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Excerpt: The chronic failure of the security council <br> to enforce its own resolutions is unmistakable: it is<br> simply not up to the task. We are left with coalitions<br> of the willing. Far from disparaging them as a threat <br> to a new world order, we should recognise that they<br> are, by default, the best hope for that order, and the<br> true alternative to the anarchy of the abject failure<br> of the UN.<br><br><br> Thank God for the death of the UN<br><br>Its abject failure gave us only anarchy. The world needs order<br><br> By Richard Perle<br><br><br>Thursday March 20 2003<br>The Guardian<br><br><br>Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is about to end. He<br>will go quickly, but not alone: in a parting irony, he<br>will take the UN down with him. Well, not the whole UN.<br>The "good works" part will survive, the low-risk<br>peacekeeping bureaucracies will remain, the chatterbox<br>on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die is<br>the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world<br>order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to<br>preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual<br>wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through<br>international law administered by international<br>institutions.<br><br>As free Iraqis document the quarter-century nightmare of<br>Saddam's rule, let us not forget who held that the moral<br>authority of the international community was enshrined<br>in a plea for more time for inspectors, and who marched<br>against "regime change". In the spirit of postwar<br>reconciliation that diplomats are always eager to<br>engender, we must not reconcile the timid, blighted<br>notion that world order requires us to recoil before<br>rogue states that terrorise their own citizens and<br>menace ours.<br><br>A few days ago, Shirley Williams argued on television<br>against a coalition of the willing using force to<br>liberate Iraq. Decent, thoughtful and high-minded, she<br>must surely have been moved into opposition by an<br>argument so convincing that it overpowered the obvious<br>moral case for removing Saddam's regime. For Lady<br>Williams (and many others), the thumb on the scale of<br>judgment about this war is the idea that only the UN<br>security council can legitimise the use of force. It<br>matters not if troops are used only to enforce the UN's<br>own demands. A willing coalition of liberal democracies<br>isn't good enough. If any institution or coalition other<br>than the UN security council uses force, even as a last<br>resort, "anarchy", rather than international law, would<br>prevail, destroying any hope for world order.<br><br>This is a dangerously wrong idea that leads inexorably<br>to handing great moral and even existential<br>politico-military decisions, to the likes of Syria,<br>Cameroon, Angola, Russia, China and France. When<br>challenged with the argument that if a policy is right<br>with the approbation of the security council, how can it<br>be wrong just because communist China or Russia or<br>France or a gaggle of minor dictatorships withhold their<br>assent, she fell back on the primacy of "order" versus<br>"anarchy".<br><br>But is the security council capable of ensuring order<br>and saving us from anarchy? History suggests not. The UN<br>arose from the ashes of a war that the League of Nations<br>was unable to avert. It was simply not up to confronting<br>Italy in Abyssinia, much less - had it survived that<br>debacle - to taking on Nazi Germany.<br><br>In the heady aftermath of the allied victory, the hope<br>that security could be made collective was embodied in<br>the UN security council - with abject results. During<br>the cold war the security council was hopelessly<br>paralysed. The Soviet empire was wrestled to the ground,<br>and eastern Europe liberated, not by the UN, but by the<br>mother of all coalitions, Nato. Apart from minor<br>skirmishes and sporadic peacekeeping missions, the only<br>case of the security council acting during the cold war<br>was its use of force to halt the invasion of South Korea<br>- and that was only possible because the Soviets were<br>not in the chamber to veto it. It was a mistake they did<br>not make again.<br><br>Facing Milosevic's multiple aggressions, the UN could<br>not stop the Balkan wars or even protect its victims. It<br>took a coalition of the willing to save Bosnia from<br>extinction. And when the war was over, peace was made in<br>Dayton, Ohio, not in the UN. The rescue of Muslims in<br>Kosovo was not a UN action: their cause never gained<br>security council approval. The United Kingdom, not the<br>United Nations, saved the Falklands.<br><br>This new century now challenges the hopes for a new<br>world order in new ways. We will not defeat or even<br>contain fanatical terror unless we can carry the war to<br>the territories from which it is launched. This will<br>sometimes require that we use force against states that<br>harbour terrorists, as we did in destroying the Taliban<br>regime in Afghanistan.<br><br>The most dangerous of these states are those that also<br>possess weapons of mass destruction. Iraq is one, but<br>there are others. Whatever hope there is that they can<br>be persuaded to withdraw support or sanctuary from<br>terrorists rests on the certainty and effectiveness with<br>which they are confronted. The chronic failure of the<br>security council to enforce its own resolutions is<br>unmistakable: it is simply not up to the task. We are<br>left with coalitions of the willing. Far from<br>disparaging them as a threat to a new world order, we<br>should recognise that they are, by default, the best<br>hope for that order, and the true alternative to the<br>anarchy of the abject failure of the UN.<br><br>Richard Perle is chairman of the defence policy board,<br>an advisory panel to the Pentagon.<br><br>This is an edited version of an article that first<br>appeared in this week's Spectator.<br> <b on></b>
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