By Jeffrey Laurenti
Executive Director of Policy Studies, UNA-USA
The following is in response to suggestions made in Brown University's e-forum on the UN that the situation in Iraq may best be tackled through NATO.
In contrast to the NATO treaty (that is, the North Atlantic Treaty as it was written, not as some in Washington might wish to reinvent it), the U.N. Charter creates a comprehensive security organization. The North Atlantic Treaty is quite intentionally one-dimensional: responding collectively to an "armed attack" upon the home territory of any of its members, in exercise of inherent "self-defense" as recognized by Article 51 of the U.N. Charter (and even that, only till the Security Council can "take measures necessary to maintain international peace and security" in that situation). NATO's mission is narrowly one of repelling illegal armed force (against its own members, of course)--the restricted scope that some contributors to this forum would crabbedly apply to the U.N. as well.
The U.N. Security Council's mandate is far broader--dealing with ANY "threat to the peace". Add to that its functions in peacekeeping, peaceful resolution of disputes, and the work of other parts of the U.N. in building the economic and social foundations of peaceful relations, and you have a multidimensional and comprehensive security system.
Sure, it's weak and fragile. But the notion purveyed by some on both sides of the Potomac that NATO should supersede the Security Council and launch military operations against other states on its own ukase (in order to get around the squeamishness of Russia and China about intervening in internal affairs) is risky and misguided. The desire of some U.S. officials to get NATO's member states formally to assert such a power may (and, I would suggest, should) alarm many contributors to this discussion group. It should even alarm the few political leaders in Washington farsighted enough to think about possible consequences--e.g., the risk that nations outside of NATO may conclude they need to band together into rival blocs to raise the cost of Western interventions.
