Both used and abused, the UN has lost its fundamental legitimacy

ALL SORTS of historical parallels have been invoked to try to make sense of the current international situation surrounding Iraq, from the Suez Crisis to the Bay of Pigs invasion.

But, in truth, there is no precedent for the almost surreal debate over Iraq that has taken place in the past year. As the Independent on Sunday put it, never has a war been "so heavily signposted so long in advance, to the general indifference of so many".

We have a US administration that is desperate to go to war against another devastated, impoverished Third World state. Yet even armed with the powerful propaganda weapon of a demonised rogue whom it likes to compare to Adolf Hitler, it cannot generate any genuine popular enthusiasm for war, either domestically or in the wider world. On the other hand, we have a so-called anti-war movement that, despite all the dithering, confusion and anxiety within the Bush and Blair administrations, still cannot mount any coherent or convincing case for not attacking Iraq.

When George W Bush first identified Iraq as part of an "axis of evil" in his State of the Union address, he assured the American public that "I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer." Yet here we are, almost 10 months later, and the terms of a new UN resolution are still being kicked about in the UN Security Council, a body loathed by many of the conservatives close to the Bush administration, with the US and France in particular locked in negotiations to resolve their differences.

Not so long ago, the Bush hawks were rubbishing the UN, while France and Germany were being dismissed as an irrelevance in international affairs who needs those damned lily-livered Europeans anyway, was the American attitude, we'll just go ahead and take Saddam out by ourselves. A few months ago vice president Dick Cheney stated his conviction that Saddam Hussein would develop a nuclear weapon "fairly soon. We know we have a part of the picture and that part of the picture tells us that he is in fact actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."

He ridiculed the idea of sending international arms inspectors back to Iraq. Defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld was equally dismissive of any conciliatory gestures from Iraq towards the West. "You'll find at the last moment that they will withdraw that carrot of opportunity," he said, "and go back into their other mode of thumbing their nose at the international community."

Bush told the United Nations that Saddam's regime is "a grave and gathering danger". To believe otherwise is to gamble with peace "and this is a risk we must not take."

One would imagine that, confronted by a grave threat from a latter-day Hitler who was on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and who would never accede to the will of the international community, the last thing the world's only superpower would want at this stage is to get bogged down in months of wrangling over the terms of a new UN Security Council resolution especially with those pesky French.

It is a measure of the insecurity that informs US foreign policy making today that this is precisely what it allowed to happen. The US has never been so powerful, yet is increasingly nervous and uncertain about how to project that power.

For all the gung-ho rhetoric and the dire warnings of the threat posed by Iraq, it still could not muster the resolve to act decisively without obtaining the legitimacy bestowed by the UN. Just to cloud matters further, Bush switched emphasis again on October 21. After months of declaring regime change in Baghdad as the central goal of American policy, he said the United States was trying to disarm Mr Hussein "peacefully" and suggested that if Iraq complied with all UN resolutions, "it would signal the regime has changed."

This is the same regime that only a month earlier had been declared beyond redemption. The change of rhetoric was widely interpreted as an attempt to mollify other members of the Security Council, which in itself is telling, but even at this late stage the Bush administration appears not have determined what exactly its purpose or goals are with Iraq.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has argued that for the hawks in the Bush administration, this "is the latest chapter in the culture wars, the conservative dream of restoring America's sense of Manifest Destiny Extirpating Saddam is about proving how tough we are to a world that thinks we got soft when that last helicopter left the roof of the American embassy in Saigon in 1975".

In this sense, however, the war on terrorism has clearly been a failure. The Stars and Stripes may still fly over houses and buildings all over America, but it seems to be more an expression of a collective sense of vulnerability and loss than the type of go-get-'em patriotic fervour that has characterised previous times of war.

The problem of Iraq has become the defining issue for the Bush presidency, largely because it has nothing else to distinguish it and therefore must continue pursuing the war on terrorism indefinitely in order to retain some sense of mission or purpose. Yet despite Republican successes, the subject did not generate much enthusiasm in the course of the most nasty, petty and trivial Congressional election campaign that anybody can remember.

Whatever is holding back Bush and Blair, it certainly has not been the strength and coherence of the anti-war coalition in Europe and elsewhere.

At each stage, the anti-war movement has relied on arguments over strategy or potential consequences to oppose an attack on Iraq, rather than any principled objection to Western intervention per se. They argued that a war would be highly dangerous in that it could destabilise the entire Middle Eastern region. They trotted out the jaded and increasingly surreal argument about the war really being about oil and profits (if the war on terror actually has any such clearly defined purpose, somebody should inform the Bush administration). They demanded more evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and represented a threat to the West. Tony Blair duly produced his much-hyped dossier, which merely re-hashed old evidence already in the public domain, and failed to even mention any purported link between Iraq and Al-Qaida.

Nevertheless, the war momentum rumbled on, and the anti-war lobby turned to the UN for salvation. For many on the liberal-left, a military assault that completely violates the sovereignty and independence of a weak Third World state somehow becomes more acceptable if it is dressed in the garb of UN legitimacy. But this faith in the UN is hopelessly misguided, for the organisation is a mere shadow of what it once was, used and abused by the major powers at will. If it can be used as a vehicle for conferring legitimacy upon Western military adventures then it will, but if not it will simply be ignored, as in the case of Kosovo and Afghanistan.

As President Bush told the UN in September, this is the organisation's "defining moment" and that a failure to act in accordance with US wishes would render it "irrelevant."

But if the UN does proceed to give legitimacy to a war against Iraq, it will have destroyed once and for all one of the fundamental principles upon which the organisation was originally founded the sovereign equality of all its members. Might truly will be right in international affairs. In fact, the only check upon US power will be its own hesitancy and uncertainty about where it is going next.