Nation against nation: what happened to the U.N. dream and what the U.S. can do about it.

NATION AGINST NATION

Supporters of the United Nations and its global peacekeeping mission should consider the lesson of FIJIBAT.

FIJIBAT is the military name for a battalion of troops from the Fiji Islands that, during the early 1980s, formed part of UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. The roughly 6,000-man UN peacekeeping force has also included Scandinavian troops--known as NORBAT and FINBAT--as well as contingents from such unlikely countries as Ghana and Senegal.

Most of UNIFIL is an expensive joke and an illustration of why the United Nations has failed so miserably in its central task of keeping the peace and deterring aggression among nations. The UNIFIL mission looked sensible on paper. After the 1978 Israeli incursion into Southern Lebanon, the United Nations voted to send troops to police a buffer strip between the major PLO strongholds of South Lebanon and the Israeli border. Their job, in theory, was to separate the combatants--to curb Palestinian attacks against Israel and to block a new Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

In fact, UNIFIL proved to be a toothless, pseudomilitary force that didn't deter anyone from doing anything. It failed to prevent Palestinian rocket attacks against the Israeli towns of northern Galilee; later, when the Israeli army invaded Lebanon in June 1982, UNIFIL stepped politely aside. The UNIFIL forces presented an absurd sight in South Lebanon, traveling from village to village in their antiseptic white Jeeps, tut-tutting the locals and issuing dire warnings, but never doing anything credible to keep the peace.

Except for FIJIBAT. The Fijians, it was said, had a simple way of handling troublemakers. Rather than issue European-style reprimands to misbehaving Palestinians, they simply broke their fingers.

"The Fijians didn't mess around,' recalls one State Department official. "If the rule was you weren't to carry a gun across a checkpoint, then the Fijians made sure you weren't carrying a gun.' In the process of enforcing the rules, the Fijians lost 18 men, more than the other contingents of UNIFIL. They even tried briefly in 1982 to stop the invading Israelis from crossing a bridge in their sector, until cooler heads at UNIFIL command prevailed.

The story of FIJIBAT was related to me in Beirut several years ago, probably at a hotel bar late in the evening, so I cannot vouch for the finger-breaking detail. My informant claimed that in the vicinity of FIJIBAT you could see scores of Palestinians with finger splints. Alas, I never found any. But the broader point remains valid: you won't be taken seriously as a peace-keeper, in South Lebanon or anywhere else, unless you're prepared to break a few fingers.

A "cosmic overselling'

The UNIFIL debacle in Lebanon is a small example of the global problem that Thomas Franck explores in Nation Against Nation.* His topic is the failure of the UN to accomplish the "two principal tasks . . . on which it ultimately must be judged'--resolving disputes among nations and, failing that, deterring or resisting aggression. After marshaling overwhelming evidence of this failure, he notes the depressing statistic that since the UN was founded in 1945, 20 million people have died in wars.

* Nation Against Nation: What Happened to the U.N. Dream and What the U.S. Can Do About It. Thomas M. Franck. Oxford, $19.95.

Reckoning with the failure of the UN is a painful process for anyone who grew up in the postwar era of hopeful, high-minded liberalism. For the UN was in many ways symbolic of that liberalism. It represented the belief in human perfectibility, the notion that institutions could transform the base human instincts that produced wars, and the dream of an international brotherhood of man. This was the "secular humanism' that conservatives denounce today, and the UN was perhaps its holiest shrine.

The robust post-war world that produced the UN is now, for me, a set of childhood memories: playing with my father's World War II medals and hearing stories about how the good guys had won; listening to the voice of Edward R. Murrow on the 78-rpm version of "I Can Hear I Now' as he described the horrific history of the 20th century converging on the explosion of the atom bomb and the foundation of the UN--and asking in his gravelly voice whether in 1945 the world had reached midnight and the end or "walked into a new dawn'; visiting New York as a boy and looking, awestruck, at the clean, austere facade of the UN building on the East River; even the silly Halloween ritual of trick-or-treating for UNICEF, which was another part of the kids' version of the age of high liberalism.

