Paper Peacekeepers The Unmet Promise Of The U.N.
Ignatius, David
PAPER PEACEKEEPERS THE UNMET PROMISE OF THE U.N. by David Ignatius upporters of the United Nations and its S global peacekeeping mission should con- sider the lesson of FIJIBAT. FIJIBAT...
...What’s remarkable is that more than half of these missions have been in the Middle East...
...Indeed, the public image of the UN today is probably close to the MacNelly cartoon that shows unshaven delegates from places with unpronounceable names sitting in the General Assembly with pots on their heads...
...The Soviets followed the same approach when they invaded Hungary in 1956...
...After the 1978 Israeli incursion into Southern Lebanon, the United Nations voted to send troops to police a buffer strip between the major PLO strongholds of South Lebanon and the Israeli border...
...But I think the deeper difficulty is that the UN has devoted an enormous amount of its energy, money, and good will to the thankless, perhaps hopeless, task of trying to solve the intractable problems of the Middle East...
...A look at the 1984 membership totals shows why the General Assembly is an awkward forum for American interests...
...Their job, in theory, was to separate the combatants-to curb Palestinian attacks against Israel and to block a new Israeli invasion of Lebanon...
...The robust post-war world that produced the UN is now, for me, a set of childhood memories: playing with my father’s World War I1 medals and hearing stories about how the good guys had won...
...This was the “secular humanism” that conservatives denounce today, and the UN was perhaps its holiest shrine...
...Reckoning with the failure of the UN is a painful process for anyone who grew up in the postwar era of hopeful, high-minded liberalism...
...Franck reaches a conclusion that might best be described, in this magazine at least, as “neoliberal I’ He implies that a sound approach to the UN should reject the wet-lipped reverence of traditional liberalism and the whining and carping of the neoconservatives...
...The roughly 6,000-man UN peacekeeping force has also included Scandinavian troops-known as NORBAT and FINBAT-as well as contingents from such unlikely countries as Ghana and Senegal...
...After marshaling overwhelming evidence of this failure, he notes the depressing statistic that since the UN was founded in 1945, 20 million people have died in wars...
...Alas, I never found any...
...on which it ultimately must be judged” -resolving disputes among nations and, failing that, deterring or resisting aggression...
...But the British Foreign Office warned at the time that the move was unwise because of the coming surge of newly independent Asian and African nations...
...3 is up to you...
...It failed to prevent Palestinian rocket attacks against the Israeli towns of northern Galilee...
...It represented the belief in human perfectibility, the notion that institutions could transform the base human instincts that produced wars, and the dream of an international brotherhood of man...
...Franck argues that the UN has fallen so low in the public esteem largely because of the “cosmic overselling” of the early days...
...For the present,” he writes, “the U.S...
...A ‘cosmic overselling’ The UNIFIL debacle in Lebanon is a small example of the global problem that Thomas Franck explores in Nation Against Nation .* His topic is the failure of the UN to accomplish the “two principal tasks...
...He was recently named associate editor of The Washington Post in charge of the “Outlook” section...
...by David Ignatius upporters of the United Nations and its S global peacekeeping mission should con- sider the lesson of FIJIBAT...
...By Franck’s count, out of 159 total members, there are 120 developing nations, 99 members of the non-aligned movement, 50 members of the African Group, 33 members of the Latin American Group, and only 22 members of the Western European Group...
...The Middle East briar patch As for the UN’s failure as a peacekeeper, Franck argues that the U.S...
...The UNIFIL mission looked sensible on paper...
...was delighted in 1950 to obtain UN cover for its defense of South Korea (achieved only because of a foolish tactical blunder by the Soviets, who boycotted the Security Council meeting that approved the UN force...
...Those memories seem faintly comical now, reminiscent of an era-confident, naive, sentimental-that has passed as surely as the Old South...
...should use the power of the purse (we paid 25 percent of the assessed budget in 1982) to restrain the miscreant UN bureaucracy...
...My informant claimed that in the vicinity of FIJIBAT you could see scores of Palestinians with finger splints...
...Instead of the feel-good conservative approach of quitting the UN, Franck prescribes what I would call a get-tough liberalism...
...Franck demonstrates that it was the U.S.-not the Soviets and their Third World cronies-that engineered the transfer of power from the Security Council to the General Assembly in the early 1950s...
...Most of UNIFIL is an expensive joke and an illustration of why the United Nations has failed so miserably in its central task of keeping the peace and deterring aggression among nations...
...The Americans thought they had come up with a clever stratagem for getting around Soviet vetoes in the Security Council...
