Kerry, the UN and Genocide

Martin Peretz has some questions for John Kerry:

How would John Kerry have dealt with Saddam? He has told us Saddam needed to be “confronted.” But the word itself–which implies that the United States could have overthrown Saddam without using military force–tells us what we need to know. Had the United States and our allies not embarked on this war, the Iraqi mass murderer would still be in power. And, were international sanctions gone, as they soon would have been thanks to Russia and France, he would have been on his way back to having and deploying weapons of mass destruction. And the senator from Massachusetts would not have raised his voice.

Now, of course, the WMD rationale for war has dissolved like a mirage in the Mesopotamian desert. For Kerry and for Democrats, this has simply dissolved the case for the war. Finis. Which leaves us with the dilemma of how we deal with regimes that commit genocide. Saddam’s genocides seem not to have provoked Kerry at all, nor, for that matter, did the genocide in Rwanda. (When U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright finally tried to focus the Clinton administration on the government-sponsored massacres there, Kerry was not exactly an ally.) It is true that, during the first presidential debate, Kerry limply suggested that perhaps, as a last resort, some American troops should be sent to Darfur, Sudan. But I haven’t heard him mention it much since, which says something about his seriousness.

Kerry’s main problem is that the United Nations, the designated proctor for his “global test,” is an impediment to prompt and effective action against savage governments. The United Nations was set up largely to protect the territorial integrity of its member states. But, with a few exceptions, states no longer make war on their neighbors–they make war on segments of their own populations. (Of course, even in that rare case where one state did invade another, and the United Nations endorsed military action–Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait–Kerry did not. In that vote, and in others, he carries on a tradition of Massachusetts isolationism. Democratic politicians in the Commonwealth did not want to send aid to Great Britain before World War II, and Joseph Kennedy, JFK’s father and FDR’s ambassador to the Court of Saint James, was a rank appeaser.)

The savagery of governments against their own people, usually against a defined ethnic or religious minority, has been a consistent feature of the postwar world. Not charged in its charter with dealing with such cases, the United Nations has simply looked the other way, or worse. In the 1960s, it sided with the Nigerian government against the Ibos of Biafra; with Kofi Annan in charge of the U.N. presence in Rwanda, genocide unfolded there; and, with Annan again in charge of the blue helmets in Yugoslavia, many massacres took place in Bosnia. Likewise, over decades, it did not see–because it did not want to see–what was going on in Iraq.

More here.