The U.N.'s Two Incompatible Roles

This piece, linked to by Instapundit, asks, "How many more must die before Kofi quits?" It recounts the role that Kofi Annan's deliberate, cool neutrality during the Rwandan genocide played in the deaths of 800,000 people there.

Here, too, is Annan's faxed response - ordering Dallaire to defend only the UN's image of impartiality, forbidding him to protect desperate civilians waiting to die. Next, it details the withdrawal of UN troops, even while blood flowed and the assassins reigned, leaving 800,000 Rwandans to their fate.

While it's hard not to fault Annan for ordering his troops not to defend innocents who were being slaughtered, I can understand (sort of) where he was coming from. For the U.N. to have any hope of brokering a negotiated peace, they had to retain the appearance of neutrality between the sides. That neutrality would have been lost, and with it the possibility of a non-military end to the genocide, if the U.N. soldiers intervened on one or another side.

I think the Annan fax is emblematic of a lot of the structural problems in the U.N. right now. And I don't mean that in the "the whole place is full of bloodless, amoral bureaucrats" sense. I mean that the U.N. has basically two roles, which I think are largely incompatible.

The primary role of the U.N. is to serve as a neutral forum in which nation states can meet to resolve their differences without resorting to armed conflict. In order to fulfill this role, the U.N. has to maintain a largely amoral stance on all the big issues that come before it. It has to stay neutral between democracies and dictatorships - which is part of why there are so many thuggish states on the Human Rights Commission - because if Tehran, Havana, etc, felt they were being ostracized they'd just take their ball and go home. The U.N.-as-neutral-forum model can't work if the U.N. is just a club of like-minded democracies with not much to disagree about. Similarly, the U.N. has to stay neutral between perpetrators of genocide and its victims, because taking sides jeopardizes the U.N.'s role as a locus for negotiations.

All this amoral neutrality, however, seems to conflict with the U.N.'s other role: acting as an organ through which the world can condemn, and act against, evils like genocide or aggressive war. That's why the U.N. has peacekeeping forces in the first place. Those forces can't ever be used without, for a time at least, taking sides - the side, say, of Tutsi civilians under attack from Hutu militia, or of Fur villagers being raped and murdered by the Janjaweed. As long as the U.N.'s prime directive is "don't take sides" its soldiers won't be able to do anything more than stand around, looking official and neutral. It's impossible to stop a genocide without taking the side of the slaughtered against the slaughterers.

If preventing genocide is one of the U.N.'s objectives - and lets assume arguendo that it is - it's incompatible with the U.N.'s role as a neutral forum in which global disputes can be resolved. Annan's actions in Rwanda are just symptomatic of this irreconcilable tension in the U.N.'s role in the world.

Maybe then, the answer is to cleave the roles. Jonah Goldberg once suggested scrapping the U.N. in favor of a "League of Democracies":

Why not create a new multinational organization that has members who share common ideals and that isn't based on the antiquated assumptions of 50 years ago. In this League of Democracies, membership would be restricted to countries with democratic values and the rule of law. This wouldn't be the "West versus the rest" either. Japan, India, South Korea, South Africa and others could be members.

Right now the U.N. bureaucracy, led by Kofi Annan, wants its own army to do social work around the world. The problem is few oppressed people trust the "blue helmets" to be effective, and few Western nations are willing to tolerate their own troops fighting under Annan's flag.

At the same time NATO, which is already the military wing of the world's leading democracies, is desperately in search of a new mission, particularly at this moment when the European Union is pondering developing a separate military force. A League of Democracies could solve both problems. It could speak with moral authority, and it would have the military might to back it up.

A variant of this idea might not be a bad idea. Let the U.N. stay on as a neutral forum for trying at non-military solutions to the world's problems, but set up a second, unaffiliated body, unhampered by the need to appear neutral, to step in when negotiations fail and knock heads (to put it euphamistically) when needed.