Can the UN Be Redeemed?

But a more corrosive issue is whether Saddam Hussein had manipulated the program to help win the support of UN Security Council members. True, Oil for Food required Iraq to deposit its oil earnings in a French bank account with UN oversight. But it left Saddam sovereign to decide whom he would sell oil to and whom he would buy food from.

How did the UN design a $65 billion program with such easily exploited loopholes? The CIA's Charles Duelfer has determined that Saddam's illegal oil sales and kickbacks allowed him to increase the budget of his Military Industrial Commission a hundredfold. This windfall could have financed illegal weapons of mass destruction programs, had the 2003 Iraq War not intervened. Duelfer's serious charge goes to the heart of whether the UN can be trusted to safeguard international peace and security.

Nor is the UN failure in Iraq an isolated one. Its intervention in Somalia crumbled in 1993. In 1994, though its peacekeeping force in Rwanda warned of an impending extermination campaign by Hutu militias against the Tutsi tribe, Annan's peacekeeping department ordered its troops to remain "impartial." Within months 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered in a preventable genocide.

One year later, UN troops refused to stop the assault of the Bosnian Serb Army against the "safe area" of Srebrenica, leading to the slaughter of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims, right under the UN's blue flag.

In this context, the UN's just-released report proposing sweeping reforms, entitled A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, seems a belated cry, "Don't give up on the UN; it can still be fixed and redeemed." The choice of some authors for the report should raise eyebrows, such as Amr Moussa, Egypt's hard-line former foreign minister, and Yevegny Primakov, a former Russian foreign minister and prime minister, who former UN Chief Weapons Inspector Richard Butler insists was receiving payoffs from Saddam Hussein. The fact that these participants were offset by former US National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft did not provide much comfort for UN skeptics.

Nevertheless, one way to evaluate the panel's work is to consider whether the disasters of the 1990s could have been averted if its recommendations had been implemented 10 years ago. To discern this, we must recognize that what ails the UN is a broken moral compass.

THE UN was born in 1945 at a moment of extraordinary moral clarity. To become a founding member, states had to declare war on one of the Axis powers and in effect become allies of the Big Three.

There was no doubt then that Nazi Germany stood for evil and the Allies for good. But within a few years, the UN standards became muddied with the addition of new members, who sought to alter the organization's ethos to serve their own authoritarian agendas.

Annan's panel recognized that the change from the original 51 members to today's 191 member states meant that "[t]he General Assembly was transformed from a body composed of States that largely resembled one another to one whose membership varied dramatically." A UN that, Soviet participation notwithstanding, had been dominated by democratic values became a tool of Third World authoritarians, who quickly raised the value of "noninterference" above that of human rights.

This dramatic distortion came to roost in the UN failures of the 1990s, which were characterized by a confusion between aggressor and victim. In Rwanda, the UN's initial moral equivalence between Hutus and Tutsis infused the military doctrine of its peacekeeping forces. In Bosnia, UN forces showed more sympathy for the Serb aggressors than for their Muslim victims. One reason the Oil for Food scandal went on for so long, according to former UN official Michael Soussan, was that the UN had more sympathy for Iraq's predicament than its own mandate to root out Iraq's WMD programs.

With respect to Israel, the UN systematically condemned Israeli defensive measures, without addressing the terrorism that forced Israel to act. The UN Human Rights Commission, for example, not only blasted Israel's 2002 Operation Defensive Shield but implicitly justified suicide bombings by referencing a 1982 UN General Assembly resolution recognizing the right of peoples to use "armed struggle" to resist "foreign domination."

When the General Assembly improperly activated the UN's judicial arm, the International Court of Justice, to stop Israel's security fence, Annan's office sent reems of supporting documents to The Hague, without touching on the suicide attacks that had forced Israel to build the fence. Had the UN existed in the Middle Ages with this moral logic, it would have outlawed armor and shields while condoning the use of the cross-bow.

Though the report's recommendation that terrorism be defined as "any action ... intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants" - without the Arab bloc's exception for "resisting occupation" - is clearly a step forward, it remains to be seen whether it will translate into the censure of aggressors and support for their victims.

Annan's panel dryly admits that "the norms governing the use of force by non-State actors have not kept pace with those pertaining to States." The UN has, in other words, been slow to assert its collective will against terrorism, while placing limitations rights of states to self-defense.

This asymmetry is a recipe for continuing global chaos. But it is not clear from the Annan panel how it is to be remedied. What is perhaps the central recommendation of the report - the expansion of the Security Council from 15 to 24 members - seems irrelevant to the problem.

Can the UN be redeemed? It certainly has a role to play in giving out food and tents in an emergency. The World Health Organization is crucial for stopping epidemics. But in the critical field of international peace and security, there may be no substitute for the kinds of "coalitions of the willing" used by Bill Clinton in Kosovo and by George W. Bush in Iraq, outside of the formal authorization of the UN Security Council.

These coalitions of allies have one built-in advantage: They have a clear sense of who their allies and adversaries are; therefore, they are not crippled by the moral confusion that characterized the judgments of the Security Council in failed interventions over the last decade.

Dore Gold is a former Israeli ambassador to the UN.
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