Dissent Grows at U.N. Over Iran

Malloch Brown suggested that Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has interpreted the council's inaction as a sign of weakness, and rebuffed its demand to allow more than 20,000 U.N. peacekeepers into Darfur, Sudan, to bring an end to one of the worst human rights calamities in Africa in a decade.

"President Bashir looks at us and he thinks he's seen us blink, and that makes it hugely difficult to credibly address this issue of winning his consent to our deployment," Malloch Brown said. Though he acknowledged there is no stomach for using force to compel Bashir to accept U.N. forces, he said "we can never take the military option off the table."

The U.N. debate over the use of force in Iran and North Korea has focused on Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, a provision that has traditionally been used to enforce U.N. demands through the threat of economic sanctions or military action. Russia and China have refused to support the provision, arguing that it could be used to justify future military action.

The Bush administration argues that a Chapter 7 resolution is required to make sanctions compulsory. "It is simply incorrect" that the phrase "somehow authorizes the use of force," John R. Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said last month.

"There is a suspicion, a misperception that this leads inexorably to the use of force, and it doesn't," British Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry added during recent negotiations on North Korea.

Britain, France and Germany brokered a compromise sanctions resolution on Iran that cites Chapter 7, but it explicitly rules out the possibility that it could be used as a pretext for military action.

Some U.N. experts say the debate exaggerates the importance of a Chapter 7 provision in authorizing the use of force. They note that Chapter 7 was never invoked to authorize the United Nations' two most important Cold War enforcement operations, the Korean War and the 1960 Congo peacekeeping operation. The U.N. Security Council did not cite Chapter 7 when it granted U.N. peacekeepers the right to use force against Israeli troops or Hezbollah militia to enforce a cease-fire between the two combatants.

It may be harder to justify military action without using Chapter 7, "but it doesn't completely shut the door," said Colin Keating, New Zealand's former ambassador to the United Nations and the director of the New York-based Security Council Report.