We don't need the U.N.

HEADNOTE

NATIONAL SECURITY

Joshua Muravchik, "We Are Better Off Without that U.N. Resolution," AEI On The Issues, March 21, 2003 (aei.org)

Writing two days after international coalition forces began their campaign

to liberate Iraq, AEI scholar Joshua Muravchik contends that the United States "dodged a bullet" by not seeking U.N. Security Council authorization for the war. Muravchik points out that the main reason why nations like France and Russia often exalt the Security Council's importance is that they have so little power (military or otherwise) relative to the United States.

Muravchik observes that the requirement for a Security Council mandate was never established in international law. During the Cold War, NATO, for example, functioned on the assumption that the U.S. and other Western nations would act to repulse a Soviet advance into Europe without the approval of the Security Council. "American power does much more than the Security Council to preserve the peace," he writes.

When the Security Council has acted-as in Korea and the 1991 Gulf War, it has largely relied on American force to do its bidding. Muravchik also points out that the Security Council failed to act to avert massive slaughter in Rwanda or in the former Yugoslavia when international action might have averted humanitarian disasters. The real losers in a world where the U.S. needs Security Council approval for its actions would not be America but, rather, other nations that rely on U.S. protection and aid.

"The world would be anything but safer if a principle became enshrined that deterred the U.S. from defending Taiwan without Beijing's permission, or Poland without Russia's, or Israel without the assent of the U.M.," he observes.