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Millions of protesters against a US-led war on Saddam Hussein have demonstrated that they want peaceful solutions of international disputes. Millions, usually the same people, regard the so-called "United" Nations as the only alternative problem-solver. They fondly imagine the UN to be a law-maker, a source of law, of just and impartial law, a law-enforcement agency. Not so!
In the last resort, the UN is an organization that can seek to maintain peace only by threatening war. Thus it is scarcely logical to regard the UN as a peacekeeping authority. Nor is it even an authority, since its own Charter gives it no power to do anything else but make recommendations. Its Members, being sovereign (Article 2) are not bound to follow any recommendation, not even States that voted in favour.
Itself unable to take action, the UN can in the last resort merely appeal to one or more of its Member States to make war or enforce warlike measures such as sanctions, which punish the weak, the poor and the innocent rather than the guilty. Being sovereign, its Members will of course engage in war or impose sanctions only if they would have done so anyway, even if the UN had never existed. As a peacekeeper the UN is thus a negligible factor in world affairs.
Our present choice is thus between two evils, war or appeasement. Appeasement would not have prevented Mussolini from invading Abyssinia, nor Hitler from conquering the whole of Europe including Britain. Yet just when Saddam Hussein was teetering and Iraqui dissidents were about to eliminate him, the appeasers of the world, whilst professing to hate him, granted him a reprieve.
Considering that the ignorant, unthinking and badly educated are in a majority in this world, it might be logical to assume that the minority have the right idea. But look how at the end of WW2 the self-proclaimed élite revived the League of Nations under the name of the United Nations, despite the ignominious failure of the former! The physicians prescribed "the mixture as before."
It seems logical to conclude that the vast majority of the world's population hates war and demands something better than the UN to provide an alternative. What is needed is a genuine peacekeeping authority with the de jure and de facto power to reach decisions without shady horse-trading and to enforce such decisions peacefully without having to beseech possible lawbreakers to carry out its decisions on its behalf.
If such an authority comprised all the nations of the world, all with voting powers, it would be like a barrel of fruit containing many rotten apples. It would fail as ignominiously as our two world leagues . Yet such a union of the democracies would be potentially so successful that all others would clamour to join, and democracy might spread like wildfire across the despotic world. Remember the dramatic collapse of the Communist empire!
The governing body of such a union would of course have to be controlled by a democratically elected parliament, and would be constitutionally empowered to deal only with a limited list of powers. e.g. defence (including anti-terrorism); foreign policy, civil aviation and power to tax for its' own existence. All other powers would remain with the national governments and citizens where they already rest.
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