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What if the UN had gone into Iraq?
By Robert Fisk
04/24/05 "Sunday Tribune" - - There were bagpipers in Scottish tartan, hundreds of soldiers coming to attention this week with a banner proclaiming "Duty Unto Death". I had to pinch myself to remember that this corner of the British Empire was actually southern Lebanon.
But there was nothing un-British about the Assam Regiment, whose battle honours go back to 1842 and whose regimental silver still bears the names of Victorian colonels of the Raj. It was Malcolm Muggeridge who once observed that the only Englishmen left were Indians.
The Assam Regiment's 15th battalion is India's contribution to the United Nations' peacekeeping force along the Israeli border - and its soldiers, from the seven north-eastern states of India, have turned out to be among the most popular of UN units for two simple reasons: They help with much of the veterinary work among the poor farmers and they repair all the computers in local schools.
But there was one salient feature of the battalion's UN medal parade on Thursday - the other units which had sent their officers were almost all non-Western.
There were Fijians and Nepalese and Ghanaian soldiers - but only a smattering of French and the odd Australian UN observer. When the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) was at its height during the Israeli occupation, its soldiers tended to come from richer countries: Ireland, Norway, Finland and France.
Now it is the poorer countries whose soldiers are spread across the hills between Tyre and Golan. India's army can also be found on duty in the Democratic Republic of Congo and, shortly, in the Sudan and Ethiopia.
The UN's global reach thus seems to be revolving more and more around non-Nato forces. Our superior Western armies, I suspect, are much happier in Bosnia or illegally invading Iraq. Lord (Tony) Blair of Kut al-Amara is not going to waste his men on the Israeli border.
But all this does raise an important question: Do nations that we once called "Third World" make better peacekeepers? Would it not be more appropriate to have soldiers who understand poverty keeping the peace in lands of poverty?
I can remember now, amid the corruption and terrors of the Bosnian and Croatian wars, how the smartest and the most disciplined contingent turned out to be not the French or the Canadians, but the Jordanian battalion on the Serb border.
There was a time, back in 2002, - when US President George Bush was threatening the UN - when I was asked in New York if I "believed in the UN".
It was a bit like being asked if one believed in God or the Devil, which I'm sure Bush does. But I have to admit that while I'm not at all sure about God - or at least Bush's version of him - I did reply that, yes, I believed in the UN. And I still do.
It was in Bosnia that I had a long discussion with a Canadian UN officer about the worth of the United Nations. His theory was quite simple: If we'd had a UN in 1914, it might have stopped World War 1.
"And despite everything that's gone wrong in Bosnia, it would have been far worse - much more like the World War 2 - if the UN wasn't here."
The debacle in Somalia hardly supports this view, but have the Americans done any better in Iraq?
Once the UN was discarded, in went the US army and Lord Blair's lads - and now they've got an insurgency on their hands.
"Duty Unto Death" might suit the Indian battalion in Lebanon, but I doubt if many US troops would adopt this as their regimental motto.
The Indian army served in Sri Lanka, whose suicide bombers would make even Iraq's killers look tame.
So here's a satanic question: What if the UN had sent a multinational force into Iraq in the early spring of 2003? Could it have been a worse mess than we have in Iraq today?
If Saddam Hussein could have his weapons of mass destruction destroyed by the UN - and they were destroyed by the UN, were they not, because we know that there weren't any there when we invaded - might the UN not also have been able to insert military units after forcing Saddam to disband his regime? No?
Well, in that case, how come Syria's regime in Lebanon is crumbling under UN Security Council Resolution 1 559? On Thursday even Jamil Sayyed - the pro-Syrian head of Lebanon's General Security, a figure more powerful and definitely more sinister than the Lebanese president - stepped aside.
True, it was the French and the Americans who pushed for resolution 1 559. But how many of us will stand up today and admit that the UN is doing in Lebanon what the US has failed to do in Iraq?
Copyright: Tribune Foreign Services
This article was originally published on page 32 of The Sunday Tribune on April 24, 2005
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