Jerusalem Summit

To Retain Credibility, U.N. Must Insist Syria Behave

January 7, 2005

The U.N.'s oil-for-food scandal was placed center stage last year, but with Iraqi elections fast-approaching, there is another scandalous development at the U.N. that is beginning to receive national attention: How Syria, which served as a member of the U.N. Security Council from early 2002 through the end of 2003, has been continuing to back international terrorism and even turning itself into the main line of supply for the current insurgency in western Iraq…

Historically, the U.N. had a special role for the Syrians. After the 1991 Gulf War, Secretary of State James Baker visited Damascus to speak with Hafez al-Assad… Baker was trying to organize what would become the Madrid Peace Conference, but kept hearing from the Syrians that U.N. auspices for proposed Arab-Israeli summit was absolutely vital… This was known at U.N. headquarters in New York 10 years later. For that reason, high-level U.N. officials were hopeful that Syria would change its behavior on terrorism, when it was elected for a two-year term to the U.N. Security Council in October 2001 (a month after 9/11), by more than a two-thirds majority by the General Assembly. Since council members were entrusted to safeguard international peace and security, it was then argued, Syria would have to curtail its support for Hezbollah and a dozen other terrorist groups to which it had given sanctuary for nearly two decades. This U.N. scenario for Syria didn't pan out. The regime of Bashar al-Assad continued to defy U.N. resolutions and harbor terrorist groups. Despite explicit warnings from the Bush administration, throughout 2002 Syria helped the regime of Saddam Hussein circumvent U.N. sanctions and allowed illegal Iraqi oil to be pumped through the Syrian oil pipeline to the Mediterranean.

It no longer held Hezbollah on a tight leash but permitted its Iranian backers to reinforce the organization's military infrastructure in Syrian-occupied Lebanon, with thousands of rockets aimed at central Israel, creating a new Middle Eastern powder keg. At the same time, Syria hosted terrorist operatives belonging to the al-Qaida affiliate network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who plotted against Jordan…

This is not just a story about Syria behaving as a rogue state; it is also a glaring example of the U.N. system failing. For security council membership did not lead to more moderate Syrian behavior but rather to the opposite: a more defiant posture than was even witnessed during the years in which Hafez al-Assad ruled Syria. Last month, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the U.S. commander in Iraq, disclosed that the Iraqi insurgency was being run by former Iraqi Baath Party officials from Syria…

What message did the Syrians internalize from this promotion in their international status? If the U.N., from the Syrian standpoint, was the "source of international legitimacy," then Syrian behavior was viewed in the morally skewed universe of the U.N. as legitimate…

The U.N. must demand minimal standards of behavior of member states; if not, it risks becoming a bankrupt idea. The original U.N. of President Roosevelt was born in 1945 in a moment of moral clarity, at which time new members had to declare war on one of the Axis powers. Unless that clarity is restored, the U.N. will not promote world order, but will inevitably turn into an instrument for global chaos instead.

(Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the U.N., is the author of Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos [NY: Crown Forum].)

9.02.2005

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