It was a mistake the Soviets would not make again. In both 1967 and 1973, with war looming, the UN withdrew from the Middle East, leaving Israel to defend itself. The Soviet empire was wrestled to the ground, and Eastern Europe liberated, not by the UN but by the mother of all coalitions, NATO.
Facing Milosevic's multiple aggressions, the UN could not stop the Balkan wars or even protect its victims. Remember Sarajevo? Remember Srebrenica and the slaughter of thousands of Muslims under the supposed protection of the UN? It took a coalition of the willing to save Bosnia from extinction. When the war was over, peace was made in Dayton, Ohio, not at the UN. The rescue of Kosovo's Muslims was not a UN action -- their cause never gained Security Council approval. This 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 harbor terrorists, as we did in destroying the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The most dangerous of these states are those that possess weapons of mass destruction, the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that can kill not hundreds or thousands but hundreds of thousands. Iraq was such a state, but there are others. Whatever hope exists 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 (with respect to Iraq) is unmistakable -- it is simply not up to the task. So we are left with coalitions of the willing. Far from disparaging them as a threat to a new world order, we should recognize that they are, by default, the best hope for that order, and the true alternative to the anarchy caused by the dismal failure of the UN.
Richard Perle, a former US assistant secretary of defense, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a member of the US Defense Department's policy advisory board.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
RSS