Those memories seem faintly comical now, reminiscent of an era--confident, naive, sentimental--that has passed as surely as the Old South. The American public is more cynical now about an international body full of high-living Arabs and Africans who seem to spend most of their time wasting American money and denouncing Israel. Indeed, the public image of the UN today is probably close to the MacNelly cartoon that shows unshaven delegates from places with unpronounceable names sitting in the General Assembly with pots on their heads.

Franck argues that the UN has fallen so low in the public esteem largely because of the "cosmic overselling' of the early days. He explains: "No understanding of the present attitudes of Americans toward the UN can be achieved without taking into account the utterly false premises on which the UN charter was based, and then sold to the public.' He quotes a telling example of the near-religious enthusiasm for the UN in a 1945 lobbying message to Congress from a Unitarian group in support of the organization. "It all adds up to this: whether there is to be World War No. 3 is up to you.'

The fundamental problem, Mr. Franck suggests, is that the UN charter was premised on a belief that individual states would subordinate their national interests (or at least unilateral military actions in pursuit of those interests) for the sake of the larger good of world government. The past 40 years have been a continuous lesson in the unrealism of that premise. Lacking a monopoly of force, the UN has been powerless to restrain its well-armed members.

The value of Franck's book is that it should convince readers to stop complaining about the UN and take a more realistic view of hew and why it has fallen on such hard times. Indeed, he presents convincing evidence that the U.S. is to blame for some of the UN's worst problems.

Take the UN General Assembly, the buffoonish, pot-headed gathering that, in the American view, has hijacked the UN. Franck demonstrates that it was the U.S.--not the Soviets and their Third World cronies--that engineered the transfer of power from the Security Council to the General Assembly in the early 1950s. The Americans thought they had come up with a clever stratagem for getting around Soviet vetoes in the Security Council. But the British Foreign Office warned at the time that the move was unwise because of the coming surge of newly independent Asian and African nations.

A look at the 1984 membership totals shows why the General Assembly is an awkward forum for American interests. Like most legislative bodies, it breaks down into voting blocs that trade support on major issues. By Franck's count, out of 159 total members, there are 120 developing nations, 99 members of the non-aligned movement, 50 members of the African Group, 33 members of the Latin American Group, and only 22 members of the Western European Group.

The Middle East briar patch

As for the UN's failure as a peacekeeper, Franck argues that the U.S. must also share some of the blame. The U.S. was delighted in 1950 to obtain UN cover for its defense of South Korea (achieved only because of a foolish tactical blunder by the Soviets, who boycotted the Security Council meeting that approved the UN force); but when Guatemala requested help in suppressing a CIA-sponsored coup in 1954, the U.S. blocked action by the Security Council. The Soviets followed the same approach when they invaded Hungary in 1956.

The UN is in tatters today partly because it has fallen very deep into the briar patch of the Middle East. The organization's cheerleading role for the PLO is part of the problem. But I think the deeper difficulty is that the UN has devoted an enormous amount of its energy, money, and good will to the thankless, perhaps hopeless, task of trying to solve the intractable problems of the Middle East. For example, Franck counts 13 UN peacekeeping missions since the organization was founded: Greece, Pakistan, Kashmir, Suez and Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, Zaire, West Irian, Yemen, Cyprus, India, Pakistan, and Syria. What's remarkable is that more than half of these missions have been in the Middle East.

Franck reaches a conclusion that might best be described, in this magazine at least, as "neoliberal.' He implies that a sound approach to the UN should reject the wet-lipped reverence of traditional liberalism and the whining and carping of the neoconservatives. The U.S. should use the power of the purse (we paid 25 percent of the assessed budget in 1982) to restrain the miscreant UN bureaucracy. We should look at how countries vote in the UN in distributing foreign aid, so that cheap shots from Third World countries are no longer costless. We should recognize the useful mediating role that the UN secretary general can play in world conflicts, from Cyprus to the Iraq-Iran war.

Instead of the feel-good conservative approach of quitting the UN, Franck prescribes what I would call a get-tough liberalism. "For the present,' he writes, "the U.S. national interest is better served by a muscular strategy of staying in.'