United they fall
Richard Perle bids farewell to the United Nations and its history of anarchy and abject failure Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly. but not alone: in a parting irony he will take the United Nations down with him. Well, not the whole United Nations. The 'good works' part will survive, the low-risk peace-keeping bureaucracies will remain, the looming chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die in Iraq is the fantasy of the United Nations as the foundation of a new world order.
As we sift the debris of the war to liberate Iraq, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions. As free Iraqis document the quartercentury nightmare of Saddam's rule, as we hear from the survivors able to speak from their own soil for the first time, let us not forget who was for this war and who was not, who held that the moral authority of the international community was enshrined in a plea for more time for inspectors, and who marched against 'regime change'. In the spirit of postwar reconciliation that diplomats are always eager to engender, we must not reconcile the timid, blighted notion that world order requires us to recoil before rogue states that terrorise their own citizens and menace ours.
A few days ago Shirley Williams argued on television against a coalition of the willing using force to liberate Iraq. Decent, thoughtful and high-minded — like many of the millions who have marched against military action — she must surely have been moved into opposition by an argument so convincing that it overpowered the obvious moral case for removing Saddam's regime.
No, for Baroness Williams (and many others), the thumb on the scale of judgment about this war is the idea that only the UN Security Council can legitimise the use of force. It matters not if troops are used only to enforce the UN's own demands. A willing coalition of liberal democracies isn't good enough. If any institution or coalition other than the UN Security Council uses force, even as a last resort, 'anarchy', rather than international law, would prevail, destroying any hope for world order.
This is a dangerously wrong idea, an idea that leads inexorably to handing great moral — and even existential politico-military decisions — to the likes of Syria. Cameroon, Angola, Russia, China and France.
When challenged with the argument that if a policy is right with the approbation of the Security Council, how can it be wrong just because communist China or Russia or France or a gaggle of minor dictatorships withhold their assent, she fell back on the primacy of `order' versus `anarchy'.
But is this right? Is the United Nations Security Council the institution most capable of ensuring order and saving us from
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