Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 30, 1993 TAG: 9309080398
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
They could take great pride in what they had accomplished. The totalitarian combination of Germany, Italy and Japan had at last been decisively defeated on the battlefields of Europe and Asia. The political grip or the dictatorships had been broken, and much of the land they had conquered lay in ruins.
On the surface, at least, the Allies had proceeded smoothly to destroy the dictatorships. Britain and France, it was true, had come close to defeat in the first year and a half of World War II. The Soviet Union, which had struck a devil's bargain with Hitler in 1939, only entered the fighting after being invaded in 1941; and it too, suffering the greatest losses of the entire war, had been near defeat. Nor had the United States leaped into the fray until it had been attacked by Japan later that year.
Still, the victory was impressive, and owed as much to Allied cooperation as it did to the enormous military and industrial power of the United States, which, once engaged, proved to be, as Franklin Roosevelt called it, ``the arsenal of democracy.''
With victory absolute throughout the world and their enemies in tatters, the Allies, though tattered here and there themselves, could look forward to a future of peaceable cooperation similar to the military cooperation they had shown each other during the war.
One of the ways by which they hoped to maintain that cooperation was the United Nations, created - mostly at the instigation of the United States - in the closing days of the war. Something similar had been tried after World War I with the League of Nations, but without American membership - scuttled by the Republican ``irreconcilables'' of the U.S. Senate - and a peacekeeping arm, it proved impotent. Italy invaded Abyssinia without league action, and the league turned out to be equally powerless against German invasion of the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.
So the United Nations, when it came into being in 1945, would be different: not only a congress of the nations subscribing to its charter but a vehicle with the power to keep the peace with its own troops, contributed by its own member nations.
Alas, this too proved at crucial moments to be a chimera. Though U.N. presence succeeded again and again in ameliorating small border difficulties, it was, it seemed, powerless when the stakes were high. The troops fighting the North Koreans and Chinese between 1950 and 1953 fought nominally under U.N. sponsorship, and the world called it a ``police action'' instead of a war, but it was an American show.
No serious U.N. peacekeeping was even attempted in Vietnam. Nations employed the United Nations when it suited their purposes, ignored it when it did not. They called for it to act when unwilling to act themselves. In the United States, a rabid Republican right wing derided it and cynically called for its dissolution. The United States even let its dues fall into dangerous arrears.
Now the world faces new instances in which international cooperation seems impossible to attain. In Somalia, a U.N. force dispatched to maintain the peace has been turned into a fighting body. In Bosnia, the U.N. appears to be not only ineffectual but doomed to failure, perhaps the demise of its own troops. The European nations, for half a century dependent on the United States to save their skin, refuse to act. The United States seems unwilling to act.
In all of this the impotence of democracies based on popular opinion appears obvious. The United States, Britain, France and Germany will not act because public opinion opposes it. Yet the stakes are as high as they have ever been, for ``ethnic cleansing'' is as great a crime as the Holocaust. And the United Nations is still proving effective in smaller conflicts. It seems premature to give up on it.
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB