Thomas R. Eddlem
New American
September 30, 2013
When the United Nations Security Council agreed to enforce a chemical
arms ban in Syria, it was a significant step toward establishing the
United Nations as a global police force. “Tonight, the international
community has delivered,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said after
the September 27 agreement was concluded. “I welcome the commitment to
safeguard and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles.”
The Syria agreement followed up on Ki-moon’s September 24 address opening
the UN General Assembly. “I urge you to embrace the global logic of our
times,” Ki-moon said. “With our fates ever more entwined, our future
must be one of ever deeper cooperation. In this transformed global
landscape, let us find new ways of governing, partnering and
problem-solving. Let us empower the United Nations to be more than a
first responder or a last resort.”
The idea that the United Nations would increasingly engage in
“governing” and become “more than a first responder” was also engaged by
top Obama administration officials. “The United Nations Security
Council has demonstrated that diplomacy can be so powerful it can
peacefully defuse the worst weapons of war,” U.S. Secretary of State
John Kerry said after the vote. Kerry continued:
But tonight’s resolution, in fact, accomplishes even more. Through
peaceful means, it will for, the first time, seek to eliminate entirely a
nation’s chemical weapons capability, and in this case specifically
Syria’s. On-site inspections of the places that these weapons are stored
will begin by November, and under the terms of this agreement, those
weapons will be removed and destroyed by the middle of next year…. For
the first time since Syria’s civil war began, the Security Council is
spelling out in detail what Syria must do to comply with its legal
obligations. Syria cannot select or reject the inspectors. Syria must
give those inspectors unfettered access to any and all sites and to any
and all people…. We are here united tonight in support of our belief
that international institutions do matter, that international norms
matter. We say with one voice that atrocities carried out with the
world’s most heinous weapons will not be tolerated. And when
institutions like the Security Council stand up to defend the principles
and values that we all share, when we put violent regimes on notice
that the world will unite against them, it will lead not only to a safer
Syria, but it will lead to a safer world.
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