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The flaw in the UN Samuel Brittan: Financial Times 06/12/02 In a few weeks' time a decision will have to be made on whether Iraq has complied with UN resolutions on disclosing and eliminating weapons of mass destruction or whether an invasion should be mounted to force it to so. I have previously questioned whether Saddam Hussein was a sufficient threat to Western interests to justify a war against Iraq (October25). But that is not now the issue. On the pessimistic assumption that he is not seen to comply with the disarmament requirements there will be an attempt to push through another Security Council resolution permitting invasion, and in practice to enforce a regime change. A lot of arm-twisting and unedifying bargaining will go on to try to secure such a majority. But suppose that the US fails in this, either because it cannot secure a sufficient majority or because one or more of the Great Powers exerts a veto? Public opinion then is likely to divide two ways: support for US or Anglo-US unilateralism versus nothing without the UN. Both positions are deeply flawed and there really is here a third way. The critics of the Bush Administration are right to say that the US should not throw its weight around to dispose of any regime in the world to which it takes a dislike or regards as a threat. But that does not mean that any action needs to fulfil the technical requirements of a UN vote. I am not referring to the arcane legal dispute about whether the original UN resolution provides adequate cover for an invasion. The more important point is that the UN organisation is far from providing a satisfactory system of international law. There is a General Assembly which consists of nearly 200 countries, operating on the absurd system of one vote each for China and India which have around a billion people each, and one vote also for Andorra, Antigua, Dominica, Grenada, Liechtenstein, the Marshall Islands, Monaco, Palau, St Kitts, San Marino, Seychelles, and Vanuatu, all of which have under 100,000 inhabitants. An idea of its quality can be gained from the fact that Libya has been nominated to take over the chair of the UN Human Rights Commission. The 15-country Security Council, which does contain the Great Powers - except anachronistically those that were defeated in World War Two - does at least give more weight to the larger countries and is ultimately more democratic as well as a more realistic reflection of power patterns. But even that is hardly an international court of justice. It consists rather of a number of governments jockeying for position. They are moreover governments which often have interests at stake within an area of dispute. It is as if the US Supreme Court or the British High Court were selected not from highly qualified judges but from the heads of local government bodies. This scepticism about UN resolutions is not just a way of rationalising force. Looking at a post-mortem I wrote on the Anglo-French Suez expedition, from a position of extreme hostility to that venture, I wrote that Labour and Liberal spokesmen put too much weight on particular UN resolutions rather than the general moral and strategic case. I want to avoid misunderstanding. The UN is the only UN we have. If action is to be taken in Iraq it should certainly be put through the Security Council and it will be better if the Council approves. But in the last resort what matters are two features. First, action taken must accord with the general body of law, custom and approved behaviour which exists, in however tenuous a form, among countries even in the absence of a world government. Laws and resolutions are too rigid a terminology to describe the tentative gropings that the world has made towards an improved standard of international behaviour. The rules we should do well to observe are related to UN principles, more than to UN votes. They are in nature midway between legal and customary restraints. They are important insofar they provide an approximation to the rules of the game which government endeavour to observe, although often with much backsliding in their actual conduct. It is particularly difficult to apply this body of thinking now, as the evolved body of international doctrine does not cover the case of pre-emptive wars which can hardly be ruled out a priori in a terrorist-ridden world. This makes a second feature all the more important. That is to try for some kind of international consensus. This could not embrace the whole world any more than it did in the case of Kosovo or Bosnia. But it does have to be large enough to embrace countries outside the normal US ambit - in other words much more than Tony Blair's UK. In the case of former Yugoslavia Nato provided a degree of international sanction for intervention. General Wesley Clark, who commanded the Kosovo operation, believes that the irritation of trying to get 19 Nato members to agree to each new military strike in the Kosovo operation was well worthwhile, however irritating at the time. He stresses that every decision also generates pressure to agree. Greece, for example, never blocked a Nato action, although its people strongly opposed the war and the Greek government maintained a certain distance from operations. He believes that it is still not too late to enlist Nato in the fight against terrorism, to handle peacekeeping duties in Afghanistan, and to deepen its involvement in the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction...If there is to be a military operation against Iraq, then involving Nato more deeply would give European leaders a personal stake in the war. The legalistic course of going by the letter of the UN Charter and Security Council votes is not necessarily the more moral or humane one. The US has already soft-pedalled its concern for the war in Chechnya and the suppression of Tibet for the sake of the Soviet and Chinese votes, or to avoid their vetoes. Is that really more moral than trying to secure a coalition of the willing, provided that that coalition embraces a sufficient number of countries with otherwise differing creeds and interests and is not confined to the US and the UK. In any case making ones attitude to a war in Iraq or anyone else depend on the vagaries of the UN vote is a sheer cop-out. I might be tempted to call it democracy run mad, except that it isn't even democracy.
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