The UN's missions impossible

摘要

The use of the United Nations as an international police force has, in the space of the past decade, ballooned, shrivelled again when things went wrong, and now, with Kosovo, East Timor and Sierra Leone, once again grown fat. Increasingly, the liberal world's fitful conscience does not want to live with barbarity, and demands that it be checked. Usually, the un is the only available instrument. But the one constant, throughout those ten troubled years, is that the Security Council, the world's flawed policymaker, continues to instruct its policemen to do what needs to be done without providing them with the means to do it.