COLUMN LEFT : The U.N.’s Job Is to Stop, Not Start, Invasions : Those who called for limited war aims are wrong to now demand intervention.

What is sorely lacking in the United States is an authentic left-wing viewpoint. That was the conclusion I reached after reading in this space an allegedly left-wing column about Iraq by Alexander Cockburn. That article was replete with fancy invective but devoid of perceptive analysis.

Before World War II, socialists pleaded for measures of collective security to stop the aggressors in Europe and Asia. Their pleas were in vain, thwarted by appeasement by Britain and isolationism in the United States.

The United Nations was formed in 1945 in an attempt at a new start. For 45 years, the Cold War neutered the United Nations. That Cold War ended just in time for the the organization at last to be able to act decisively when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August, 1990.

That the United Nations had failed in the past, over U.S. policy toward Nicaragua and Grenada, over Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, over British and French aggression at Suez, is no excuse for deriding the welcome, however belated, exercise of U.N. authority in the Gulf crisis.

Here, at long last, collective security was invoked, and here, at long last, collective security worked. First, sanctions were imposed, enforced by U.N.-authorized naval and air blockades.

Socialists in Britain and Europe urged that sanctions be given the maximum possible time to achieve their objective. That objective, however, was not--as Alexander Cockburn in his column implied--to bring Iraq to the negotiating table. Having swallowed Kuwait, Saddam Hussein repeatedly offered to disgorge his meal (or part of it) in exchange for concessions that would simply have been a reward for his aggression.

The sanctions were imposed specifically to achieve compliance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 660, which required unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. The option of force, provided that the United Nations endorsed it, was properly available if sanctions failed. We shall never know if they could have succeeded.

Force, however bloody and brutal, is a sanction, too; only a principled pacifist has the right to reject it outright. Socialists in the 1930s volunteered to fight in Spain when collective security against Franco was not even attempted.

Socialists in 1990 supported Security Council Resolution 678, which authorized force against Iraq if Saddam Hussein did not withdraw from Kuwait. They did so because they were ready to make the hard choices: possible heavy loss of life among coalition forces and Iraqis rather than continued Iraqi murder, torture, kidnapping and pillage in Kuwait; all the horrors of a high-tech conflict incurred in order to send a message to other potential aggressors that the world had at last decided that aggression must not pay.

Easy choices make easy consciences. They do not, however, make good international law.

When the Gulf War broke out, the European left--certainly including the British Labor Party--insisted that the war aims must be limited, and that liberation of Kuwait must not extend to invading Iraq and overturning Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Alexander Cockburn accuses the United States of being “back in the business of keeping Saddam Hussein in power.”

Others--some of the very people who were most vocal in demanding stringently limited war aims--are lurid in their condemnation of the failure of coalition governments to send their forces into Iraq to save the Kurds. The implication is that the coalition governments are refusing to attack Iraq again and this time drive on to Baghdad.

Iraqi repression of the Kurds has been abominable for many years. However, invading Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein is out of the question. There cannot be good invasions and bad invasions. There are only invasions, and the United Nations is in business to stop them, not start them.

The new Security Council resolution, condemning Hussein’s repression and offering humanitarian aid (and opposed, significantly, by “left-wing” Cuba), extends the U.N. role significantly. Maybe that role should be extended further. Maybe it will be. Certainly, those on the left who believe in the United Nations will use its newly enhanced authority to try to extend its role wherever possible.

A howl of rage, from Alexander Cockburn or anyone else on the “radical liberal left,” however, cathartic, achieves nothing. Despite the harrowing news from inside Iraq, socialists should derive satisfaction from the successful international response to the invasion of Kuwait. A principle has been upheld. A precedent has been set.