actually, willravel, without going through the rigmarole of the legalisms, arguably it wasn't necessary to get UN approval because the 1991 resolutions that suspended the war already authorized the use of force for noncompliance. That doesn't tell you anything about whether the politics dictated a new resolution, or the optics, or whether getting another resolution was a good idea. I can think of good arguments either way.
But that is a very different question from the issue of whether Iraq would have a stable government in the short term or even medium term if the UN had been in charge from the git-go. Very very doubtful. The UN did come into Iraq after the fact, to run the reconstruction, and then the insurgents killed de Mello and the UN pulled out. (That's pretty consistent with the UN's record in general: the UN failed to protect people from massacre in Srebrenica, can't do noodlysquat in Darfur even as we speak.)
So whether it was a good idea to get the UN to say OK in late 2002-early 2003 is a totally different question from whether things would have been different if the UN had OK'd the invasion. I see no basis for believing there would have been no insurgency if the UN said the invasion was OK. The Iraqi insurgents are the kind of people who use children as decoys in car bombs - you think they give a rat's ass whether the UN says OK or not?
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