war by many months. It also gave time for anybody who could read a newspaper, even the more conservative ones, to become aware that Washington and London had only a paucity of evidence to prove that Iraq was the threat they said it was and that the then supposed connections with Al Qaeda were tenuous at best. (Nothing that has come out since has added much to what was pretty well known before.) It didn’t stop the war but it educated masses of people- many of whom turned out on the streets of America, if not as in as many numbers as in the rest of the world- that war is rarely a solution to intractable political problems and we should learn to be smart enough to find cleverer, alternative ways of dealing with what appear to be insuperable difficulties.
Despite the war with Iraq, the world as an entity is making progress – towards the emergence of what Kant called “a state of peace”- an international system of states reciprocally bound by law and an international society in which all men and women would be free citizens. The number of wars, including ethnic conflicts, has gone down sharply the last decade since the Cold War ended. Freedom from war is not an illusion. The life of civilization and mankind is not predetermined by unshakeable physical causations, much less theories of realpolitik. We can intervene and shape its direction. We need reason, faith, generosity and imaginative experiment in the reach of international law. And then we can take even further steps forward. Perhaps one day the divisions that overtook the debate at the UN on going to war with Iraq will come to be seen like a bad dream. We will have woken to the fact- and America and Britain too- that we all need the UN to have a future that works. And right now we all need to put our shoulder behind it and send it into Iraq in force- for the good of Iraq and for the good of the world.
Copyright © 2003 By JONATHAN POWER Follow this link to read about – and order – Jonathan Power’s book written for the 40th Anniversary of Amnesty International
“Like Water on Stone – The Story of Amnesty International”
