Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question. I do not have an untempered faith in the United Nations. My faith in the United Nations is very much tempered and very much qualified, tempered by experience.
It has plenty of failures. My argument is simply that it is the best agency available. What I have been arguing here is that it should be playing the lead role. I cannot conceive of a situation in which the United States would step aside from a major role or the United Kingdom would step aside from a major role. Those major roles would have to be played.
I agree absolutely with the member, and I think I said so in my remarks, that the only instruments we can see that can guarantee short term stability are the armies. I would add the army of Iraq, because I think that as an institution it is going to be essential to establish cohesion there, but that is in the short term and I have no doubt about the military capacity in the short term and the essential nature of that presence.
It is the medium and the longer term that I am worried about. I do not know the degree of faith of the hon. member in the Pentagon and the United States to see this through. I suspect he has some reservations, as most people would. What we have to do here is find some system that gives the world a choice. At the moment, there is no choice. There are a few lonely voices that are talking about giving the United Nations a mandate, but no one is taking the active leadership to provide that kind of mandate. That means that the burden will fall, by default, to the United States.
I commend the speech given by the former secretary Baker in Toronto and, indeed, the study undertaken by the Baker Institute and the Council of Foreign Relations on which that speech was based, which spelled out a different and much broader approach. That is in a sense what I am advocating here. I have not given up on the United Nations, but I am not blind about its weaknesses nor naive about its capacities. I simply think it is the best agency available to the world in these circumstances.