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The
UN must support the US now in Iraq
By
Jonathan
Power
September 18, 2003
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.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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"
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