Earlier this week the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute gave a sneak peek at their annual study on the state of the world.  According to the study, since 1991 the number of conflicts has decreased by a third.  Even by the broader standards used by Canada’s Project Ploughshares, from 1995 to 2003 there was still a twenty percent drop in the number of conflicts.

The Human Security Center, working with Sweden’s Uppsala University, found a similar drop in conflict-related deaths.  They estimate “battle-related deaths…, because of the Iraq war, rising to 20,000 in 2003. Those estimates are sharply down from annual tolls ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 in the 1990s…, and from a post-World War II peak of 700,000 in 1951.”

By any measure these are remarkable numbers.  The various reports point to one organization has being responsible for these marked improvements: the United Nations.  Andrew Mack, director of the Canadian center, insists, “The end of the Cold War liberated the U.N. to do what its founders had originally intended and more.”

Perhaps a reality check is in order.  The UN certainly deserves credit for the increase in peace around the world, but the studies’ emphasis on peace calls into question their definition of the word.  The reports insist the Iraq war is partially to blame for the movement away from peace in the past year.  If true, that means the hundreds of thousands of people killed by Hussein, and other like-minded tyrants, are ignored in the interests of world peace.  That is, they are more interested in maintaining the status quo rather than real peace.

This is precisely the problem most of the world has with the United States’ removal of Hussein: we messed up the peaceful order of things, even if he did kill thousands.  The UN did itself immeasurable damage by refusing to stop Hussein’s murderous regime.  They insisted that inspections were accomplishing something to perpetuate their hopeful avoidance of war.  They wanted to maintain the peace, regardless of the faultiness of it.  The success of Kim Jong-il’s North Korea provides no better example of what the United States was attempting to avoid in Iraq and of the UN’s inability to handle desperate situations.  UN peacekeeping missions are repeatedly deployed to countries where there is little or no risk of a strong response from the indigenous people – think East Timor, the Balkans, or Rwanda.  Yet, when there is a risk of a strong response that might result in the deaths of peacekeepers, the UN simply wrings its hands and worries about the loss of life while carefully avoiding any risk of offending the tyrant – as is the case currently in Iran and North Korea.

In this new war on terror, though, the status quo is simply not sustainable.  It is the responsibility of all free nations to prevent the spread of terrorism, and there is no greater weapon against terror than freedom.  This is proven by the strong responses of the Taliban to Afghanistan impending elections and the Iraq’s terrorist insurgency.  They fear freedom because it means the end of their power, and an end to the opportunity to recruit a new generation of terrorists.

President George W. Bush sent a clear message to the terrorists around the world on September 20, 2001, “we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism.  Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.  From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”  Regardless of what Bush- and America-haters might insist, that “us” is not the United States, but rather all civilized nations who understand the importance of freedom.  A group that should include the UN, but too often does not.

The UN prefers to send a different message to terrorists and the world leaders willfully supporting them.  The UN is willing to ignore genocides (Rwanda, Sudan), massacres committed by brutal fundamentalists (Afghanistan, Iran), the starvation of a people (Zimbabwe, Liberia), the death of thousands with bioweapons (Iraq), or the development of nuclear capabilities (Iran, North Korea) in the interests of perpetuating their façade of world peace.

If that’s the tact they choose to take, then so be it.  But, one must wonder what the UN and its proponents will do after the first terrorist uses a nuclear bomb.  What will they say when the subsequent year’s Human Security Center death count is an eight or even nine digit number?

Perhaps then they will decide to change the status quo.

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