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The Lessons of History
SIR BRIAN URQUHART
World War 2 after all was no end of a lesson to everybody, and even to the US. And they were determined that the same thing shouldn't happen again.
And when I joined the UN I was absolutely astonished at the sort of Evangelical feelings that the US mission and the US government had about the UN. It was something you really couldn't criticise.
I was very pleased with myself after 6 years in the army, I thought I knew everything, but then said one day...you know I think the charter is wonderful but I really can't think why governments should so completely change that they will actually obey it. It just doesn't seem likely.
I got the most tremendous rocket, actually from Alger Hiss who was then the chairman of the American delegation and a very grand figure in the state department and he said it's cynical young people like you who cause wars. So I was a little bit annoyed about that.
But they had put together with enormous care an organisation which addressed aggression, economic depression, and supposedly disarmament. These were the 3 pillars of the original UN and they had taken huge care to fix the United States Senate which was the trouble the first time with a very complicated formula, including the veto in the Security Council.
And I think, greatly to their credit, they believed that this was going to be a sort of major fundamental change.
And Roosevelt when he came back from Yalta, in speech to the two houses of the Congress, I think it was the last time that he addressed the Congress, he said the new organisation will be an alternative to arms races, balances of power, military alliances and all of the things that had been tried before and have always failed. I mean this was what they were talking about and actually I think they believed in.
And of course if it hadn't been for the Cold War, it is arguable, because the US was so enormously powerful in respect to the rest of the world, and incidentally still enormously respected, which made the Soviet Union very uneasy.
I think if it hadn't been for the Cold War it is conceivable that the Security Council might have worked as it was supposed to have worked at least for a bit.
But of course it couldn't because the concept of the UN was that you took the military alliance which won World War 2 and put it in charge of peace in the world and the trouble was that the real threat to peace was among the premanent members of the Security Council, so had a kind of paradox.
But one can't really overstate the ambition can one? I mean this was supposed to stop war.
It was making the use of for force illegal, except in very clearly defined terms; self-defence, or under the orders of the Security Council. And it was a magnificent concept - there's no question about that.
And I still think that it isn't completely lost, because you know everybody loves to say how irrelevant the UN is but here we are 6 months after the event and it seems to be extremely relevant to what is happening, not only in Iraq but everywhere else as well.
And people said that all along. I can't remember a time when there wasn't some fairly large or partial faction which said Oh God, the UN, hopeless, forget it, and then they always come back to it.
Not that it works very well, it doesn't, it should work much much better. But it is a sort of a start and I think what the league never had was the kind of silent approbation and support of the vast majority of people in the world which I think the UN, for various reasons, good bad and indifferent, the UN does have.
They think the UN is very important to them because they don't are not great powers, they are not nuclear powers, they are living in a very uncertain world and the UN actually is a hell of a lot better than nothing. Somewhere you can turn to when you are really in trouble and also something which is supposed to legitimise the actions even of the greatest in powers.
It's very important.
To return to the actual construct of it; the idea behind the Security Council was that that would provide the teeth that the League of Nations never had.
That's right. Well in particular the military staff committee which has never been taken seriously at all every since.
But it was a huge step forward to have the Chiefs of Staff of the 5 permanent members which were supposedly the 5 most powerful countries in the world as the kind of executive committee for any action -t hat's what it was supposed to be. It was a huge step forward.
But of course the moment you have a sort of head on confrontation, ideologically and otherwise, between the permanent members of the Security Council, that tended to go out the window.
I think what people forget about the UN, is the first place it was like the League, it was set up to deal with the 3 great problems that had led to World War 2, namely, the slump, the depression, the arms race and totalitarian aggression. These were the 3 problems and of course when we got to 1946 and the Charter was set in marble nobody really had taken into account nuclear weapons at all.
I mean in April 1945 - except for a few people in the US govt nobody knew about them, though I think the Russians did know about them but weren't prepared to say so.
Nobody took into account de-colonisation.
I mean the UN in its first 10 years was a very comfortable western organisation with the Russians in a total minority and because they could veto something in the Security Council the United States put forward the resolution which allowed the Security Council if deadlocked by the Cold War to refer a matter to the General Assembly because they had an absolutely safe majority in the General Assembly.
But they hadn't reckoned that de-colonisation was going to be so fast.
I mean when I first joined the UN I remember being told by somebody in the British Foreign office that don't worry about decolonisation because it was going to take at least 100 years.
So I said it somehow doesn't look like that I knew Ralph Bunch very well who was the kind of dynamo of de-colonisation and the person who had set up the trustee system and who had written the chapter in the Charter on the colony.
