IN the wake of the Anglo/American-led war in Iraq, there are many who now say that one of the major casualties of the conflict is the credibility of the United Nations because it failed to sanction military intervention in Saddam Hussein's republic of fear.

Has the UN's prestige been mortally wounded by the failure of bickering and competing power blocs in the Security Council to endorse the war? Is the UN now set to go the way of the League of Nations, the weak-willed international body created after World War One which failed to take a united stand against Japanese, Italian and German aggression in the 1930s, setting the stage for the Second World War?

To understand whether the United Nations is indeed on its last legs and the world is in need of some new less bureaucratic and more streamlined international organisation - as some of the more powerful nations are arguing - it would be instructive to identify what the UN is and is not in terms of its international mandate and powers.

I think we can dismiss one thought right away: the UN is not about to make national governments redundant and institute some form of world government. This is a favourite argument of some far-right groups in the United States.

It's also a claim that is made from the pulpits of certain religious sects with the preachers warning their congregations of the so-called evil designs of the UN, describing it as the vanguard of a sinister New World Order aimed at stripping people of their freedom in a new millennium they call the beginning of the Biblical End Times.

And despite the popular belief that the United Nations can mediate the world's conflicts - as well as send troops in to police peace treaties between warring parties - the organisation does not exist as an autonomous power in its own right, with a globally respected mandate to interpret and enforce international law.

The UN is, in fact, the sum of all its parts, completely dependent on the will, manpower and finances of its membership to operate as it does. It is a polyglot organisation, its famous headquarters in New York a contemporary Tower of Babel where the membership speaks a wide variety of languages and has an equally wide variety of interests.

Sometimes the member nations are united on individual issues. In other cases - such as Iraq - regional, religious, moral, racial and, to be frank, financial considerations preclude a united front. With respect to its power and influence in the world, the reality is that the UN has as much power to enforce its will as the Pope.

You might remember a famous incident when a former Pope was dressed down by an international leader after the Vatican attempted to have a say in the world order that was emerging at the end of the Second World War. The Pope was reminded of the papacy's real status in the world when the leader in question asked: "How many tank divisions does the Pope have?"

This response to the failed attempt at Papal diplomacy was voiced by none other than Joseph Stalin, the Georgian-born dictator who ruled the former Soviet Union with an iron hand and whose position at the Kremlin was so very secure that he had no fear of being threatened with what is today called "regime change".

The reality is that the UN shares a lot in common with the papacy; they both exert a tremendous moral sway and are major presences of the world stage - yet neither has the power to independently enforce its edicts.

Even though the UN has a military arm - its peace-keeping forces drawn from the armies of member nations - these blue-helmeted soldiers can only be deployed with the permission of their native countries.

In fact, the United States has never allowed its soldiers to come under UN command, not even during the Korean War when the US was the leading power fighting Communist aggression under the umbrella of the United Nations.

Although the UN, through the collective agreement of its membership, can censure countries on their human rights records and even impose economic sanctions - as in the case of Libya for its role in masterminding the Pan Am airliner bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland - it often lacks the power to police its own resolutions, leaving such sanctions vulnerable to be violated.

That happened repeatedly during the 12 years economic sanctions were imposed on Iraq following the first Gulf War. Sanctions busting was big business, a multi-billion-dollar-a-year enterprise; Iraqi oil was flowing across the country's borders into Turkey, Jordan and Syria and being sold on the black oil market, most of the proceeds being pocketed by Saddam Hussein. And the UN did not have either the manpower or the authority to stop it.

What the UN has, as does the Pope, is a form of moral authority which may or may not be respected. It was that moral authority the United States and Britain so desperately sought before they embarked on their war against Iraq.

And, of course, in the wake of their failure to get UN endorsement for their campaign against Saddam Hussein, they did what all powerful nations have always done throughout history - they proceeded anyway.

The United Nations was formed by an association of nations pledged to maintain international peace and security and to promote international co-operation. Its charter was drawn up by the San Francisco conference in 1945 and is based on the proposed draft at the Dumbarton Oaks conference. The UN succeeded the old League of Nations.

The organisation was flawed from the beginning for the powerful nations were not willing - as was the case with the failed League of Nations - to surrender sovereignty or their national interests to the UN.

Yet today, with this great flaw at its centre, we often hear that the United Nations is in danger of going the way of its predecessor, the old League of Nations, which was formed in 1920 with its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

THE League of Nations also had laudable goals; all conflicts were to be submitted to the League for resolution or arbitration and it too enjoyed great success in the humanitarian field. But like the United Nations today, it came to grief over internal rivalries and the reluctance of powerful nations to submit what they considered to be their essential national interests to the judgment of the League.

The UN's central weakness is essentially the same as the one that afflicted the League of Nations.

The United Nations today is an elitist organisation where the more powerful nations in the world have permanent seats on the Security Council with veto power over UN Resolutions; this is never discussed.

It is no coincidence that these positions of power are held by the five Allied victors of World War Two. Their privileged position is based on military and economic power and can only be challenged by military and economic power. The crisis over Iraq came as a result of a falling out in this group about economic and regional interests; it had nothing to do with the real role the UN is meant to play.

So is the United Nations on its last legs? Not from my perspective. For one thing the UN is representative of the world at large while the old League of Nations was in reality made up of old colonial powers which still held sway over large parts of the world and its colonial peoples.

The UN today is much more than the geo-political talking shop of the great powers. For that reason the UN must go on and continue to exist because the rest of us demand it.