Outgrowing the U.N.

What is laid bare in the above is the extent to which alien interests affect voting distributions. Whether the United States should move militarily against Iraq has zero to do with U.S. immigration policies involving Mexico, but nothing is clearer than that Mexican petulance is operative here.

In 1975, the U.N. General Assembly voted to declare that Zionism was racism. That declaration (rescinded in 1991) was one hell of a shock, with implications that included sending Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the U.S. Senate, to celebrate his eloquent and outraged rebuke, as American ambassador, of the racism vote. Mexico voted the anti-Israel line, and a few weeks later the Mexican tourist business all but closed down: the American Jewish community decided to take action of its own, and a legion of planned meetings and visits to Mexico by Jewish organizations were canceled. (Mexico got the word, and crawled back, denouncing the declaration it had voted for.)

All of which highlights the continuing peril of banking on U.N. approval. The rhetoric of 1990, used by the senior Bush administration, was historically reckless. Pleading for approval by the United Nations of the proposed military action to oust Iraq from Kuwait, there were suggestions that unless the U.N. vote favored the action, we would not undertake it. The U.N. did, and Congress did, though narrowly.

We have got to live with the historical implications of our pre-eminence in world affairs. Policies initiated by the president and approved by Congress cannot be subordinated to parliamentary allocations of power arrived at in 1945 (why a French veto power, not a Japanese or German?). If it is the consolidated judgment of democratically elected U.S. leadership that Saddam Hussein must be tamed, it is irrelevant what the Security Council of the United Nations does.

We would benefit more in the long term if the French (or Russians) did veto the desired resolution, so that by proceeding against Iraq, we would simultaneously destroy the aggressive power of Saddam and the passive power of the U.N.