And it actually took let's see, less than 20 years and it completely revolutionised the UN because it made, it took the form...the great support of the UN in its early years was a very large traditional liberal majority in the two houses of the Congress in Washington, they had huge support for the UN, and when they lost the majority or had a very uncertain control over the General Assembly that began to go and of course the newly independent countries that became the third world that were in their adolescence were extremely anxious to stick their finger in the eye of the United States which certainly didn't help with all sorts of things like the new international economic order and the information order and then worst of all, zionist racism which was the stupidest things which anyone including the Palestinians ever did - that lost at one blow what was the bedrock of the UN which was steady traditional liberal support in the US congress, it just lost it.
Did people worry about what the impact of the veto might be when it..
Yah, lots of people worries about it at the beginning.
Dr Evert, the foreign minister of Australia, Herbert Evert, conducted a huge campaign to say that it was a shameful thing. The Dutch had a shot at it. A lot of people had a shot at it and they finally all they got at the end was a so called gentlemen's agreement that they wouldn't use the veto in any improper way which I mean, ho ho.
There was great resentment at the veto in the beginning.
Then I think in the Cold War people began to see that there was an upside to the Veto. That you couldn't really plunge the nations of the world into war with a superpower on a majority war which would be ... so it was just as well to have a veto.
And of course it was the condition on which both the United States and the Soviet Union joined the UN so without it, it would have been like the League, it would have had no great power.
Not it seems to me a realistic idea.
Do you think it has ever worked as it should do? Some people say that Korea was an example of...
Well Korea was a fluke because the Russians were protesting about the non-recognition of the People's Republic of China and so they absented themselves from all main meetings and they never did it again.
I mean to a ludicrous point.
No Soviet Ambassador could leave the Security Council for any reason while it was in session after Korea and if as sometimes happened that the poor ambassador wanted to go the bathroom he had to get the thing adjourned and of course people wouldn't want to do that and it was very embarrassing.
So they made a huge mistake.
I suppose you could say was that the time it really worked was against Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iraq...I mean Kuwait...As near. That was what it was supposed to do.
I think the low point in the Council in my view was when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980 or whenever it was and the Council under the leadership, I'm sorry to say, of the British and the Americans studiously avoided having a session on it and I managed to get Kurt Waldheim who was then the Secretary general to call a ?? meeting.
Everybody was furious. They said why on earth did you do that?
I said well you know the point of the UN and its major priority was to deal with aggression. This is an absolutely clear case of aggression and it doesn't matter if you hate the victim. It really doesn't, it has nothing to do with it. The whole point is you stop it anyway.
They said that is very unrealistic and I think it's one of the reasons that he didn't think anything would happen when he invaded Kuwait. I think he always thought the Security Council was a paper tiger because of his experience invading Iran which was a much bigger enterprise, incidentally, than invading Kuwait.
Do you think it became, if you like, less of a war stopper and more of an aid giver during that period in the cold war?
No I tell you I think the main political function of the UN, let's not get into all the other stuff which is very important, the non-political, which I think is extremely important which is non political and extremely important, but the main political function I think of the UN was after the Cold War became an absolutely irreducible reality was providing a way of keeping regional conflicts out of the sort of East-West hostility orbit where you risked having a nuclear confrontation if things went wrong.
I mean the Middle East, Cyprus, Kashmir, India- Pakistan, later on the Congo, and these were all, even though the Russian said they didn't really agree with them, they actually supported these things because it was better than having an east-west confrontation.
And it nearly did come to that on one or two occasions.
You know in 1956 in the Suez crisis, one the reasons everybody was so anxious to get UN troops in there and start getting the British and French and Israelis out was because Khruschev was making all these missile rattling statements in Moscow, and talking about volunteers and this sort of thing.
And certainly I mean that was the main function of the UN if one is looking at it an rather cynical way it was very very useful at clamping down and containing regional conflicts like the Congo or Cyprus or even Kashmir. So that you didn't suddenly get one or other of the nuclear superpowers involved and it nearly did happen.
I mean in the 1973 war when if you remember Saddat crossed the Canal and the Israelis for about 3 days had a very rough time indeed and then they finally came back, lead by Sharon, across the canal.
And then there was a cease fire and the Russians were telling the Americans that we should jointly go to the aid of Egypt. That didn't go down too well in Washington. Not a welcome word that.
And so on and then the cease-fire kept breaking down because it was a very complicated situation on the ground because the Israelis would push and then the Egyptians would push somewhere else and it kept collapsing and then the Soviets were moving airborne troops towards the area - or said they were - and the US declared the highest state of nuclear alert it has ever declared, it's called DEFCON 3. I think largely in order to deter the Soviet Union, and then finally it was solved by bunging in a UN peace keeping force to get between the Israelis and the Egyptians and actually make the cease fire work.
