In the State of the Union address this year, President George Bush said the United States would never seek permission to go to war. Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, former Mexican Ambassador to the United Nation’s Security Council, watched in astonishment.

“This is the destruction of the United Nations,” Zinser told the more than 200 people packed into UC Berkeley’s Doe Library. “We might as well close it down if the founder of the UN says it challenges the basic concept for which the organization was created.” During his past two years on the Security Council, Zinser has been an outspoken critic of the U.S. drive to war.

Zinser’s talk addressed the threats facing the United Nations and its need for reform, but underlined that fundamentally “the UN system worked.” Its inspections teams and international embargo prevented Saddam Hussein from attaining weapons of mass destruction. “If we would have let the system work, war would have been avoided,” Zinser said. The day after Zinser’s presentation, the leader of the U.S. search for banned weapons, CIA advisor David Kay, announced that Iraq did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons. UN weapons inspectors had come to the same conclusion nearly a year earlier.

The talk was Zinser’s first public appearance since leaving his post in late November. President Vicente Fox fired Zinser after he gave a lecture at a Mexico City University in which he said that the United States treated Mexico as a “backyard” and that Mexico was forced to “hold its tongue” in front of its northern neighbor. The dismissal is widely taken as a sign that President Fox buckled under U.S. pressure to remove Zinser over his opposition to the war.

During his talk Zinser examined U.S. leadership post-Sept. 11 and the role of dissenting members on the Security Council during the build up to war. “Following 9/11, we witnessed one of the most astonishing expressions of solidarity with the United States,” he said. The U.S. carefully collected evidence, engaged in genuine multilateral debate with U.N. members and readily received unanimous support from the15 member Security Council for the war against Afghanistan. At the time, the United States was seen as the legitimate leader of the world, Zinser said.

But that support rapidly eroded. “Iraq was so capriciously, so arbitrarily situated in the center of the debate about security that questions began to be raised,” Zinser said. Mexico joined France early on as a vocal opponent to military action against Iraq. While France took most of the heat for opposing the war (it was not tacos or tequila that was boycotted, Zinser noted), a total of 11 countries eventually lined up against authorizing the use of force.

Realizing that it didn’t have the requisite nine votes in the Security Council, the United States never submitted its resolution. On March 17, 2003, the U.S. declared war on Iraq with the support of Britain, Spain and Bulgaria. Once the war began, the United States gave up on multilateral discussions, Zinser said. Instead, it turned to bilateralism, pressuring countries one on one to fall in line with U.S. policy.

Zinser called bilateralism “the kryptonite of the United Nations,” and said it was much more troubling than unilateralism. “We are all unilateralist,” he said, and “establish our national interests and then, in a collective way, we make compromises.” But bilateralism takes debate out of the Security Camber where collective decisions can be made and into closed doors of capitols throughout the world, he said. There, the United States can sit down and say “Let’s not talk about Iraq. It’s none of your business. Let’s talk about us. Do you want us to be friends? Do you want us to be on good terms? Well then forget about Iraq and give me your vote at the UN” After the war began, Zinser said he received instructions from Mexico to keep quiet.

Zinser reflected back on his time as a nonpermanent member of the Security Council. “We are tourists in the Security Council,” he said, “two-year tourists. They are giving us a trip to the world in which you sit in a privileged first row, and you are even allowed to say something to the permanent members.”

During his time there, he said he realized that the United Nations’ biggest impact has been in the humanitarian realm, where its work has improved the lives of millions of people, many of whose survival depends on its daily presence.

But the primary role of the UN, its raison d’etre, was not humanitarian, nor was it the promotion of economic development, scientific discovery, or even the protection of human rights, he said. “Those duties sprung from the moral character of the organization and the world’s need to have a body perform those functions,” he said.

The central purpose of the United Nations was to define the rights, duties and roles of states and to avoid the use of force in international relations. The UN still has much work to do to achieve that ideal as “countries violate the decisions right and left.”

“We must reshaped the organization to make it attractive so that countries will observe its decisions,” Zinser said.

“Perhaps the area in which the United Nations has to prove its existence with more force and conviction today is Africa,” Zinser said. The United Nations must effectively take on the problems of migration, disease and the colonial legacy of violence. “There is a weapon of mass destruction in Africa — a rifle and a pistol in the hands of child soldiers,” Zinser said, holding the superpowers responsible for shifting the weapons into conflict zones.

Zinser said the United Nations should also increase women’s participation both in the Security Council and out in the field on peacekeeping missions. He cited a study that correlated participation by women in peacekeeping efforts with greater success. “If women and children are the largest victims of conflicts, they are also the most promising opportunity for peace,” he said.

Zinser said he first went to the United Nations with a host of criticisms about its bureaucracy, the lack of compliance with resolutions and work methods that can “defy all common sense.” Delegates would stay up all night, he said, arguing about how a colon or a semi-colon could drastically change the meaning of a resolution. “For whom does the meaning change drastically if no one reads the resolution?” he asked, earning laughs from the capacity crowd.

Soon after he arrived though, he fell in love with the United Nations and its ideals. He left convinced that the dialogue and compromise that takes place within the Security Council’s windowless chambers still offer humanity the best shot at peaceful co-existence. The organization must reform so that countries observe its resolutions. But “until we recognize that to live in a better world we have to make collective decisions,” he said, the United Nations will remain an ideal yet to be fulfilled.