By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, August 30, 2013
This week the United Kingdom, with the support of the
U.S. and France, scrambled -- in vain -- to get the approval of the United
Nations Security Council for a military strike on Syria.
I can certainly understand why some see this as a legal
or political necessity. International law says that nations should seek
approval of the Security Council before attacking other nations. That means if
the United States attacks Syria without U.N. approval, President Obama will
open himself to the charge from the left of being even more of an international
war criminal than George W. Bush, who at least could plausibly claim U.N.
Security Council support for the Iraq war.
But if you think such accusations are nonsense -- as I do
-- then what's left is the political case. This argument holds that we must
placate a poltergeist called "world opinion." But this
will-o'-the-wisp is as fickle as it is elusive. Obama has been chasing it in
the Middle East for years, and he's less popular there than Bush was in 2008.
In Europe, where Obama remains popular on the German and Belgian streets, it's
hard to point to an area where popularity has yielded concessions to Obama's
agenda.
A related reason, we're told, to seek U.N. approval is
that other nations need it if they're going to join our coalition. Fair enough.
But there's often a Catch-22 here in that it's hard to get a coalition without
U.N. approval, and it's hard to get U.N. approval without a coalition. One way
to cut through the Gordian knot is to ask, "What's so great about
coalitions?"
Sure, it's always better to have friends and allies
pitching in -- many hands make light work and all that. But if something is in
America's vital national interest, it doesn't cease to be because Belize or
Botswana won't lend a hand. Posses aren't more moral in proportion to the
number of white hats who sign up.
Somehow this basic fact was lost in the last decade or
so. According to liberals in the Bush years, the essence of wise foreign policy
boiled down to: "It's better to be wrong in a big group than to be right
alone."
Anyway, what I really don't get is the investment of
moral authority in the Security Council or the U.N. generally. The permanent
members of the U.N. Security Council are France, Great Britain, the United
States, China and Russia. The other nations of the 15-member body rotate on and
off the council. They also don't get a veto the way the permanent five do. But
for the record they currently are: Argentina, Australia, Azerbaijan, Guatemala,
Luxembourg, Morocco, Pakistan, South Korea, Rwanda and Togo.
Now, taking nothing away from the great and glorious
accomplishments of the Luxembourgeois, Togoans and Rwandans -- never mind the
invaluable insights the Pakistanis have into what constitute America's vital
interests -- I am at a near-total loss to see how gaining their approval for a
measure makes that measure more worthwhile. If you believe Bill Clinton was
right to bomb the Balkans to stop ethnic cleansing (which I do), do you think
that action was any less moral or right because he did it without the support
of the U.N. and therefore -- according to international law -- illegally? I
don't.
And then there are the permanent five. It's worth
remembering they have their seats on the council simply by virtue of the fact
they were the great powers at the end of World War II. One irony is that the
people who routinely insist the U.S. must seek approval from the U.N. are also
the sorts of people who blithely opine that "might doesn't make
right." Well, the council's authority is derived entirely from the idea
that might does make right. More important, by what perverted moral calculus
does the approval of Russia (never mind the old Soviet Union) or China confer
moral legitimacy? Without reading the full bill of indictment (the gulags, the
mass murder, the invasions, etc.), suffice it to say that China and Russia's
opinion of what is right and legal counts less than Miley Cyrus's verdict on
what is tasteful.
But there is a deliberative body that has significant
moral, political and legal authority when it comes to the conduct of American
foreign policy. It's called "Congress." You could look it up.
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