Criticisms of the United Nations

The most common criticism of the United Nations is that it is incapable of taking decisive action on its own. It can act only if some member nation, or a coalition of member nations, is willing to take the initiative. Above all, the United Nations has no standing military force whatsoever under its direct control. It is entirely dependent on its member nations for troops, the so-called "blue helmets."

These facts provide the basis for the argument that the United Nations is ineffectual. The implicit (and often explicit) corollary is that since the United Nations has no power in its own right, it can -- and perhaps should be -- ignored, in favor of direct unilateral action. Alternatively, intervention action may be taken either by some other body (such as NATO) that is better organized for operations of a military character, or by ad-hoc coalitions of states brought together to carry out action to achieve some particular objective.

All of these criticisms of the United Nations are true in some degree. The United Nations does in fact lack military means of its own. In that sense it cannot organize and deploy any sort of intervention force in its own right. At most it can deploy a peacekeeping force made up of troops contributed by member states. Moreover, members are generally reluctant to provide troops that will be under United Nations command, if the size of the force is large, or the risks involv

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iskanan, 2001, pp. 190-91). Interventions by a single power, even a dominant one, lack global legitimacy, even among people who might agree with the goals of the intervention. There is always a suspicion that the real motivation for intervention is narrow, national interest or advantage. The United Nations, however, has the power to convey legitimacy on an intervention, a legitimacy widely accepted in world opinion. The United Nations and the Iraq War A somewhat ironical demonstration of the significance of the United Nations imprimatur for the first Gulf War in 1991 was the unanimous consent gained in late 2002 for Security Council Resolution 1441, the resolution that ordered Iraq to re-admit the United Nations weapons inspectors with broad freedom of movement within Iraq. Resolution 1441 was voted for by members such as France and Russia, that were energetically opposed to further American action against Iraq, and certainly did not regard it as any sort of authorization for war. A cynic might argue, indeed, that Resolution 1441 was introduced by the United States with some degree of bad faith -- not in order to return the weapons inspectors to Iraq, but in hope that the Saddam Hussein regime would refuse to admit th
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Approximate Word count = 3630
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)