Never judge a textbook by its cover – instead, use the index. You learn an awful lot about how an author treats her subject by browsing what is and is not worthy of discussion; you also learn a lot about the course, and about the politics of your school. For example, those enrolled in a Dean’s Book section this semester were required to read David Shipler’s “The Working Poor.” Shipler’s index is fascinating in its exclusion of any political idea that deviates even remotely from the dichotomy repeated daily on the editorial page of the New York Times, his former employer. In particular, his sole and obscure mention of Marxism reads as if it could have been written by a computer. Two semesters ago, in spring 2005 – and I promise I’ll stop bashing Dean’s Book shortly – it was mandated, from above, that Dean’s Book students should read another work by a former Times journalist, Chris Hedges’ “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.” Like Shipler, Hedges tries in vain to squeeze a huge issue into an extremely narrow political lens, with equally painful results. His index is notable in its exclusion of terms such as “United Nations,” “UN Charter,” and “international law.” The omissions help to explain why Hedges can’t conceive a world without war, just as Shipler can’t imagine an America without poverty. Another example: I have in front of me the second edition of “American Foreign Policy” by Bruce Jentleson, a professor of political science at Duke University. The inclusion of a term like “international law” in such a book is arguably of greater importance than those mentioned already, since Jentleson’s readers are more likely to work someday for, say, the State Department (Jentleson’s former employer). It isn’t there. Instead there are some scattered references to “international legal institutions,” such as the International Criminal Court, and more often than not the discussion is framed around why the United States disagrees with the institution in question. The distinction is important, because such institutions carry no weight absent an underlying body of international law to back them up. Similar to American ambassador John Bolton’s famous declaration that “There is no such thing as the United Nations,” Jentleson is effectively denying the existence of international law. Ridiculing the UN, in effect the cornerstone of international law, is in vogue again these days, these criticisms being sometimes accurate. What is not accurate is to say that it is a radical or idealistic organization, any more than imagining a world without war is a radical idea. On the contrary, the roots of the UN are in fact highly practical, and remain relevant today. Some history: by 1945, millions of soldiers and civilians had been killed in combat, millions more by the concentration camp, and two atomic bombs had just been dropped on Japan. It was now apparent that advances in the technology of killing, specifically the atomic bomb, threatened to destroy the species. Thus, it was the judgment of the Nuremberg tribunal that from then onward, wars of aggression would be forbidden as “the supreme international crime.” It was with these sentiments in mind that the UN Charter was crafted, as its first sentence makes clear, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” The Charter also sets clear limits on the threat or use of force in international relations: specifically, force is only allowed in self defense, or with the approval of the Security Council. Anything else constitutes “the supreme international crime.” So it is not surprising that the government of the United States, especially but not exclusively the Bush administration, detests the UN, as do the government lapdogs in the intellectual elite. Aggressive war has long been American foreign policy, but it has only recently been officially sanctioned by the 2002 National Security Strategy, also known as the Bush Doctrine. First, you’ll recall, the White House argued that the attack on Iraq was justified due to a gathering threat to our survival; by 2004, the absence of banned weapons forced them to admit that they reserved the right to attack any country on the merest suspicion of a threat. The contempt for international law has now reached such heights that the 2005 Pentagon document, National Defense Strategy of the United States, identifies three threats to American dominance: “international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.” It would be interesting to inquire into how the UN Charter came to be written, and whether it had popular support or not. But its popular backing today is beyond dispute. A 2004 study by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations found that majorities of the American public favored eliminating the Security Council veto, and felt that “the United States should be more willing to make decisions within the United Nations, even if this means that the United States will have to go along with a policy that is not its first choice.” These sentiments weren’t lost on those who planned the Iraq war, of course, since they labored intensively, and for the most part successfully, to convince the American public that the invasion of Iraq was not aggressive, but defensive, and that it was undertaken with a “coalition of the willing.” The necessity of such lying is, strangely enough, grounds for hope. Mike Sances is a Collegian columnist.