Argument over on the first day. The Scuds falling on Kuwait prove that Saddam Hussein was playing games with the weapons inspectors all along: poor Hans Blix was simply being strung along, and with him the entire world, writes Kevin Myers
Though perhaps I shouldn't use the word "poor" about a man who undertook to do a job, but then lost his nerve; and in doing so, he gave Saddam vital propaganda fodder, with his witless vapourings about what the weapons inspectors might have achieved with "more time".
Saddam has had time - 12 years of time. The Scuds show how risible were Blix's declarations that Saddam had been "pro-actively disarming" and that, with yet more time, more disarmament would follow. For tyrants don't disarm merely because good people want them to, as the lamentable fate of the League of Nations tells us.
The League of Nations was brought low not by the absence of the US, but by its own cretinous infirmity wherever fascism raised its head. It chose the path of sanctions to confront Italy after the invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. That achieved nothing whatever, any more than the sanctions against Iraq achieved anything. Abyssinia was not liberated by anything but the unilateral force of arms of the British and Indian armies in 1941; and without those arms, Italy would be in Addis Ababa to this day.
There has been so much recent talk about the UN being a source of authority and legitimacy. It is neither. It has no executive arm and it is not a law-making body.
It stood by and watched Rwanda, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, the Ivory Coast fall into the hands of murderous thugs. And wherever action was taken to end the rule of genocidal killers, it was taken unilaterally by the US, by Britain, by France, acting without the authority of the UN.
So it is not the Americans who have fatally undermined the authority of the UN, but the UN itself, with its pomposities, its conceits, its humbug, its meaningless pieties. The UN has holed itself below the water-line upon the rocks of Iraq, but it was not the US which drove it onto those rocks. The UN did that itself.
We have been told about the UN as a source of "international law", as if anything remotely binding, morally or legally, could emanate from a Security Council in which votes were being clearly bought as the Iraq crisis came closer to war. How could anyone take a vote by Guinea seriously? How is it possible to maintain that the UN has effective authority over anybody, either a state or an individual, simply because one vile African dictatorship has been bribed to take a particular stance on an international issue? For law to have meaning it must be conferred by a moral authority which the citizen respects; and it must be enforced by an executive which answers to that authority.
For the past 60 years the world has pretended that the UN was such a body, when it clearly was not. Yet the fiction itself acted as a hindrance on criminal behaviour. The world agreed to an untruth, almost as a religious principle beyond the tests of proof or enforcement, and generally speaking the fiction worked: compliance was achieved.
This didn't transform the fiction into truth, the falsehood into reality. We all paid respect to the one godhead, and all spouted similar mumbo-jumbo about the authority of the UN, the respect it commanded and the legitimacy it conferred. Yet when it was directly challenged, it was unable to enforce its will. All it could do was to observe and monitor: and what kind of authority is it which merely watches criminality, but does nothing about it?
The US at bottom knew this - which is why is felt so free to use its veto so often, especially in defence of its bizarre relationship with Israel. "International law" was made meaningless when a single state could arbitrarily and unfailingly prevent its implementation on a single issue.
But it is Iraq which has stripped the United Nations bare of all the raiments of piety; and now the UN stands naked and powerless, like the emperor before the little boy. Think back now to the pathetic sight of the tiny band of weapons inspectors wandering like baffled tourists around a country that is 170,000 square miles in area - or, if you prefer, six times the size of Ireland, home to scores of IRA arms dumps.
How could anyone take such a process of inspection seriously? How could so much hope have been invested in it? It merely produced some fatuous, pilotless drones, apparently made from balsa wood and glue, and failed to find ballistic missiles, sitting there, ready for launching. It could almost be laughable; but it is not of course, for it spells the end of an old order, and nothing is more terrifying.
We may call the new era PB: Post Blix. His banal naïvety has helped bring an end to the fiction which was the UN, with its armies of self-important officials flying first-class around the world, achieving little but burning holes in the ozone layer.
And now it's over. The regime of faux UN consensus, of apparent compromises, of agreeing new variations on old fictions, and of allowing tyrannies equal voting authority with democracies, is dead; and deplore its death as we might, much as we might deplore the movements of intergalactic comets, we cannot breathe life into those bones.
We are unlucky. We are living in interesting times.