President George Bush is correct when he says the debate about
how to disarm Iraq is as much about the future of the United
Nations as it is the future of Saddam Hussein’s regime. His
assessment of how the governing body can maintain its relevance
might be flawed, though.

Bush insists that the only way the United Nations can remain a
credible, strong organization is to take an aggressive, unforgiving
posture toward Iraq. What he really is saying is that the only way
the United Nations can remain credible and strong is by adopting
and implementing U.S. wishes over the objections of the other
nations on the U.N. Security Council, mainly France and
Germany.

Bush is not alone in this assessment. In fact, this is probably
the typical American’s sentiment when it comes to the United
Nations.

Through much of the 1990s, from its work in Bosnia to Somalia,
the United Nations has stumbled from what many Americans perceive
to be one blunder to another. Who will ever forget how powerless
the blue-helmeted troops were in the face of Serbian genocide in
the former Yugoslavia?

There’s more to the American notion that the United Nations is
simply a place where diplomats gather to wring hands and long for
peace, though. Some American’s distrust the organization’s motives,
suspecting that the United Nations wants to subvert our sovereignty
and the sovereignty of other nations.

This notion is rooted deeply in American culture – a culture in
which the rights and importance of the individual are above the
rights and importance of the collective, or society. Thus, for us
to funnel our foreign policy through the filter of an international
collective of nations such as the United Nations seems antithetical
to American values.

Bush’s pronouncements about the fate of the international
organization are in line with the American notion of its perceived
relevance now and possibly in the future. Bush more or less has
given voice to the idea that the United States needs the United
Nations less than the United Nations needs the United
States.

Where this assessment might be incorrect, though, is that it
fails to acknowledge the most obvious fact about the international
governing body – it is not an American organization but an
international collective. Given that, it functions best when it
operates with the interests of most of its members in mind, even if
it might seem a bit powerless and slow.

Sure, the organization sometimes seems to lurch from conflict to
conflict without having much of an impact on that conflict’s
resolution, but we must recall how effectively it began perhaps its
most tarnished decade, the 1990s. If you recall, that decade began
with a massive, American-led, U.N. military victory over the same
dictator Bush now goads the United Nations into
dethroning.

Some might argue that even the Persian Gulf War was a U.N.
failure because we’re back to where we were at the end of that war
– begging Iraq to let weapons inspectors do their job.

That, however, is the fault of one president’s father, who
called off the war much too soon. The elder Bush, not the failure
of the U.N. weapons inspection program, left the demon in Iraq with
another decade to develop weapons of mass destruction.

If the younger Bush is successful at getting the United Nations
to follow the American line above the objections of all other
nations, that will harm the organization. The United Nations is not
a subsidiary of the United States. Indeed, we are merely a member
of it.

So we might have to go it alone in Iraq, and if we’re
successful, then we can gloat all we want to about how we saved the
world from the exploits of a ruthless dictator. However, we then
will have to turn to the same organization we snubbed and ask it to
help pay for the reconstruction of yet another country.

That is when the organization we deem irrelevant becomes
critical. Without its help, we’ll be forced to pay for the
reconstruction of two countries – don’t forget Afghanistan – at the
same time we slash our taxes and try to jumpstart one of the worst
domestic economies the nation has seen since the Great
Depression.

Matthew Vuletich is the managing editor of the News-Press.