United they fall

Saturday, 22nd March 2003

Richard Perle bids farewell to the United Nations and its history of anarchy and abject failure

In the heady aftermath of the Allied victory in the second world war, the hope that security could be made collective was reposed in the United Nations Security Council - with abject results. During the Cold War the Security Council was hopelessly paralysed. The Soviet empire was wrestled to the ground, and Eastern Europe liberated, not by the United Nations but by the mother of all coalitions, Nato. Apart from minor skirmishes and sporadic peace-keeping missions, the only case of the Security Council acting in a serious matter affecting world order during the Cold War was its use of force to halt the North's invasion of South Korea - and that was only possible because the Soviets had boycotted the Security Council and were not in the chamber to cast their veto. It was a mistake they did not make again. With war looming, the UN withdrew from the Middle East, leaving Israel to defend itself in 1967 and again in 1973.

Facing Milosevic's multiple aggressions, the UN could not stop the Balkan wars or even protect its victims. Remember Sarajevo? Remember Srebrenica? It took a coalition of the willing to save Bosnia from extinction. And when the war was over, peace was made in Dayton, Ohio, not in the United Nations. The rescue of Muslims in Kosovo was not a UN action: their cause never gained Security Council approval. The United Kingdom, not the United Nations, saved the Falklands.

This new century now challenges the hopes for a new world order in new ways. We will not defeat or even contain fanatical terror unless we can carry the war to the territories from which it is launched. This will sometimes require that we use force against states that harbour terrorists, as we did in destroying the Taleban regime in Afghanistan.

The most dangerous of these states are those that also possess weapons of mass destruction, the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that can kill not hundreds or thousands but hundreds of thousands. Iraq is one such state, but there are others. Whatever hope there is that they can be persuaded to withdraw support or sanctuary from terrorists rests on the certainty and effectiveness with which they are confronted. The chronic failure of the Security Council to enforce its own resolutions - 17 of them with respect to Iraq, the most recent, 1441, a resolution of last resort - is unmistakable: it is simply not up to the task.

We are left with coalitions of the willing. Far from disparaging them as a threat to a new world order, we should recognise that they are, by default, the best hope for that order, and the true alternative to the anarchy of the abject failure of the United Nations.

Richard Perle is chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to the Pentagon.