Global Policy Forum

By Thalif Deen

When the U.N. Security Council threatens the use of force to enforce its resolutions, it nearly always follows through, but history may not necessarily portend the use of force in Iraq, a longtime U.N. observer said.

"As a general rule, the council has been careful to keep its powder dry unless it's going to be used," said Simon Chesterman, a senior associate at the International Peace Academy, a think tank that works on issues related to the United Nations.

Though the Security Council has passed dozens of resolutions over the years that have not been carried out, "The vast majority of the time, it doesn't threaten what it can't follow through on," said Chesterman, who teaches international law at Columbia University's School of International Affairs. The U.N.'s chief weapons inspectors are to brief the Security Council Friday on Iraq's progress in complying with Resolution 1441, which demands Baghdad rid itself of its alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Iraq claims it has no such weapons. President Bush has declared that "time is running out" for the Iraqis to prove they have no weapons of mass destruction. But even if the council determines that Iraq has failed to comply with the resolution, that may not be enough to persuade member countries to give their blessing to military action, Chesterman said. Bush called earlier Thursday for the United Nations not to risk becoming "irrelevant" by failing to enforce its resolution.

"I'm optimistic that the U.N. Security Council will rise to its responsibilities and, this time, ensure enforcement of what it tells Saddam Hussein that he must do," Bush told an audience of service members and their families at Naval Station Mayport, near Jacksonville, Florida. "See, I believe, when it's all said and done, free nations will not allow the United Nations to fade into history as an ineffective, irrelevant, debating society," he said.

Chesterman said he believes those comments were directed primarily as threats to countries like France and Russia, and, to a lesser extent, to Britain, given Prime Minister Tony Blair's support of Bush's stance on Iraq. "Britain, France and Russia link their status as significant powers at the moment considerably to their roles on the Security Council," Chesterman said. "When he [Bush] talks about the possibility of the council being marginalized, he's saying: 'If the council gets marginalized, you get marginalized.'"

In other words, the Iraq situation has left the members of the Security Council in a dilemma: either they go along with Bush's request to approve the use of force in Iraq, based on American intelligence and on an American timetable, and risk being seen by other countries as complicit with the Bush administration, or defy the U.S. president and risk being considered irrelevant by the world's largest military power, he said.

"That's an unhappy place to be," Chesterman said. The issue of the U.N.'s relevance comes up regularly, Chesterman said. "Every couple of years, the United Nations faces a crisis over its legitimacy," he said, citing debate over its roles in the Balkans, the Gulf War and Somalia.

"This time I do think it's a little more serious. America is flirting with greater unilateralism than normal. The current challenge to international law isn't limited to the U.N., but is reaching into NATO, which is a measure of how serious the divide is." NATO has been split since early this week, when France, Belgium and Germany blocked Turkey's request for special precautions to ensure its security in the event of an attack by Iraq. It's not clear how much precedent there is for failing to bring a U.N. resolution to, well, resolution.

UN Never Threatened Military Action Against Israel

The world body does not keep track of which of the thousands of resolutions it has passed have been complied with, a U.N. spokesman said. "It's up to the members of the Security Council to decide whether or not a resolution has been implemented," he said. "That call is a political call, so if you were to poll the different members of the council, they would give you different versions."

He cited a resolution that demanded Israel withdraw from south Lebanon in 2000. Israel did withdraw to the "Blue Line," but some member states felt that it was not in complete compliance because it did not evacuate the Sheba'a Farms area.

Israel has also been criticized for failing to comply with a resolution passed more than 30 years ago demanding that it withdraw from the occupied territories. Dozens of subsequent proposed resolutions on that topic were either vetoed by the United States or toned down considerably, he said. But, for more than a decade, the council has refrained from making clear demands unless it had already lined up an enforcement mechanism, Chesterman said.

That was the case prior to Desert Storm in 1991 and U.S. intervention in Somalia in 1993. The resolution authorizing the latter intervention, he said, was drafted by the Pentagon. Israel's noncompliance falls into a separate category, because the United Nations has never threatened military action against Israel, he said.

Israel is not alone in not complying with a U.N. resolution. Another set of resolutions concerned Cyprus, where Turkey remains in violation of calls to relinquish a Turkish-controlled area that it recognizes as the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

And Morocco remains in western Sahara, though that occupation has been less widely condemned, Chesterman said.