IRELAND: Will Ireland vote at the United Nations Security Council to wage war against Iraq, asks Patrick Smyth.
No-one seriously believes that George Bush or his administration have become converts to the idea of multilateralism or the United Nations as an instrument of world peace.
What the US President has done, however, in his astute speech to the General Assembly this week, is to turn the tables on the organisation so distrusted by his party and put the onus on it to act to demonstrate its credibility. For Ireland, among others, he has created real problems.
Despite the broad welcome by diplomats for his new focus on the UN, there was considerable disquiet among them about what this means in practise. Belgium's Foreign Minister, Louis Michel, said Bush had answered his European critics and made them squirm. "He gave another chance to Iraq. So we have to ask Iraq, to press Iraq, to deliver now. If Iraq doesn't deliver, it will, of course, be very uncomfortable for some European countries not to support the United States," Michel said.
That was also the message of the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan. In an eloquent defence of multilateralism and the UN system - "I stand before you today as a multilateralist by precedent, by principle, by charter and by duty" - he told the US and Iraq they had to respect their obligations to international law, but he made clear the obligation on the other member states was equally serious.
"The existence of an effective international security system depends on the council's authority and therefore on the council having the political will to act," he argued, "even in the most difficult cases, when agreement seems elusive at the outset."
The Bush speech poses a real dilemma to Irish foreign policy makers, one they can not avoid as they have in the past. Ireland's membership of the Security Council means that it will be a full participant in the decision on whether to sanction force against Iraq, if the latter fails to comply with a likely new strict requirement to facilitate inspectors, and not simply a passive recipient of a policy handed down by the council to which it is bound by the charter.
As a member of the Security Council, moreover, Ireland has a particular obligation to see that its authority is not flouted repeatedly.
The response to US unilateralism can not simply be a formulaic reiteration of the centrality of the UN to global collective security. To be credible and coherent it must be a demonstration of the effectiveness of the multilateral alternative, a robust UN, able and willing to act. If necessary by force.
Bush touched a raw nerve.
"The United Nations was born in the hope that survived a world war - the hope of a world moving toward justice, escaping old patterns of conflict and fear," he argued, using the visionary language of its supporters . "We created the United Nations Security Council, so that, unlike the League of Nations, our deliberations would be more than talk, our resolutions would be more than wishes," he told delegates.
"The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of UN demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honoured and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?"
It is a powerful argument whose logic Ireland will find difficult to escape. Writing in this paper on Thursday the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Brian Cowen, insisted that: "Ireland believes fervently in a system of collective global security founded on the UN and the requirements of international law."
He urged the creation of an international community "which, when necessary, is ultimately prepared to defend the rules against those who violate them".
The State may be neutral, but is not pacifist. It has an Army which has been honourably put to the service of the robust defence of international order, most recently with a peace-enforcing mandate.
And yet Cowen's Department, which insists that the US must wait upon the UN, is silent on how the UN can demonstrate its credibility as an alternative by ensuring its repeated resolutions on Iraq are actually enforced.
It will not be sufficient to argue that other resolutions, such as those on the Middle East, also remain unenforced. A choice will have to be made on the resolution actually before the Security Council. "Will Ireland vote with the US or with Syria?" was how one veteran Irish diplomat put it.
The peace lobby in Ireland is likely to respond "Syria", but a Government mindful of its relationship with Washington and the credibility of the UN is likely to think twice.
Nor will it be possible to take refuge in the suggestion that only a UN force would be acceptable rather than the broader sanctioning of a "coalition of the willing" under US control. The experience of Bosnia, as Annan himself admitted after Srebrenica's massacre, has made it extremely unlikely that the council will again sanction the creation of an unwieldy UN force for a major operation.
The Government may not share the US perception of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. It may believe, as many of its European partners do, that traditional deterrence can still hold a canny survivor in check. But Saddam's continued defiance of an apparently impotent Security Council is also an open invitation to the world's only superpower to bypass the multilateral institution.
Is that a price we are willing to pay? Where do you stand, Ireland?