...They even tried briefly in 1982 to stop the invading Israelis from crossing a bridge in their sector, until cooler heads at UNIFIL command prevailed...
...Indeed, he presents convincing evidence that the U.S...
...but when Guatemala requested help in suppressing a CIA-sponsored coup in 1954, the U.S...
...even the silly Halloween ritual of trick-or-treating for UNICEF, which was another part of the kids’ version of the age of high liberalism...
...The fundamental problem, Mr...
...later, when the Israeli army invaded Lebanon in June 1982, UNIFIL stepped politely aside...
...The story of FIJIBAT was related to me in Beirut several years ago, probably at a hotel bar late in the evening, so I cannot vouch for the finger-breaking detail...
...In the process of enforcing the rules, the Fijians lost 18 men, more than the other contingents of UNIFIL...
...Dream and What the US...
...The UN is in tatters today partly because it has fallen very deep into the briar patch of the Middle East...
...The value of Franck’s book is that it should convince readers to stop complaining about the UN and take a more realistic view of how and why it has fallen on such hard times...
...Can Do About It...
...listening to the voice of Edward R. Murrow on the 78-rpm version of “I Can Hear It Now” as he described the horrific history of the 20th century converging on the explosion of the atom bomb and the foundation of the UN-and asking in his gravelly voice whether in 1945 the world had reached midnight and the end or “walked into a new dawn...
...Oxford, 819.95...
...must also share some of the blame...
...FIJIBAT is the military name for a battalion of troops from the Fiji Islands that, during the early 1980s, formed part of UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon...
...Except for FIJIBAT...
...Franck suggests, is that the UN charter was premised on a belief that individual states would subordinate their national interests (or at least unilateral military actions in pursuit of those interests) for the sake of the larger good of world government...
...But the broader point remains valid: you won’t be taken seriously as a peacekeeper, in South Lebanon or anywhere else, unless you’re prepared to break a few fingers...
...The American public is more cynical now about an international body full of high-living Arabs and Africans who seem to spend most of their time wasting American money and denouncing Israel...
...had a simple way of handling troublemakers...
...The Fijians didn’t mess around,” recalls one State Department official...
...If the rule was you weren’t to carry a gun across a checkpoint, then the Fijians made sure you weren’t carrying a gun...
...He explains: “NO understanding of the present attitudes of Americans toward the UN can be achieved without taking into account the utterly false premises on which the UN charter was based, and then sold to the public...
...The Fijians, it was said, David Ignatius, a former editor of The Washington Monthly, worked from I980 to 1983 as Middle fist correspondent of The Wall Street Journal...
...For the UN was in many ways symbolic of that liberalism...
...Thomas M. Franck...
...Lacking a monopoly of force, the UN has been powerless to restrain its well-armed members...
...The past 40 years have been a continuous lesson in the unrealism of that premise...
...The U.S...
...The organization’s cheerleading role for the PLO is part of the problem...
...is to blame for some of the UN’s worst problems...
...visiting New York as a boy and looking, awestruck, at the clean, austere facade of the UN building on the East River...
...He quotes a telling example of the near-religious enthusiasm for the UN in a 1945 lobbying message to Congress from a Unitarian group in support of the organization...
...Nation Against Natiorr What Happened to the UN...
...In fact, UNIFIL proved to be a toothless, pseudomilitary force that didn’t deter anyone from doing anything...
...The US...
...lhke the UN General Assembly, the buffoonish, pot-headed gathering that, in the American view, has hijacked the UN...
...For example, Franck counts 13 UN peacekeeping missions since the organization was founded: Greece, Pakistan, Kashmir, Suez and Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, Zaire, West Irian, Yemen, Cyprus, India, Pakistan, and Syria...
...Rather than issue European-style reprimands to misbehaving Palestinians, they simply broke their fingers...
...Like most legislative bodies, it breaks down into voting blocs that trade support on major issues...
...The UNIFIL forces presented an absurd sight in South Lebanon, traveling from village to village in their antiseptic white Jeeps, tut-tutting the locals and issuing dire warnings, but never doing anything credible to keep the peace...
...We should look at how countries vote in the UN in distributing foreign aid, so that cheap shots from Third World countries are no longer costless...
...national interest is better served by a muscular strategy of staying in...
...We should recognize the useful mediating role that the UN secretary general can play in world conflicts, from Cyprus to the Iraq-Iran war...
...It all adds up to this: whether there is to be World War No...
...blocked action by the Security Council...
Vol. 17 • December 1985 • No. 11
