The eerie whine of precision-guided missiles over Baghdad contrasts with the equally shrill but increasingly muddled debate over the legality of the conflict. The trans-Atlantic war of words has laid bare competing visions of the purpose of the United Nations Security Council. Was the council meant just to pass judgment on the use of force — or to organize its collective use? Given the imbalance of power between the United States and the rest of the world, should it embrace American military might — or seek to constrain it?
Unless these contradictions are reconciled, the council will be relegated to dealing with local crises, as in East Timor and Sierra Leone. The United Nations will retain operational roles in peacekeeping, mediation, humanitarian relief, human rights, development and nation-building. But if lesser powers contrive to turn the council into a forum for counterbalancing American power with votes, words and public appeals, they will further erode its legitimacy and credibility. Given the experience of the League of Nations, the architects of the United Nations were determined to bind American power and global decision-making, not to set them at odds.
The United Nations, sadly, has drifted far from its founding vision. Its Charter neither calls for a democratic council nor relegates the collective use of force to a last resort. It was a wartime document of a military alliance, not a universal peace platform. Pleas for reform of the Security Council, however, stress equity and representation — not effectiveness and responsibility. The reformers would mimic the political correctness and practical impotence of the League's Council. Then, as now, most states had little stomach for enforcement.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. By combining muscle and legal authority, Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter promised to set the United Nations apart from the feckless League. Yet, as France, Russia and China looked the other way, Saddam Hussein stripped the United Nations Security Council of its credibility layer by layer.
Last September, President Bush ungallantly pointed out that the council, like the proverbial emperor, has no clothes. However weak his multilateral credentials, on this he is right: the council has shed credibility for so long that more worldly leaders have forgotten what it looks like. His warnings about the United Nations morphing back into the League of Nations have fallen on deaf ears in capitals that would prefer a weak council to a strong one dominated by the United States. They are as ambivalent about American power as Washington is about international organization.
Reforming the Security Council is inconceivable without a reconciliation among the major powers. Paris and Berlin should understand that neither European unity nor global leadership can be built on a platform of denial and demonstrations. Neither Paris nor London is about to cede its permanent seat to the European Union, and intra-European bickering has been a major obstacle to Security Council reform.
For its part, the Bush administration should do more listening and less preaching. Most countries are neither friends nor foes, and none likes to be taken for granted. If Washington shows more respect for the agendas of others, they are more likely to respond to ours.
As long as the United States has more military and economic power than any other country, the voting rules in the Security Council will appear arbitrary. Under such conditions, the council should vote less and seek consensus more, giving rogue states less opportunity for employing splitting tactics. Projecting a positive vision, the United Nations Charter speaks of concurring votes of the permanent members, not of their vetoes. The Big Five — the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China — were meant to seek common ground, not to deny the validity of one another's security concerns or to posture for public approval.
Since the United Nations no longer tries to organize or oversee the use of force itself, this has been left largely to the discretion of member states. Even Secretary General Kofi Annan has acknowledged that unilateral military action is sometimes necessary. The forced removals of Idi Amin in Uganda, or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, were justified "in the eyes of the world" because of "the internal character of the regimes," he said in June 1998. Likewise, the council did not authorize the use of force by the West in Kosovo, the United States in Afghanistan, Russia in Chechnya, or, most recently, France in Ivory Coast.
Opponents of the war in Iraq have been highly selective in their reading of the United Nations Charter. It is a compact by which the member states accept constraints on their use of force in the context of a binding system of collective security. Those who for years have sought to weaken the sanctions and inspections efforts in Iraq — undermining this compact — have set the stage for the use of force. It is hypocritical for them now to claim that the rest of the Charter's rules are sacrosanct.
Unless both the enforcement and legal pillars of the Charter are reinforced, what is left will indeed look a lot like the ill-fated League of Nations. Will the real United Nations please stand up?

Edward C. Luck is director of the Center on International Organization at Columbia University
New York Times, 22/03/2003

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