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To secure peace, first rescue the United Nations

By Meyer Rangell

May 29, 2006

"It may be that learning to live with a nuclear Iran is the wisest thing under any circumstances," opines Thomas L. Friedman (New York Times, April 19 ). Positing two alternatives, "a nuclear-armed Iran or an attack on Iran's nuclear sites that is carried out and sold to the world by the Bush national security team," Mr. Friedman states, "I'd rather live with a nuclear Iran."

Astonishingly, in his lengthy column, Mr. Friedman laments the fact that there is no other "third way." Has he forgotten completely that there is, in fact, a third way, and that it lies in the international organization whose name he does not even mention? Of course, I refer to the United Nations, the only international organization on the planet dedicated to the rule of law, the only organization that has the potential to resist a return to anarchy, distrust and paranoid hatred among nations, to stem a return to an unbridled arms race, to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to reduce, even eliminate, the dangerous stock piles of thousands of nuclear missiles that still exist and threaten us all, the only organization that, in principle at least, places problem-solving, negotiation and diplomacy as the only road to peace among nations.

The unfortunate central dilemma of our times lies in the fact that the United States has delivered a staggering blow to the concept of world peace through diplomacy and negotiation under a common banner of internationalism when the Bush team thumbed its nose at the Security Council, adopted instead a policy of pre-emptive, unilateral war, and attacked Iraq under false and lying pretenses, thus violating its own pledges to the U.N. Charter and undermining the United Nations as an effective instrument for world peace.

The result of the Bush policy has been to nearly destroy the United Nations as an international forum for world peace and for the peaceful resolution of conflict. As a result of this studied denigration, the U.N. has a disgraceful nonsupport in the United States, where its relevance, power and influence are under attack, ignored, or minimized at every opportunity.

Even in the powerful analysis by the indomitable Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, warning us of a repeat of the Iraq folly now being planned for Iran by the Bush team, the United Nations is almost ignored, only briefly mentioned.

At the ceremony on the White House lawn in honor of the visit of China's President Hu, neither President Bush nor President Hu, while pledging to work in harmony, even so much as mentioned the United Nations.

The urgent task for the peace process today, I suggest, is to rescue the United Nations, to reinvigorate its stature, to restore its relevance, its practical and moral authority, to re-establish the primary importance of the rule of law among nations.

As Jimmy Carter so cogently stated when he received the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago: "As a citizen of a troubled world, the United Nations is the best avenue for the maintenance of peace."

True then; true now.

Meyer Rangell lives in Bloomingburg.