ABSTRACT
The Gulf conflict was regarded as a ‘make or break’ issue for the United Nations. Certainly the United Nations figured prominently in the crisis; ostensibly one side of the crisis was being conducted by the United Nations, or was it being conducted by the United States on behalf of the United Nations-or even, as some think, was the United Nations simply being manipulated by the United States to serve its own interests? Was the United Nations a party to the crisis or was it merely a forum within which the diplomacy of the crisis was conducted? The role of the United Nations was a complex one and there is a degree of misperception or misunderstanding regarding the nature of the United Nations, its purposes and functions, what it can and cannot do; and perhaps there are unrealistic popular expectations about what the United Nations can achieve.
