Let us pray for all those now about to die in this defeat for humanity

By Ronan Mullen

Pray for the Iraqi soldiers going out to face certain death and driven (who knows?) by conviction or coercion.

Pray for the Allied forces, too, that their conduct of the war will not be marked by unnecessary acts of barbarism or tyranny against Iraqi forces.

Pray that the war will not be in vain, and that some kind of democracy will emerge in Iraq to ensure a better life for the people there.

Pray that life in the Middle East will stabilise, and that Muslims throughout the world will not see this conflict as an act of aggression against their way of life.

Pray that dictators the world over will get the message that sooner or later they must answer for their crimes.

Pray that America, while pursuing its legitimate commercial and security interests, will honour the basic rights of all people regardless of their nationality, and use its great strength to create a more just international order.

Eighteen months ago I attended an ecumenical service in Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral for those who died on September 11.

A huge congregation was gathered and people seemed very moved by the liturgy. I am surprised therefore that our Church leaders have not moved to organise similar events on this occasion.

I am not talking about politicised affairs where churchmen would castigate the US or condemn Saddam’s tyranny. Quite the opposite.

People who believe this war is justified are united in many ways with those who do not. All of us know that war is an evil, in the Pope’s words “a defeat for humanity,” and this demands a response.

This war reminds us that despite our technological and diplomatic achievements we still haven’t answered the really big questions about the meaning of life and the senselessness of evil.

In fact, one of our greatest temptations in coming weeks will be to make light of evil, either by ignoring the war altogether or by embracing what in fact will be entertainment-based coverage on offer from Sky News and the big TV channels.

Witness the latest Sky News advertisement which uses images of the conflict to promote its news coverage. By sensationalising war in this way, media magnates connive at it, but so also do the viewers who lap it up.

If prayer and reflection are important right now, so is politics, and the next task is to pick up the fragments of international law and to piece together a new international system to prevent aggression.

We shouldn’t shed too many tears, however, for the model of the United Nations that has just died, because the UN has proved itself, time and again, to be a very imperfect system for the maintenance of peace and justice in the world.

Decisions about war and peace are taken by the UN Security Council which, in addition to having ten elected member states, has five permanent members, all of whom can veto military action.

But one of the permanent members, China, is not a democracy at all. In fact, under its one-child policy, it is the only country in the world where it is illegal to have a brother or a sister.

Let’s suppose, then, that there was support on the security council for a war to disarm Iraq, but China was threatening a veto. Would a veto from such a country make such a war immoral?

What is troubling people, of course, is that China isn’t the problem on this occasion.

The threatened veto on a second UN resolution mandating war in Iraq came from a ‘respectable’ western democracy, France, as well as Russia, and a majority of the other states on the security council were opposed as well.

The question is: should we trust the UN Security Council more than we trust the United States? On the surface, it might seem like we should.

The US is but one country, with many vested interests, whereas the UN offers some kind of a system where countries can act as a brake on each other’s ambitions.

That much is true, but it would be foolish to think of the UN as an organisation free from vested interests. As a former US Assistant Secretary of Defence, Frank Gaffney, puts it, the security council “is not some kind of higher moral entity where everyone leaves their national interests at the door and thereby arrive at some collective and more reasoned view, than, say, the United States acting simply under its constitutional processes.”

Gaffney argues that in a post-Cold War era, “in a world of weapons of mass destruction and rogue states, the world should look beyond a Security Council on which permanent members may have an interest in protecting these rogue states.”

Even opponents of a war without UN backing, such as the former British ambassador at the UN, Sir John Weston, confirm that the security council is susceptible to vested interests.

“I don’t think we should be too prissy about the notion,” says Weston. “There is an element of wheeling-and-dealing in national politics and law-making everywhere.”

Perhaps this helps explain why, in all the great barbaric conflicts that have erupted in recent years, the UN has consistently failed to protect human life.

It failed in Kosovo, and it was the NATO-led invasion which eventually caused the Milosevic regime to collapse. The UN failed in Rwanda, with genocidal results.

And it failed in Iraq. Instead of enforcing its own resolutions on Saddam Hussein, it opted to let the Iraqi people suffer under a system of penal sanctions.

Perhaps it hasn’t always been vested interests which stayed the UN’s hand, but a recently-unearthed photograph of a younger Jacques Chirac cosying up to Saddam Hussein suggests that French motives in all this may not be entirely altruistic.

It is somewhat ludicrous, in the light of the UN’s pathetic record, to blame the US and Britain for being willing to go it alone.

Blame France and Germany instead. Because if they really wanted to protect the UN’s legitimacy, they would have realised that the US was not going to back down on this occasion.

And, just as Blair showed the right spirit by persuading Bush to go to the UN for support, the mainland European powers should have responded by presenting a united front to Saddam.

But long-term, the UN will not suffer, thanks to its vital role in humanitarian and emergency relief, peacekeeping and nation-building. And a role in the reconstruction of Iraq after the war will be vital in healing the bad blood caused by the current crisis.

In the fullness of time, we may even see that this conflict was the making of the UN. America’s new toughness, provided it lasts into the next administration, should stiffen the security council’s resolve and help it face up to international terrorism and lawlessness.

Britain will play a vital role as persuader in bringing America back into the fold. But the UN needs to grasp this nettle most of all, because it is in nobody’s interest to have America acting alone on the world stage.

No country is above selfish self-interest. Thus the UN must rise to the challenge of becoming the world’s trusted conscience again.