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January 26, 2004

How Terrorists Out-Maneuvered the U.N.

An insightful analysis by David Frum and Richard Perle shows how and why the U.N. is outmoded:

U.N. Should Change—or U.S. Should Quit

The world body’s rules prevent America from answering threats.

...the United Nations has emerged at best as irrelevant to the terrorist threat that most concerns us, and at worst as an obstacle to our winning the war on terrorism. It must be reformed. And if it cannot be reformed, the United States should give serious consideration to withdrawal.

The U.N. has become an obstacle to our national security because it purports to set legal limits on the United States’ ability to defend itself. If these limits ever made sense at all, they do not make sense now.

Yet the U.N.’s assertion of them forces presidents and policymakers into a horrible dilemma. If we obey the U.N.’s rules, we compromise our national security. If we defy them, we expose ourselves to accusations of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

According to the U.N. Charter, nations are permitted to use military force only in two situations. Article 51 of the charter recognizes an “inherent” right to self-defense against attack. In all other cases where a nation feels threatened, it is supposed to go to the U.N. Security Council to seek authorization before it takes military action even action that might forestall an attack.

The trouble is that the U.N. defines aggression in outdated ways. For the U.N., “aggression” means invasion across national borders. Send Nazi shock troops into Poland that’s aggression. Give sanctuary to thousands of anti-American murderers, as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, that’s not aggression.

...In other words, under U.N. rules, the U.S. is obliged to let terrorists strike first before retaliating and might even be prohibited from striking second. In an age when shadowy radical movements around the globe are seeking weapons that could kill hundreds of thousands of people, these rules are clearly out of date. We need new rules recognizing that harboring terrorists is just as much an act of aggression as an invasion and that those who are targeted by terrorists have an inherent right to defend themselves, preemptively if necessary.

Very good points. Until the advent of terrorism, war between two nations involved armies of one nation moving against the interests of another. Such armies wore uniforms marking them as agents of their state government. Such war is the only kind of aggression the U.N. charter recognizes because that’s all there was at the time it was written. The charter needs to be updated if the U.N. wishes to avoid becoming a tool of the terrorists.

The point I’d like to make is that terrorism evolved in part in response to the U.N. charter. The terrorists depend on that charter to prevent nations that support them from being attacked by the nations the terrorists target.

The Bush doctrine short-circuits this plan. It is the only possible response. And it’s working, to use an apt expression, like gangbusters. Per Victor Davis Hanson:

We were warned that “preemption” in Iraq would give the green light to Pakistan and India to go to war. In fact, India’s economy and culture are more America-oriented than ever before, and Pakistan seems more afraid that such new ties with the United States will leave it odd man out.

...Iran is once more witnessing democratic demonstrations and calls for radical reform. Its spooky theocracy is no longer talking of the joys of an Islamic bomb that might take out Israel at the economical price of a few million fried Muslims.

...Syria suddenly claims that it wants to discuss peace with Israel.

...And what about the locus of our purported catastrophe in Iraq? We cannot even compare the sniping, however wretched, to missiles raining across borders, no-fly zones, broken armistices, ignored U.N. mandates, U.N.-introduced food embargoes, massive foreign invasions, bounties awarded for suicide killings, genocide, destruction of the environment, and looting of oil revenues to buy imported weaponry. For all the chaos we supposedly created, we no longer have mass graves, but instead Shiites demonstrating for democratic elections and Kurds hammering out plans for a federal state. Instead of Baathists slaughtering students, the current controversy is whether to depose Saddamites from university faculties. And the full effect of the war remains to be seen, when the neighbors of Iraq will watch in horror at free elections and debates. It isn’t easy there, but when or where has the creation of civilization in place of barbarism ever been effortless?