Critics have called for the United Nation's dissolution almost since its founding. Now, a small but vocal group in the United States senses a new opportunity to renew its anti-U.N. efforts.

In sweeping rhetoric critics liken the U.N. to the ill-starred League of Nations and argue that recent events demonstrate that collective efforts to deal with the world's most difficult and dangerous challenges can yield little more than endless chatter and hand wringing. In their view, only when the powerful take matters in hand can problems be solved.

These observers see a world where self-determined righteous might makes right and one in which military force is, in the end, the only effective arbiter of major disputes.

They are wrong on nearly every count. In fact, the U.N. has come to embody the simple reality that force cannot do all that needs doing and all that needs doing cannot be done alone.

Today, the U.N. is more important than ever — not only for the vast majority of the world's peoples, but also for the totality of the world's states — including its most powerful. Indeed, as it has matured over 50 years; the U.N. has become — unevenly, imperfectly, but unmistakably — the only place where the world can come together to pool strengths and share burdens.

It is true that some of the institutional machinery is in need of overhaul. Yet, by many measures, the U.N. is an extraordinary success.

It provided an indispensable mechanism for ending colonialism and helping to manage the transition for many states to independence. It has become the centrepiece of global efforts to tackle complex transnational problems in such areas as health, the environment, chronic poverty and deprivation.

Moreover, it is at the heart of the work of generations to promote human rights on a global scale and in more recent decades to help people recover from the devastation of war. Perhaps most important, it has become the essential means to create the political and physical space necessary for difficult problems to be resolved in ways short of war.

The U.N. provides a place for dialogue, deliberation, and diplomacy. Indeed, it is the only global arena where nations can in peace air grievances, confront opponents, craft solutions, and marshal resources that (almost inevitably) require the help of others.

Many disputes between and within states unleash violence that cannot be neatly confined to those in the fight. To deal with the wider threats posed by such violence, U.N. member states have given special responsibilities to the Security Council, whose deliberations and decisions are largely now matters of open record.

The U.N. has, in effect, made possible unprecedented transparency and a new sense of accountability among those who decide the world's most momentous issues.

Such transparency and accountability can only be welcomed. In an earlier era (well within living memory for many of the world's citizens) gravely important matters were often decided in back rooms where napkins substituted for map sheets and impressions substituted for understanding. In secret, sometimes capricious deals, narrow, even transient, political interests were frequently traded in equal weight with the enduring fate of millions.

The U.N. is also a place for action, not only when crisis looms, but also every day, in the face of the steady — and long-term — demand for development assistance, humanitarian aid, refugee protection, essential health services, environmental preservation, and countless other chores that lie beyond the capacities of governments to handle on their own.

Such needs are nearly overwhelming and the U.N. provides both the framework and machinery to initiate and sustain the international efforts to make real progress in these areas. Such mechanisms are superior to an environment where co-operation is ad hoc and where states are thus forced to confront every problem as if for the first time.

Moreover, in addition to its substantive strengths and legitimacy, the U.N. has established links with other international organizations with means to help and it has become well practiced in drawing on the vast array of resources, talent, and commitment in the worldwide nongovernmental community.
Preventing the emergence of widespread violence, and helping to create capable societies with security, well-being, and justice, based on the rule of law, is a big job.

These aims depend on integrating political, economic, and social strategies and rely on the comparative advantages of governments, international institutions, as well as the nongovernmental and for-profit private sectors. While U.N.-organized interventions have not been without their problems, no better repository of experience, expertise, and legitimacy exists to pull all of this together.

War has come again in Iraq. A military victory alone will not yield the desired results of the Iraqi people and the wider region no longer menaced by a tyrant and a world no longer held hostage to his whims.

In many respects, when the shooting ends, the real work will just begin, to help create a capable society in Iraq where representative governance, widespread economic opportunity, and the rule of law prevail. The U.N. is essential to secure the kind of peace that will help prevent the emergence of instability and opportunism that could scourge the region for generations and demonstrate clearly that it is possible to reverse the chronic conditions of deprivation and discrimination where terror sinks its root.

In this way, success in the war in Iraq links to success in the global war on terror. Even beyond Iraq, states must join efforts to help create capable societies in the world's forgotten corners — with help to build the political, economic, and social structures that the people themselves choose and that permit them to manage their affairs and their differences, at home and abroad, in relative peace.

History offers a model here.

In the wake of World War II, the United States worked with others, victor and vanquished, to help create capable societies — capable partners — in Europe and Asia. It worked with others to establish the United Nations so that the time- and energy-consuming steps necessary to marshal resources, divide labour, exploit comparative advantage, and establish rightful ownership of the processes and results of rebuilding societies devastated by war would not have to be repeated. The long-term results speak for themselves.

Force cannot solve every problem, and no state alone can do all that needs doing. The states, and more important, the people of the world need the U.N. Now, more than ever.

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