[nasional_list] [ppiindia] Why America needs the U.N.
- From: "Ambon" <sea@xxxxxxxxxx>
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- Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 03:01:48 +0100
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http://informasi-beasiswa.blogspot.com **Why America needs the U.N.
By RAMESH THAKUR
Special to The Japan Times
We have to live in and manage a world in which the threat and use of force
remain an ever present reality. The material capacity, economic efficiency,
political organization and military skills in the use of force determine the
international power hierarchy. Great powers rise and fall on the tide of
history. Rivalry between them caused two world wars in the last century that
strengthened the determination to tame the use of military force as an accepted
part of sovereign statehood. The right to wage war in self-defense was kept by
states, but otherwise the decision to authorize wars was restricted to the
United Nations.
The conviction was that for peace to be maintained, the U.N. must be able and
willing to use force in the name of the international community against outlaw
states. This proved unduly optimistic. Instead the typical U.N. deployment of
military troops took the form of "peace operations," not military combat
missions.
The California-based Rand Corporation undertook a comparative study of U.S.
combat and U.N. peace operations: "America's Role in Nation-Building: From
Germany to Iraq" (2003) and "The U.N.'s Role in Nation-Building: From the Congo
to Iraq" (2005). Its conclusions reinforce the need for complementary
operations based on comparative advantage.
The U.N. is better at low-profile, small-footprint operations where soft-power
assets of international legitimacy and local impartiality compensate for
hard-power deficit. The quality of U.N. peacekeeping troops, police officers
and civilian administrators is more uneven and has become worse with the
retrenchment of Western nations from U.N. operations, and their arrival on the
scene is often tardy.
Military reversals are less damaging to the U.N. because military force is not
the source of its credibility, whereas they strike at the core basis of U.S.
influence. To overcome domestic skepticism, American policymakers define
overseas missions in grandiloquent terms and make the operations hostage to
their own rhetoric, while U.N. missions are outcomes of highly negotiated,
densely bureaucratic and much more circumspect documents.
Because member states are unwilling to contribute more manpower or money, U.N.
operations tend to be undermanned and under-resourced, deploying small and weak
forces into, hopefully, post-conflict situations under best-case assumptions.
If the assumptions prove false, the forces are reinforced, withdrawn or
rescued. Washington deploys troops under worst-case assumptions with
overwhelming force to establish a secure environment quickly.
The United States spent $4.5 billion per month in Iraq in 2004, compared to
under $4 billion per year for all 17 U.N. missions combined. This does not mean
that the U.N. could do the job in Iraq better, more efficiently or more
cheaply. It does mean that there were at least 17 other places where Washington
did not face calls to intervene because the U.N. was already doing the job. The
total number of U.N. peacekeepers -- around 65,000 -- is modest by the
standards of U.S. expeditionary capability. But it is more than any other
country or coalition can field.
U.N. missions have been relatively more successful -- a higher proportion of
local countries have been left in peaceful and democratic conditions than with
U.S. operations. This could be a statistical artifice: A different selection of
cases might produce different results. Or it could indicate that the U.S.
operations have been intrinsically more difficult, requiring larger forces,
more robust mandates and greater combat weight.
Or it could even be that the U.N. has been better at learning lessons. James
Dobbins, the lead author of the Rand study, notes that Kofi Annan, when he
moved to New York as secretary general, retained many of his staff from his
days as head of U.N. peacekeeping in key advisory positions. This offset many
institutional discontinuities. By contrast, says Dobbins, Washington tends to
staff each new operation as if it were its first and is destined to be its
last.
The U.S. and U.N. roles complement each other in managing the messy conflicts
around the world. Peace operations enlarge the spectrum of capabilities
available to the international community to respond to threats of chaos in the
periphery. But the U.N. does not have its own military and police forces and
would be hard pressed to achieve anything notable without active U.S.
engagement, let alone against its vital interests and determined opposition.
U.N. operations allow Washington to choose how, where and how deeply to engage
in different conflicts around the world.
Participation in U.N. peace operations symbolizes solidarity and shared
responsibility. If the U.N. is unable or unwilling to honor its responsibility
to protect victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing or other egregious
humanitarian atrocities, Washington can forge multilateral coalitions of the
willing to lead military interventions to stop the atrocities.
The Brahimi Report (2000) reinforced the importance of a U.N.-authorized force
under the active leadership of a significant military power. For while the
Security Council can validate the legitimacy of a peace-support operation, the
U.N. does not have enough professionally trained and equipped troops and police
forces of its own. Successful operations that need robust mandates might still
have to depend on coalitions of the able and willing -- but also duly
authorized.
For decades, U.N. peace operations have served U.S. security interests in the
Mideast, Africa, Central America, Southeast Asia and Haiti. Peacekeeping will
remain the U.N.'s instrument of choice for engaging with the typical conflicts
in today's world. The U.S. approach to peace operations will therefore continue
to define the nature of the U.S. engagement with the U.N. Because the U.S. will
remain the main financial underwriter of the costs of U.N. peacekeeping, it
will continue to exercise unmatched influence on the establishment, mandate,
nature, size, and termination of U.N. peace operations.
By their very nature, they cannot produce conclusive results either on the
battlefield -- they are peace operations, not war -- or around the negotiating
table -- they are military deployments, not diplomatic talks. A drawdown of
U.N. peace operations would reduce U.S. leverage in spreading the burden of
providing international security and lessening the demands and expectations on
the U.S. to take up the slack.
Conversely, scapegoating the U.N. will erode its legitimacy and so reduce the
U.S. ability to use the U.N. in pursuit of other U.S. goals -- for example in
enforcing nonproliferation.
To die-hard U.N.-bashers and passers, Washington needs the U.N. like fish need
bicycles. The facts say otherwise.
Ramesh Thakur, senior vice rector of U.N. University, is the author of "The
United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the
Responsibility to Protect." These are his personal views.
The Japan Times: Jan. 26, 2006
(C) All rights reserved
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