Save the U.N.?
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
An array of commentators is encouraged by President Bush’s speech to the United Nations. The hawks are glad to see the president is finally starting to press publicly the case for a preemptive attack on Iraq. The doves are also starting to express some understanding, if grudging. That Iraq is “a grave and gathering danger,” as the president also said, is not in doubt, Frank Rich acknowledged in the Saturday Times. Even Thos. Friedman admits the president made a “strong case” for the war on Iraq. Many commentators are particularly taken with the president’s argument that this is an opportunity for the United Nations to save itself by enforcing its own resolutions.
Far be it from us to rain on this parade, but we, for one, are anything but sanguine about the idea of giving the United Nations a last chance at credibility. We’re not at all sure it would be a good thing were the United Nations to start backing up its resolutions. It may be all well and good insofar as Iraq is concerned, for the regime in Iraq is a clear and present danger, and America went into the Gulf War in the first place under cover of the United Nations.
But it is well to remember that the United Nations has long since veered from the idealistic world body envisioned in the United Nations Charter. It comprises a General Assembly of dictatorships and a Security Council in which a veto is still held by a China that is ruled by the communist party and a France that is infected with the spirit of Drancy. It wouldn’t be too much to suggest that the way the General Assembly has been behaving its principal raison d’etre has become the isolation of the Jewish state. It has built up what Jason F. Isaacson, in a November 2001 report of the American Jewish Committee, calls “an entrenched bureaucracy of censure.”
The Committee offers a detailed rundown of the resolutions designed to isolate Israel. It can be read on the world wide web at http://www.ajc.org/up-load/OneSided.PDF. The resolutions festering in the U.N. system attack everything from Israel’s nuclear deterrent to its sovereignty over Jerusalem. The truly visionary strategy for an American president would be to build his alliance among the free and democratic nations of the world and establish a club that can only be entered by those countries that have achieved the democratic ideal.
