Iraq has been on the United Nations Security Council's agenda for a quarter century. As noted UN expert David Malone shows, their tempestuous relationship has been a two-way street: just as the UN has changed Iraq, so Iraq has reshaped the UN.
In many ways, Iraq has been the organization's greatest challenge - dividing the UN's membership, overwhelming its staff, flaunting its covenants, manipulating its inspectors, and engulfing it in two bloody conflicts.
Malone traces the Security Council's evolution as it sought to manage this most vexing of global security challenges. He shows how the Council's role on Iraq evolved from a Cold War peacemaker to a policeman of the New World Order, to a weapons inspector and a sanctions enforcer. The shifting imperatives of the United States, the UK, France, and Russia are also explained and placed in historical context. Iraq forced the Council to reckon with unforseen problems of legality and legitimacy, and to find a way forward when its most powerful member insisted on taking action without its blessing.
Malone also examines the now-infamous Iraq Oil-for-Food Program. With an academic's rigor, he shows that despite its deep politicization and a scale that was well beyond the UN Secretariat's management capacity, Oil-for-Food was a largely successful humanitarian program. As with so many UN instruments, it was a flawed attempt to meet urgent human needs while balancing the interests of the permanent members of the Security Council.
Illuminated throughout are the Security Council's unique strengths as a multilateral arbiter of international relations, and its crippling institutional weaknesses as a fragile vessel for great power interests. Ultimately, Malone shows, Iraq spurred the Council to evolve from an ad hoc mediator of conflicts and crises to a regulator seeking to redefine the rules of the global game.
Anyone seeking a clear, balanced analysis of the evolving geopolitics that shape Security Council decisions will be well served by this excellent book.
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