World View/Paul Gillespie: On the hard right and the hard left the United Nations is getting a bad press following the decision by the United States and Britain to lead the attack on Iraq without an explicit Security Council mandate.
Richard Perle salutes the end of the "fantasy of the United Nations as the foundation of a new world order" in this newspaper today - "the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions."
Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post urges President Bush not to go back to the UN after the war is over to seek a new resolution providing for the governance of Iraq. Although the US lost badly at the UN, the defeat has one side benefit: it enables the US public to see the UN as it really is - not "a global Mother Teresa. . .but a committee of cynical, resentful, ex-imperial powers such as France and Russia serving their own national interests."
He adds, perspicaciously, that "the deeper issue is that the principal purpose of the Security Council is not to restrain tyrants but to restrain the United States". If the Security Council is "nothing more than the victory coalition of 1945", an alternative new structure must be built: the "coalition of freedom" led by the US and Britain and about 30 other nations.
Kevin Myers reflects such views in these pages: "It is not the Americans who have fatally undermined the authority of the UN, but the UN itself, with its pomposities, its conceits, its humbug, its meaningless pieties."
In the Dáil, Mary Harney castigates Enda Kenny for arguing that the UN's legitimacy and authority must be upheld. He "apparently, wants to close Shannon to our close friend the United States, so as not to antagonise the government of North Korea." She, and the Government, are intent on being included in those 30 nations - or at least in the 15 others Colin Powell said "do not yet wish to be publicly named" but which it is believed does include this State.
Writing in the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson, editor of the New Left Review, welcomes the opportunity the crisis affords "to focus on the entire prior structure of the special treatment accorded to Iraq by the United Nations, rather than wrangle over the secondary issue of whether to continue to strangle the country slowly or to put it out of its misery quickly."
The term "international community" is a euphemism for US hegemony. The UN Security Council is not a seat of impartial authority, but since the end of the Cold War "essentially a screen for American will", as witnessed, Anderson argues, by the selective attention given to Iraq's seizure of Kuwait over comparable conquests by Israel, Indonesia, Turkey or Morocco - US allies all.
David Held, the rather less hard-left theorist of cosmopolitan democracy, writing for the excellent web journal, openDemocracy, agrees the UN Charter is deeply flawed, notably by splicing a commitment to cosmopolitan values and principles with a narrow defence of state sovereignty.
A reformed structure would have to reflect the new realities of this century, not the geopolitics of 1945, and the new forms of power engendered by globalisation. "International law and the security of nations would have to be connected to a wider agenda of ensuring human well-being."
Held says this is the wrong war, with wrong reasoning, wrong priorities and wrong timing. Far from affirming the original impulse behind the UN, the latest US strategic doctrine of pre-emptive regime change abandons both the liberal multilateralism and balance of Cold War power on which deterrence was based.
Were attacks on Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia or China to follow subjugation of Iraq, the world would be put not in the Hobbesian world popularised by another US neo-conservative, Robert Kagan, in his essay Of Paradise and Power, America and Europe in the New World Order, but back in the prior state of nature described by Hobbes as the "warre of every one against every one", in which "the life of man would be solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short". Hobbes's famous sovereign was designed precisely to avoid and prevent that by guaranteeing order.
Kagan contrasts the US's Hobbesian role with the Kantian one of the European Union. Despite its deep divisions over the war in Iraq the statement adopted at the EU's summit in Brussels yesterday insists the UN should play a central role "during and after the current crisis" and affirms the importance of the transatlantic relationship. Tony Blair argues that the UN role should extend to humanitarian aid, reconstruction, governance and oil resources.
But would such a Kantian approach not be used by France, Germany, Russia and China to subvert or restrain the US, as Krauthammer fears?
That is the real debate emerging from this crisis and it is good to see it vigorously engaged.
It should be remembered that the League of Nations, which has frequently been used as a warning by Blair and Bush against inaction over Iraq, failed because the great powers refused to take it seriously in the 1930s, just as they are refusing to accept defeat in the Security Council now.
Seán Lester, one of Ireland's great liberal internationalists, who became the League's secretary general in the second World War, argued in his final report in 1945 as it prepared to hand over to the United Nations: "The League of Nations no doubt had its faults, but it is dangerous nonsense to say that war came because of those faults. The League did not fail; it was the nations which failed to use it. That is the lesson of the last ten years and it is a vital and terrible warning for the next ten years."
His words resonate now that the UN's future is so much on the line.
pgillespie@irish-times.ie