United Nations Must be Respected to Ensure Peace

(U-WIRE) LOS ANGELES – Now that President Bush has called off diplomacy and given Saddam Hussein and his family a final deadline to leave Iraq or face war, the president has put the final nail in the coffin of the United Nations as a world security force.
The United Nations faced a no-win situation in dealing with U.S. demands: If it did not authorize the use of force to please the United States and Britain, the two countries would attack regardless. And if it did, the Security Council would become nothing more than a “yes-man” for the dominant global power.
Bush has now decided for them: the United Nations will drift into international irrelevance.
The original concept behind the United Nations is simple: the sum is greater than its parts. By forming a democratic coalition of nations to maintain international order instead of relying on nations to independently keep the peace, the United Nations’ goal was collective decision-making that would counteract any rogue, imperialist superpowers.
Since its inception by the allied nations during the beginnings of World War II, the United Nations has been more effective as a worldwide peacemaker than any country, no matter how powerful, could have been on its own. From 1945 until 1996, the United Nations is credited with 172 peaceful settlements including the Iran-Iraq War, El Salvador’s Civil War, and the removal of Russian troops from Afghanistan. In 2001, the United Nations was commended with the Nobel Peace Prize for its consistently laudable peacekeeping efforts.
The problem is that countries have to treat the United Nations with respect for it to be effective; and for countries to treat it with respect, it must be effective enough to earn it. Again, it is up to the United States to decide whether a world coalition will remain viable.
Even if the United States and Britain considerably weaken U.N. security by attacking Iraq, the world can at least be assured that the United Nations’ humanitarian and relief projects will remain largely unaffected – projects they may need if, say, they’re ever faced with an antsy superpower’s preemptive war.
We can only hope Hussein leaves Iraq and Bush lives up to his word of not attacking the country if he indeed leaves. Let us hope that when the war starts in the next couple of days, no one from, or close to, our community dies or suffers.
While dismantling the government of Iraq and preparing to establish a “democracy” there, Bush must also be thinking of how – or whether – he will help rebuild the trust in international cooperation and peace efforts that is now dead.