But I think it was, from the point of view of the nuclear supervisor, a very tricky moment. It looked very bad.
And I think there were a number of things like that. I think that was the most useful thing the Council did.
So a sort of diplomatic wet blanket if you like sitting on the fire.
Yes a fire blanket really and also to contain things and keep them away from the real major danger to the world. The absolutely awful prospect which was on everybody's mind in those days.
I mean in the back of most people's minds, including children, there was the idea that one day you might wake up and see the whole world just go.
And I don't think it was altogether fanciful. I mean it nearly happened in the Cuban missile crisis.
Just returning to the late 40s early 50s how quickly did people begin to realise that the world for which it had been designed wasn't there any more?
I think the actual Cold War problem became very clear, certainly by 1948 in the Berlin blockade but it was clear even before.
I mean the Soviet Union had been devastated by the war and it saw its ostensible partner the US this colossal power, hugely remarkable power, which was even paying for the reconstruction of the Soviet Union and they hated it.
So there was a lot of, their attitude became more and more frozen and more and more doggedly hostile.
And then you've got the Berlin blockade, and then of course what people now forget is that in Palestine, the Soviet Union were the backers of Israel because they wanted to get after the British colonialists and the United States on the whole was the backer of the Palestinians and the Arabs. I mean everything completely switched.
But even the Soviet Union were anxious that the UN should handle a hot potato like Palestine, they didn't want to get their feet dirty on the ground and neither did the United States, I mean they had a UN mediator and UN observers, there were no American presences, and they really took a back set in the original Arab - Israel war; they worked entirely through Ralph Bunch who was the UN mediator and that was more or less right through to the sort of Kissinger period I think.
I mean in the 60s it was still true that the United States was extremely anxious not to get stuck in the mud in something like Palestine which was a very hot potato at home. They didn't want to do it they wanted to handle it through the UN so the UN was quite useful in that way.
I mean I was trying to think of an national institution that started off with a magnificent mandate which was almost completely negated by events.
But you could of course say that it wasn't negated because the actual machinery kept together, even in its somewhat antediluvian form which it now is that it actually does serve a very useful purpose when powerful countries have no place to go except to war and then its very useful.
I mean they came to it during the Cuban missile crisis after all which was very important because it publicised the whole thing.
And incidentally what gave the Secretary General quite a lot of leeway in trying to sort of damp things down, I think it was much more important in the Cuban missile crisis than people actually give it credit for.
How did it change the atmosphere in New York during that heavy period when those sorts of early hopes people realised weren't quite going to be realised?
Well there was always an absolutely wildly isolationist , violently anti-international one might even say xenophobic group in the US and there still is, perhaps in a slightly different form, and there was on every other country too, but not quite so pronounced as it was here.
I think when it became clear that the Security Council could be blocked by the veto which was the invention of United States and therefore couldn't do a lot of the things the United States wanted it to do that perhaps sort of rather unfairly was seen the fault of the UN.
I mean the UN always was an organisation that it was extremely useful to blame.
Hammarskjold once said that it was like the new Santa Maria and that the people on the shore spent a great deal of time blaming the storms on the ship. And it's absolutely true, they did it in Iraq, they've done it in all.
I think it's right that governments do that when they really want to find something. You know they blame the UN for example for the Rwanda genocide which actually the Security Council didn't do anything under the rather firm leadership of the US which didn't want anything to do with it.
But I think that's always going to happen. But I think there are a plot of people in the US who genuinely believe that this great American creation was really going to change the face of international affairs, and change the face of war and peace and of course it didn't immediately, although you could argue that it certainly contributed to avoiding World War 3 during the cold war and I think it certainly did.
It was an extremely useful safety valve and a sort of safety net generally and I think people underestimated that because what they hoped to see was this great American design dispensing peace, justice, and prosperity throughout the world and of course it didn't.
Though actually I suppose if you really looked into it, it did make a rather considerable contribution.
It is interesting that you talk about the early days and the advantage of having one hugely pre-eminent power that is very much respected. At the moment, people might say the problem with the United Nations is similar; that you have one power.
Well there is one absolutely enormous difference, that the most powerful, easily, relatively, by far the most powerful country in history which is the United States which was the only nuclear power in 1945, apart from being much the most important economic and financial power.
But the difference was that Roosevelt and later on Truman took this having advocated finishing colonial empires, took the line that the United States could never become an empire and it must work through the new organisation, through international co-operation and international law.
