In the last few weeks, the United Nations has acted as the fire brigade for the world. First, the UN Security Council authorized its member-states to establish a "no-fly" zone over Libya, including bombing, aerial assaults and missile strikes, to protect civilians against attacks by Colonel Gaddafi's troops in the conflict raging in that land. Next, the UN, in conjunction with French soldiers, inserted armed forces into the Ivory Coast to help oust the former president who refused to accept his defeat in a countrywide election. The organization also continued its role in the military effort to conquer the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan -- and, at the same time, tamp down the violence in Iraq. In addition, it currently supports some seventeen peacekeeping missions, many of which have used force on occasion to accomplish their goals. A growing list of UN personnel have lost their lives in these disputes.
All of this firepower belies the pacifist image of the UN. The organization is generally regarded as a peacemaker, not a war monger. And that is as it should be. After all, the UN has helped to negotiate peacefully the end of wars in states like Guatemala, Mozambique, Angola, El Salvador, Cambodia, Haiti and other countries. It has assisted in setting up governments in war-torn societies, aided in writing constitutions, brought in experts to run elections, and participated in nation-building projects. This is the humanistic side for which the UN is known and revered.
Still, a militaristic UN should not come as a surprise. That is what the founders of the UN originally wanted for the body -- to act, under the rubric of "collective security", as an assemblage of nations to deter aggression, stop disorder, and bring about stability and peace under the umbrella of global law. This is the realist side of the UN which views human history for what it has been, replete with violence that must be dealt with and bad guys who must be corralled and punished.
In fact, at the UN's founding conference in San Francisco in 1945, the creators focused almost exclusively on security, having just endured two cataclysmic world wars within thirty years which killed over 90 million people. The founders set up a Military Staff Committee to provide the "strategic direction of any armed forces placed at the disposal of the Security Council" (though the Staff Committee withered away in the face of the Cold War confrontations). Still the UN nonetheless intervened militarily in the following years in the Korean War, the first Gulf War and the Yugoslav wars.
Today the UN has incorporated a new doctrine, "the responsibility to protect", which allows it to intervene in nation-states which commit crimes against their own people -- previously a matter considered to be solely within the purview of a state's sovereignty and off-limits to the UN. Despite the UN critics on the right who view the institution as bloated, soft and ineffectual, and those on the left who think the UN doesn't do enough against human rights violators, the organization, with the consent of its members, is serving as the world's sole, generally accepted, protector. It does not always achieve its goals -- it has missed out on a series of destructive conflicts in the past -- yet today it appears poised to act more as its founders wished, as long as the world community agrees.
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Daniella Alonso Jordana Brewster Jaime King LeAnn Rimes Rose Byrne
