IRAQ CRISIS MAY LIMIT HOPES FOR U.N.

  Artículo de FELICITY BARRINGER en  “The New York Times” del 09.03.2003

UUNITED NATIONS, March 8 — "Relevance" has become the buzzword of the Iraqi crisis. From the president on down, leading Bush administration officials have declared that if the United Nations, as it approaches the age of 58, cannot decide to make its authority felt on Iraq, it may as well resign itself to being a debating society, albeit one with a $1.45 billion annual budget.

Even ardent internationalists worry that the institution finds itself in a lose-lose situation — ridiculed as a puppet if American pressure forces a reluctant Security Council majority to support a war against Saddam Hussein, or reduced once more to a self-absorbed cipher if France, Russia and Germany lead the Security Council to thumb its nose at the world's superpower.

The Security Council's bitter split transfixes a wincing world.

But what has really imploded over the past decade are the hopes of those who believed that the United Nations would emerge from the ashes of the cold war as a mechanism for conflict control.

The current crisis, Edward C. Luck, a Columbia University professor of international and public affairs, believes, is the manifestation of a more fundamental struggle. "This is brutal because of that," he added. Referring to the feuding parties in the dispute, he said, "Everyone thinks they are setting a precedent for the future and aren't giving an inch."

For the French, the United Nations is a kind of global legislature that offers a level playing field to superpowers, plain old powers and all the rest of the world.

The Bush administration's vision blends a real, if limited, internationalism with the reflexive conservative distrust of government, particularly one in which presumptuous foreigners try to constrain the United States. President Bush went to the United Nations to challenge the institution to reclaim its power by backing him in the campaign to enforce United Nations' mandates. Otherwise, it would be doomed to irrelevance, he said.

This willingness to define the institution by its role in the current crisis seems perverse or myopic to some. "The United Nations is much, much larger than the Iraqi crisis," Secretary General Kofi Annan said on Tuesday.

But many of the foreign ministers speaking around the horseshoe table on Friday still intimated that the institution's future power would rise or fall directly as a consequence of Iraq.

Many scholars and former United Nations officials see that kind of debate as irrelevant. They question whether the United Nations, as it is constituted, can have anything more than an ad-hoc role when armed conflict looms.

In 1950, the United Nations sanctioned the Korean War; there was no Security Council veto because the Soviet Union was boycotting the institution. Close to 40 years of superpower stalemate, punctuated by vetoes, followed.

Then came Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The cold war was almost over, and the United Nations was reinvigorated. The United States assembled an international coalition, the Security Council gave its approval, and a war of a few weeks threw Iraq back to its old borders.

Resolutions were passed mandating Iraq's disarmament. The United States may have been the dominant actor, but the United Nations was a featured player.

That was before Rwanda, where 800,000 people were massacred as the world watched. It was before Bosnia, where United Nations peacekeepers were helpless to prevent Serbs from killing their Muslim neighbors.

The arc of hope for United Nations' effectiveness in maintaining peace had its one real high moment in Iraq in 1991. The low point may be in Iraq in 2003.

But Mr. Luck says the first President Bush's approach to the United Nations was not really different than his son's. "George H. W. Bush said he was only going to stay with the Security Council as long as he knew he was going to win," he said.

Of course, conflict control is but a part of what the organization does.

As James Hoge, the editor of Foreign Affairs, said: "Except for a brief post-cold-war period, the United Nations has been a service agency its entire life. The experiment, the brief experiment of a decade and half, in which it was there to curtail war, or to confine going to war within some loosely defined international parameters set by the Security Council, has failed."

But the fact that it is so often missing in action when it comes to war puts its most prominent defenders on the defensive.

For James S. Sutterlin, a former United Nations executive and the author of "The United Nations and the Maintenance of International Security," the question is not the institution's relevance, but its competence."The centrality of the Security Council was evident in its very failure," in Rwanda and Bosnia, he said. "There was the very serious problem that the central organization responsible for security couldn't do it."

For American conservatives, the past three months have been galvanizing. "The notion that the U.N. is really a problem," William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, said this week, "was a fringe notion until about three months ago. Now serious people, who are not unilateralists, are much more open to alternatives to the U.N."