And I think that they were perfectly prepared to do that but I think that none of them had foreseen what the Cold War would do, they had not foreseen certainly what the development of the Third World would do.
Nobody had ever heard of the Third World in 1945. I mean it completely changed the dynamic of the organisation, for better of for worse.
I think there was, and I think that then the antics of the third world, I mean it was still true, right up to and through 1973, that the UN would view very sceptically, but when it did actually something that really got everybody out of a horrendous mess as it did in 73, when you had a real threat of east-west confrontation in the Middle East and the UN in a matter of days managed to get rid of that by getting the cease fire pinned down, people then were, for about a month or so, people thought it was wonderful, and then of course, pretty shortly thereafter we got the new International Economic Order and we got all sorts of silly votes in the General Assembly because the Third World had a considerable majority and I think that did create a huge disillusionment in the people who'd really believed in the system.
There are still I think a lot of people, but they must be rather old probably, who think that the basic idea was right and I must say I believe it myself. I think it was a very good try which didn't foresee these enormous new developments.
Do you think it is possible for it to work now as it is currently constructed when again you've go one power which is so much greater...?
You have, whether you like it or not, the pre-eminence of the United States is a fact.
But there is also a fact which has been less, if we are to go on previous experience that there are forces in the world and they are probably much stronger now than they used to be, which even a great military and economic power really can't handle, therefore has to come to term s with these things and the best place to come to terms with them is in the UN.
I very much doubt that anybody can handle terrorism and I don't imagine that terrorism is going to get any less vigilant in the next year or so.
It seems to me that a lot of things that are happening are providing a lot of recruits. That has to be handled whether you like it in co-operation with every other country on earth otherwise you have holes in the system and it doesn't work.
I think it's absolutely true that the more failed nations and completely collapsed states you have around the world the easier it will be to organise large terrorist undertakings so you have to deal with that and the best place to deal with that is in the United Nations.
You have to start putting an underpinning a law under all of these things if you are ever going to get the thing fundamentally better in the end and I must say I think the UN record, the UN record on that is simply extraordinary. The only question is when you are ever going to get to enforcing the law.
I mean I for example have always thought that if the Security Council is going to get into disasters within the borders of one country, which it has on innumerable occasions since 1990, it absolutely has to be able, not just to pass a resolution but to actually do something about it and to do that, many countries don't want to put troops into Liberia or Sierra Leone or some ghastly place, or north east Congo, except under extreme pressure, you really have to have, in the UN, a permanent rapid reaction force, trained to do this kind of thing and with a world class reputation which is one of the most important things.
I mean in its day, the French Foreign Legion in Africa, if you were in an African country and somebody was thinking of having a coup d'etat, you only had to say well a battalion of the Legion is coming on the morrow and people would simply go home and bury their arms. They would give up, they had a huge reputation.
I don't see any reason why we shouldn't have a better reputation than that and be able, once you got it started, it would take about 5 years, to really have something which could turn the tide before it gets into a major human disaster in a place like Liberia or indeed Rwanda.
I mean I think that the credibility of the UN is very much damaged by the fact that it can't act quickly and is seen to be on the side lines beseeching other people to do its work for it.
But of course the trouble with that is that this is the anti-international people in all countries, especially here (USA), hate the idea of anything which will improve the performance of an international organisation, they loathe it.
And an international rapid reaction force which actually worked would be anathema so it would be a large obstacle to overcome, but I still think it's the right thing to do and I think that after another 20 or so humanitarian disasters on a major scale it's probably what will happen. It should be happening, it should have happened before.
I think these kind of things ... I don't believe that the UN is irrelevant at all.
I think it is very incompetent for these reasons, I think it has a structure of governance which makes it extremely difficult to make anything work but that is unfortunately what the constituency is. The constituency is 192 governments of various sizes and shapes and that's what it is all about and until governments are kind of removed as what runs the world you are going to have to that and it is going to be untidy, it is going to be very difficult to run, it's going to depend a great deal on individual leadership, both in governments and in the Secretariat.
I mean the Secretary General spends his entire time making bricks without straw and I must say some of them, including Kofi, do it extremely well I think.
When you look at what he is playing with, by comparison with a n ordinary Sovereign government it's amazing that he has the reputation and the position he has and it's a matter of leadership and personality and as long as we don't have a much more ... I mean it will be much easier to have a kind of executive organisation with a CEO which did what was right all over the world.
It's never going to happen ever.
No government, no matter how liberal, is ever going to put up with that, so we may as well get on with what we've got and if it is a last resort, and a safety net and somewhere governments can go when they are really up the creek without a paddle, that's a hell of a lot better than nothing.
And it will develop I think.
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