The UN in the Post - Cold War World

Looking back at your career, your work at the UN and these personalities you've known, focusing on peacekeeping a minute, what are the circumstances under which you think the UN can do peacekeeping well?

U Thant returns from peace mission to India and Pakistan, 1965. Peacekeeping was very useful during the Cold War, during the post-decolonization period, because after decolonization, you had all sorts of power vacuums all over the world. The Middle East, Cyprus, Kashmir, whole parts of Africa, and so on. And if you had the Cold War going on, nature abhorring a vacuum, it seemed likely that either the United States or the Soviet Union would try to fill those vacuums. If they both tried to fill them simultaneously like they did in the Congo, you would have an incredibly dangerous situation. So peacekeeping was a vacuum-filler, and it gave a pretext to sensible governments who were fighting each other to stop it -- to the Israelis and the Arabs, for example, who didn't really gain from fighting each other because the Arabs could never win and the Israelis could lose a great deal without losing the battle. That was extremely valuable. Or India and Pakistan, for example, who had no hope, either of them, of winning the battle over Kashmir but occasionally got into a war over it -- three times. So I think that was very useful.

Sir Brian at UNIFIL hospital in South Lebanon, 1984. Peacekeeping in those days kept regional conflicts out of the East - West nuclear confrontation so that instead of either the United States or the Soviet Union rushing into the Middle East or Cyprus or somewhere, they would vote in the Security Council to put in a UN operation and then they would both feel free to criticize it. That was fine, and it was probably a much more valuable technique than anybody thoughtat the time. The trouble with peacekeeping was that it depends on governmental consent, including the consent of the governments whose country you're in. If they don't want it, it doesn't work, because it's lightly armed and the forces are small. We learned that the hard way when Nasser expelled the Middle East peacekeeping force in 1967 -- 1300 soldiers on a 300-mile front. The way the Western press was going on, you'd have thought it was NATO; they said we should have "fought the Egyptian dictator." Nassar had 150,000 troops with tanks in the Sinai. We had 1300 with only personal weapons.

After the Cold War, two things vastly confused the so-called international community, which, as far as it exists, is the UN. The first one was Desert Storm, which was a huge success in the use of preeminent force. Particularly on the television, it looked terrific. And people began to think, "Ah, now that the UN is united once more, it can do anything by force." I think also that governments weren't used to the Security Council agreeing on everything. After the demise of the Soviet Union, there was almost no problem the Security Council couldn't agree on. They forgot that it's one thing to agree on a solution to a problem, but it's quite another thing to put it into effect. And a third thing was that what they were getting into weren't conflicts between nation-states, they were internal conflicts within the boundaries of states, or in the case of Somalia or Yugoslavia, failed states. These were civil, ethnic, and sometimes religious wars. They weren't governments each other, but local leaders, not governments, who mostly didn't have much use for the UN. They didn't obey the rules. They all believed they could win, and they were very difficult to control. But the Security Council put traditional peacekeeping operations into these places. They put a peacekeeping operation into the former Yugoslavia, into Croatia and Bosnia, because none of the Europeans, and certainly not the United States, wanted to go in and fight the Serbs. So they set up this sort of fig-leaf operation of the UN which was bound to fail, a peacekeeping operation which everybody could then blame for not fighting the Serbs though that wasn't what they'd been sent to do in the first place, because peace-keeping forces are supposed to be impartial. This experiment has been very expensive for the UN.

Sir Brian participates in an awards ceremony for UN troops. The idea that force can easily be used in somebody else's country is nonsense. One of the greatest mistakes of the United States was the idea to try to arrest General Aidid in Somalia. General Aidid was a local leader with a considerable following and the moment foreigners began to fight him, the Somalis united, even if they'd been fighting him themselves the day before, to fight with him against the foreigner. They should have known that would happen. They didn't, with disastrous consequences. There was a misconception that peacekeeping could be used in these very violent civil situations because it had been so effective before in international cases.

What is needes is a new technique now, an instant deployment force to deal with violence, a very highly trained group of people who can be flown into these places immediately and really control the violence before it escalates into something that nobody can control. Nobody did that in Bosnia, nobody did it in Somalia, nobody did it in Rwanda. They took more than four months to get soldiers into Rwanda. You have to have something between peacekeeping and Desert Storm, which is not a military operation or a peacekeeping operation. It'll be a sort of an anti-violence operation done by highly qualified people -- civilians, police, and soldiers.

Why do you think there's been such a turnaround on U.S. attitude toward the UN? You were just suggesting that in many ways in this new environment, the UN has become a whipping boy and that's probably especially true in the United States.

It is especially true in the United States and I deeply regret it, because the United States invented the UN and is its most important member. Incidentally, the United States is the only country that actually makes money out of the UN, contrary to the general belief, because the UN is located in the in the United States and spends a lot of money here, much more than the U.S. pays in dues. To Americans, Desert Storm was fine, and George Bush's "New World Order." It all looked as if it were going to be easy after the Cold War. But then it became clear that some of the operations the UN had undertaken weren't going to be easy, were going to cost lives and might even end in failure. They were going to take a great deal of resources and might have to last for many years. The real turning point was the disaster with the Rangers in Mogadishu, Somalia, when eighteen Rangers were killed and four helicopters were shot down. This Ranger operation was undertaken by the special forces command in Tampa, Florida, without telling the UN commander in Mogadishu. In Washington it was easier to blame the UN, which knew nothing about it. That TV shot of the Ranger helicopter pilot being dragged through the streets by an infuriated mob -- a great number of Somalis were killed in that episode, incidentally, so they had something to be annoyed about -- really put the hat on United States active support and participation in these operations, even though the Rangers hadn't been under UN command. In fact, they would probably still be alive if they had been under UN command, because the UN general in Mogadishu knew what he was doing.

The other factor, of course, is the ideological turnaround in this country, the anti-government movement. And if you're anti-government, the UN is 185 governments, so you can be 185 times as vitriolic. There has been an ideological trend towards a xenophobic isolationism which you see exemplified in somebody like Pat Buchanan, but it's not so uncommon among congressmen in Washington, the newer lot particularly.

The mythology about the UN is absolutely breathtaking. People believe it costs a great deal of money to the United States. Completely untrue: it doesn't. The United States makes a net gain. People believe it's a world government, although the UN is a pathetically weak organization which improvises in emergencies to try to prevent the worst from happening. And after all, the United States has a veto in the Security Council. Until one cuts through that ideological fog, it's going to be difficult to try to restore the kind of support the UN used to have. The UN certainly needs a great deal of administrative reform, it needs much better leadership, it needs much better management, it needs to have a better civil service. But these things can be done, provided governments are prepared really to support their organization.

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