Three Cheers for the UN

By Andrew Nowobilski

The United Nations cease-fire resolution between Lebanon and Israel is perfection incarnate. It compels Lebanon to establish control over Hezbollah soil. It orders the disarmament of Hezbollah. It cuts off Hezbollah’s arms supplies. And it beefs up Lebanese and international security forces to get the job done, all while limiting the loss of human life. What better monument is there to wisdom, temperance, and justice for all?

Yes, the UN resolution is a masterful victory in the War on Terror. If it is enforced.

A perfect agreement, which assiduously considers all the angles, piling stipulation upon stipulation, devoting its every element to prudence and virtue, means nothing if it is not enforced. And it won’t be. Why? The UN is not temperamentally or politically equipped to engage in offensive maneuvers, bloody guerilla warfare, or any conflict that might result in significant civilian casualties (which is to say, all of them).

But isn’t the UN’s mission primarily defensive? Well, at the moment yes. But all Hezbollah has to do to change the strategic landscape is simply to refuse to disarm. Then the UN will either give up its mission, or it will have to root out Hezbollah by force, against which Hezbollah would of course retaliate. If the hard-nosed Israelis had trouble enough with this sort of asymmetric warfare, is there any hope at all for the boys in blue? Clearly not. Hezbollah can therefore completely eviscerate the mortal threat posed to it by the resolution if only it has the will to fight. And will is something its fighters do not lack. This agreement is like a water bucket. One hole is enough to drain the whole thing. And this is a big hole.

Pundits will prevaricate. They will talk about incremental gains here and there from the resolution, even after Hezbollah refuses disarmament. But the very fact that the pundits’ approval requires so many qualifiers shows the cease fire is a bum deal. The only acceptable victory against the terrorists is a complete one. The sole question we need to ask is whether the UN and the Lebanese can rapidly and--if need be--forcefully disarm Hezbollah. If the answer is anything less than an unqualified “yes,” the deal represents an unacceptable deviation from the clarity required by the War on Terror.

We have not failed because diplomacy is useless. Seeking total victory against terrorists is in no way incompatible with diplomacy with states. Diplomacy used in conjunction with the threat of force is a good thing. So too is cooperation. There is nothing wrong with offering Lebanon a partnership in enforcing its own sovereignty. In fact, turning states against their resident terrorists and working with those states may be the only way to make this conflict tractable. That’s why a cease fire presented such an opportunity, if only it was proctored by a serious alliance instead of a utopian (dystopian?) bureaucracy.

If quasi-failed states like Lebanon could be made to police their own territories and expel terrorists from them with the cooperation of international forces, the War on Terror would become manageable. If the threat of unacceptable consequences for failure to prosecute terrorists forces a failed or rogue state to start regulating itself, then that state can be used as a lever against the terrorists. This strategy would fold the war into a more symmetrical framework by subsuming terrorism under the sovereignty of a state. A war against a state is a definite thing. It is not an infinite war fought against 10,000 evil, unknown, technologically-empowered armies of one. We know how to impose costs and benefits on states. They have an address. It requires vigilance; it can still get ugly; it requires a mix of both force and realistic diplomacy. But it is workable. As it stands, however, the US, the Israelis, and a handful of fellow travelers can only play Whack-a-Mole digging endlessly multiplying suicide bombers out of their foxholes. If war is hell, this type of asymmetric warfare is the seventh circle.

World leaders had a chance to test a new strategy. The choice to use the anemic UN instead of a robust military alliance has utterly thrown this opportunity away. Diplomacy is not at fault. Diplomacy is an essential asset. Rather, we have failed only because some people think that diplomacy means the UN. It doesn’t. Western leaders could have found a way to make the War on Terror tractable, to cooperate humanely with Lebanon, and to maintain the moral imperative of accepting only total victory against terrorist organizations. But they gave it up because they’d rather feed a foolish utopian fetish for a chimerical “world community“ than engage in serious strategic analysis.

The UN has become not just morally repugnant by positioning despots and democrats as equals. It is not just bureaucratic and weak. It has become dangerous. Governments seek its corrupt moral approval and shrink from a just doctrine that demands both clarity and total victory. We have had enough false starts in this War on Terror. Time is running out. Next time, Hezbollah’s rockets might just have nuclear tips.