Winning the Peace

Discuss this on our boards!

Winning the Peace
by James Hall, Senior Associate Editor

April 14, 2003

"Leaning Left"

James Hall Nobody expected Saddam Hussein's third-world military to defeat the armed forces of the United States and Great Britain. (Forget about Cameroon, the Solomon Islanders and the rest of the mighty "Coalition," they weren't there.) As I write, Saddam's army is in ruins and he himself may lie in the ruins of a bombed-out apartment house in downtown Baghdad. He is not accounted for yet, nor are his sons or chief ministers, but nobody expects that these men will evade the US stranglehold on Baghdad the way Usama bin Ladin slipped by at Tora Bora.

There's still considerable mopping up to do. US and British forces weren't large enough to do more than strike off the head of the snake. There's still a lot of Baathists, Fedayeen, and ex-Republican Guard running around, there's the north of the country to secure, and there's weapons of mass destruction to find.

There's also a civil infrastructure to restore to keep the Iraqis in food and water while their economy is restored. The role of the UN in this relief effort was on the agenda this past weekend as President Bush met with Prime Minister Blair in Northern Ireland. The British want the UN involved in a post-war Iraqi occupation; the Bush administration isn't eager for UN help.

American conservatives hold the UN responsible for the Security Council's decision not to approve a second resolution for war. The UN failed, they say. The UN is weak and ineffective. The Right is now caught between despising the UN for its weakness and fearing its world power and black helicopters. Can this weak-sister UN be the same great threat to independence that they've always told us it was?

Let's face it: we have the kind of UN we've always wanted, so let's not quibble when the system works against us. The Right never wanted a strong UN, a militant UN, a forceful, taking-action UN, because that kind of UN might have taken action against our national interests. We've always preferred a weak UN, a UN of talk and resolutions, and that's the kind of UN we have.

The UN was created to keep the peace, so approving a war with Iraq was never going to be its first option. The Security Council has approved exactly two wars since World War II: the Korean Conflict (which happened only because the Soviets stormed out of a Security Council meeting in a huff), and Desert Storm, approved because Saddam Hussein made the mistake of attacking and conquering Kuwait, something that even his friends the French and Russians couldn't stand for.

So now we know that the UN isn't a military juggernaut. But it is a peace and relief organization. The UN has been effective in separating ancient enemies from each other, rendering aid to fleeing refugees, and in letting combatants talk on the world's stage instead of fighting each other with weapons.

It's that kind of effectiveness that we'll need in a post-war Iraq. Otherwise, US troops may be seen as an occupying army and even a colonial force in a region that has bad memories of Turkish, British, and French armies of occupation. There's even a nightmare scenario where the Iraqis come to equate us with Israelis occupying Palestine and start their own Iraqi intifada with our soldiers as their targets.

The Bush administration talked brashly about the UN Security Council needing to appear "strong" i.e., support its pro-war resolution, or face becoming irrelevant like the League of Nations. The reality is that outside US borders, the UN enjoys great respect, to the point that most French or Germans recently polled said that they would actually support a war against Iraq--so long as it was authorized by the UN Security Council.

Once the war's over, we'll find that we need the UN more than ever. We'll need the UN to go on doing what it did before the war, feeding 60% of the Iraqi population, providing medicine for them, and telling them the world cares about what happens to them. We'll need UN support for our occupation and UN monitoring of fair and open elections in Iraq to avoid any criticism that we are pulling Iraq's strings.

We'll even need the same UN inspectors we didn't have time for before to come in and verify Saddam's WMDs and prove to the world that we were right, after all. And we'll need them to dismantle and destroy those weapons and certify that Iraq is weapons-free so that the sanctions against Iraq can be lifted. Despite claims to the contrary, the US still needs a UN dedicated to peace to keep the peace. ***

James Hall
Orlando, FL USA

Photo of the author courtesy of staff files