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THE US PRESENCE IN IRAQ IS SEEN AS A GREATER THREAT TO WORLD PEACE THAN IRAN'S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS.

The UN serves US interests
Financial Times

By Philip Stephens
Published: June 17 2006

...Some saw a crude attempt at bullying. More interesting, I thought, was the anguish behind the rage. For all Mr Bolton's bluster, George W. Bush's administration has acknowledged that acting effectively in the world requires legitimacy as well as power. No one hates the idea of admitting this more than its ambassador in New York.

Nothing new in the bullying by Bolton.

Mark Malloch Brown, the deputy secretary-general had the temerity to suggest that the US should face up to the deliberate ambiguities of its attitude to the UN. When it suited it, he said, Washington saw the organisation as a useful instrument to promote its interests. In between, it played to a raucous gallery of anti-UN prejudice among segments of the media and Middle America. Mr Bolton is accustomed to plain language - as long, that is, as he is the one delivering it. The ambassador, I have heard a US official observe, is one of those people who calls a spade a spade. The downside, this official lamented, was that to Mr Bolton's eye almost everything looks like a spade. So a UN bureaucrat telling America how to behave was never going to elicit a friendly response. The ambassador is right to say that the UN's largest paymaster has the capacity to wreck the organisation. The threat, though, is empty. The important question is whether the US needs an effective UN. The answer the Bush administration has given, pace Mr Bolton, is yes. Iraq has shown the limits of military might in general and of American intervention in particular. As Mr Malloch Brown suggested, it has thrown up new international coalitions intent on balancing US power. Many of the sensible and necessary reforms of the UN advocated or supported by the US are opposed by some non-aligned nations simply because they bear Washington's stamp. Suspicion of his motives, in other words, has shackled a ball and chain to Mr Bush's ankle.

Is Bolton in the UN the match up of US forces in Iraq.

In most nations, the US presence in Iraq is seen as a greater threat to world peace than Iran's nuclear ambitions.

THE US PRESENCE IN IRAQ IS SEEN AS A GREATER THREAT TO WORLD PEACE THAN IRAN'S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS.

All this is anathema to Mr Bolton. As an official in the state department, he epitomised the assertive nationalism that drove US foreign policy during Mr Bush�s first term. Scornful of international institutions and law, he openly celebrated America�s muscular unilateralism. The administration has travelled halfway back from this position. It has accepted, albeit grudgingly, the value of legitimacy in the exercise of power. It still instinctively favours coalitions of the willing over rules-based multilateralism but has at least begun to make the effort. We can probably expect no more of this administration than its reluctant conversion to pragmatism. But one of these days an American president needs to explain that Roosevelt and Truman were not altruists. They built the UN because, for all its inevitable flaws, it serves American interests.

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