If We Want to Annihilate the Islamic State, It’s Time for the UN to Act

The terrorist attacks in Paris on Nov. 13 occurred only a month after the 70th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations; the timing of the two events provided a sharp contrast.

The U.N. was formed in 1945; its main objectives were to “maintain international peace and safety,” “stop acts of invasion,” and ”facilitate international collaborations,” etc. However, when faced with threats of terrorism, the Islamic State, the Syrian crisis, the European refugee crisis, etc., the organization is at a loss about what to do.

Organizational issues with the U.N. are exposed when it is facing nontraditional security problems, especially terrorism. We can see two problems with the U.N.’s reactions to dealing with problems like Syria and the Islamic State group.

First, more and more countries are circumventing the Security Council and launching military operations. In 2011, Britain, France, and the U.S. jointly overrode U.N. authorization to overthrow the Gadhafi regime. In 2014, the U.S. used the excuse that the Assad administration was illegal to skip U.N. authorization and launched airstrikes in Syria. Similarly, after the Paris terrorist attacks, the French government used self-defense as the reason to increase attacks on the Islamic State group.

Second, the U.N.’s main purpose is to facilitate the relationships between countries. However, while dealing with nontraditional international entities like the Islamic State group, the U.N. lacks effective legal weapons and political means. Even though the U.N. passed the U.N. Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy on Sept. 8, 2006, set up a global list of terrorist organizations, and encouraged the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Interpol to attack these organizations’ sources of money and weapons, its effectiveness has been limited.

In order to annihilate the Islamic State group, most Western military analysts believe in the following two criteria.

First, there needs to be a military presence on the ground. Currently, only Kurdish fighters and Syrian government forces are there. Airstrikes alone are unable to defeat the Islamic State group, but the possibility of various countries sending ground forces to fight the Islamic State group is miniscule.

Second, to solve the Islamic State group problem, the Syrian problem needs to be fixed first. The USA, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria all need to sit down together and look for a political solution that everyone can accept, even though this would mean a diplomatic failure for Western countries, especially France.

Based on historical precedent, for the U.N. to solve any international crisis, all involved countries (especially the five permanent members of the Security Council) have to agree, which is true for the Islamic State group problem as well.

For a long time, Western countries, Russia and Iran have had fundamental differences on whether the Assad administration is legitimate. Some countries even believe that as long as the Islamic State group did not attack them, it could be a useful political tool, which has led to the current crisis.

After the Paris terrorist attacks, all the countries are beginning to reach a consensus on the necessity and urgency for annihilating the Islamic State group, which would provide a way in which the U.N. could be effective in its role.

The author is a visiting scholar in France.