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in the international community that America would use pre-existing U.N. resolutions as an excuse to implement its own agenda against Iraq (Mingst & Karns 2000, p. 105). How prophetic these concerns turned out to be!

When the time for prosecuting war came in 2003, President Bush II frequently cited Security Council resolutions passed during Bush I and Clinton's presidencies to justify his aggression. The quality of debate in America was degraded, as commentators began speaking of these resolutions as having independent authority - as if the U.N. were a neutral body and did not merely do whatever its most powerful members wanted it to do. All sense of perspective on the moral arguments for and against war was lost, as various sides tried to justify or oppose the invasion using legal terminology. Instead of asking whether it was right or wrong to attack Iraq, people began asking whether it was legalor illegal under international law. But surely the former is more important than the latter when so many lives are at stake?

The Iraqwar represents the culmination of at least 10 years of warmongering by America through the United Nations. The same pattern is now being repeated against Iran, with President Barack Obama taking a hard-line on the issue, just as Bush II did before him. We can expect, no doubt, that any future attack on Iran will also be justified with reference to U.N. resolutions. Hopefully, libertarians would have by then persuaded Americans of the need to withdraw from the U.N. It is imperative that power elites be stripped of their ability to utilize this tool that legitimizes war.

CONCLUSION

As public choice theory would predict, "bureaucracy capture" has occurred at the United Nations. This is not surprising, given its highly politicized nature. We should expect that the most powerful will use the organization as an instrument for their own schemes. In this sense, the U.N. is not an organization dedicated to achieving peace. Rather, it is dedicated to achieving whatever the dominant nation or nations at the relevant time deems worth achieving.

REFERENCES

Murray Rothbard, "The Fallacy of the Public Sector" in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays (Libertarian Review Press, 1974).

Ivan Eland, The Empire Has No Clothes: US Foreign Policy Exposed (Independent Institute, 2008).

Karen Mingst and Margaret Karns, The United Nations in the Post-Cold War Era (Westview Press, 2000).

Learn more about this author, Sukrit Sabhlok.
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