Bloomfield Hills, Mich. — President George W. Bush and his most-hawkish advisers have been rightfully criticized for a heavy-handed approach toward traditional allies as they built the case for the military action that had to be taken to topple Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
The president could have exhibited greater skill in rounding up a much broader set of allies for the operation. A more careful approach to countries such as Russia, China and Germany might have led to a very different coalition from the one now fighting so valiantly in Iraq.
But the critics should also recognize that this war represents an even greater failure by the leaders of the United Nations, which again missed an opportunity to prove it can effectively resolve disputes among nations.
Both the Security Council and the General Assembly chose paralysis rather than accept the self-evident fact that U.N. resolutions are meaningless if the body is not willing to enforce them. By failing to act, the United Nations gave aid and comfort to Hussein, in effect forcing America and its allies to act.
One necessary outcome of the war in Iraq should be a sustained effort by the United Nations to emerge from its current ethical and practical bankruptcy as a leaner, more focused agency that stops pandering to the tin-pot tyrants who abuse its processes.
Nowhere has its loss of credibility been more apparent than in its dealings with Israel. Passage of the notorious “Zionism is racism” resolution in 1975 was the most blatant example of its moral blindness.
But more recent examples abound, including the failure to allow Israeli investigators to use a 2000 videotape of Hezbollah guerrillas kidnapping Israeli soldiers, and the 2001 Durban conference on racism that was allowed to degenerate into an orgy of anti-Semitism.
Never confronts Arabs
Its penchant for shooting itself in the foot was reinforced when the United States was shut out of the governing body for the U.N. human rights agency, which is now chaired by Syria, a tyrannical government that treats its own citizens with cavalier disregard for any of their rights.
In part, the U.N.’s problems can the traced to the post-World War II explosion of new nations as colonialism faded. Because each can claim a seat at the United Nations, the original one-country-one-vote structure of the General Assembly is no longer meaningful.
That is equally true with the Security Council where France, for example, should have long ago been stripped of its permanent-member veto power.
Another part of the problem has been the lack of leaders with strong moral commitment. Kofi Annan, like most of his predecessors, has seen the role of secretary general as primarily a super diplomat. He is so careful not to give offense to any nation that he cannot point a clear course.
Thus, when France and, to some extent, Germany take a hideously wrong turn, there is no one to spank them back into shape.
The United Nations still does fine work in many areas, dealing with humanitarian issues such as food and medicine and, somewhat less effectively, with helping nations learn how to deal with education and environmental degradation. But it has failed repeatedly to prevent violence against ethnic minorities, as in the Balkans or Rwanda.
United Nations failures in the Middle East that come to such violent fruition now in Iraq date as far back as its unwillingness to enforce its own 1947 decision to divide Palestine after the British resigned their mandate.
It never could find the will to confront the Arab nations, particularly Egypt, when they mustered their troops to try to conquer the Jewish state. The Arab states have continued to take advantage of that one-sidedness.
It is going to take a sustained multinational effort to rebuild Iraq as a modern Arab democracy after Saddam is gone. It is also going to take that kind of effort to restructure and rebuild the United Nations as a force that actually might preserve peace around the world.
Jonathan Friendly is national editor for Jewish Renaissance Media.
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