NEWS ANALYSIS : Did U.N. Finally Live Up to Its Promise in Gulf Conflict? : Diplomacy: Supporters say the world body united peaceful states to thwart an aggressor. But doubts about its role remain.

For many boosters of the United Nations, the Gulf War fulfilled a hallowed dream of peace-loving states banding together to squelch an aggressor. A decisive, dynamic United Nations, in this view, finally performed the way everyone once hoped it would.

“This was the first exercise in the unanimous collective security that we’ve been talking about since the days of Woodrow Wilson,” said Brian Urquhart, a former deputy secretary general of the United Nations who is now at the Ford Foundation.

Yves Fortier, Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, observed: “This was a classic case. It was Political Science 101.”

Yet, doubts sneak in. Could the image of an active, vibrant United Nations be no more than illusion? A sleight of hand by President Bush to bend the world body to his will? Is the United Nations, now that it was used, limping back to its cocoon of talk and limited action?

The answers are not yet clear and may have to wait until long after a successor to retiring Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar is selected at year’s end.

Despite all the self-congratulatory rhetoric of the last few months, the United Nations did not follow any textbook pattern in driving the aggressor, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, from Kuwait.

Even the secretary general has acknowledged this. “It was not a United Nations war,” he told the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, in mid-April. “Gen. (H. Norman) Schwarzkopf was not wearing a blue helmet.” Instead, the secretary general described the war as “a multilateral action authorized and, therefore, legitimized by the United Nations.”

The U.N. Charter, written in 1945 by the allies who defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, set down a much different way of repelling an aggressor.

If the spirit and letter of Articles 46 to 48 of the charter had been followed, the war against Iraq would not have been run by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who both report to President Bush. Instead, Powell would have plotted strategy with his Soviet, Chinese, British and French counterparts acting as the military staff committee of the U.N. Security Council. The 15 members of the Security Council would have set policy for these generals and marshals.

Everyone might have agreed to turn command in the field over to Schwarzkopf, but he would have worn the familiar blue helmet of U.N. troops and reported to a bevy of bosses on the Security Council.

Rather than follow this procedure, Bush decided to invoke Article 51 that allows a victim and its allies the right of self-defense. Relying on it, the United States led coalition forces against Hussein without military orders from the Security Council; the offensive did have the council’s nearly unanimous approval.

The U.S. tactic raises knotty issues. Bush Administration defenders believe the United Nations displayed a novel, wise and potent flexibility in prying Hussein out of Kuwait. They insist that Articles 46 to 48, never invoked before, are too unwieldy to put down aggression swiftly.

But critics believe the United Nations was all too compliant in following Bush’s wishes during the crisis. Any evaluation of the future of the world body demands a cold, unemotional examination of these issues.

“It is not necessarily my view,” said Chinmaya R. Gharekhan, India’s U.N. ambassador and a Security Council member, “but there is a perception in the United Nations, widespread throughout, that the United States used the Security Council. There is a certain unhappiness that the procedures provided in the charter were not followed.”

This wary perception was reinforced by the Bush Administration’s decision to diminish its reliance on the United Nations once the Security Council passed its resolution last Nov. 29 authorizing the use of “all necessary means” to dislodge Hussein. After the bombing began Jan. 17, the United States and its coalition partners looked on any debate at the United Nations as potentially damaging. When it could not prevent the Security Council from discussing the war, the United States insisted that the council meet in secret.

In a postwar interview with four Arab journalists, Bush disclosed that he might have invaded Iraq even if the action had failed to win U.N. approval, saying: “I might have said to hell with them (the Iraqis). It’s right and wrong. It’s good and evil. He’s evil. Our cause is right. And without the United Nations, (I might have) sent a considerable force to help.”

As if to demonstrate his independence, the President, fearing he did not have the votes there, decided not to seek Security Council approval a few weeks later before ordering U.S. troops to set up camps for Kurdish refugees in Iraq. As a result, the United States and the United Nations had two separate Kurdish relief operations.

Yet the United States has staunch, influential defenders. The barrage of criticism over Bush’s supposed U.N. manipulation angers Urquhart. “I think that’s nonsense,” he said. “There are 15 perfectly grown-up governments on the Security Council.” They could have easily defeated U.S.-sponsored resolutions if they disagreed with them, by this logic.

And the argument about proper procedures may miss a significant point. Even if essentially passive, the United Nations did perform a significant role in the Persian Gulf crisis, authorizing an assault on aggression. And it did so with the five permanent Security Council members--the United States, Soviet Union, China, Britain and France--cooperating in a way that seems seeded with hope for the world body’s future.

That optimism marks a new era, for the history of the United Nations is replete with a cynicism founded on lost and false hopes.

Its image once glistened. When the United Nations first met at temporary quarters on the Hunter College campus in the Bronx in 1945, high school students slept on the sidewalk overnight to assure themselves visitor passes to the Security Council. Everyone wanted to see the great statesmen in the council such as Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr. and Soviet Ambassador Andrei A. Gromyko.

But the image of the United Nations soon became tarnished. Many outsiders praised it for its humanitarian work and delicate efforts monitoring cease-fire lines after wars. The U.N. Children’s Fund, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the U.N. peacekeeping forces all won Nobel Peace Prizes.

But the organization’s political deliberations accomplished little and exasperated many people. The Security Council--its most important and powerful body--paralyzed itself for most of four decades because of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United Nations turned into a model of talk and limited action.

There has been a significant change in the last few years, however. With the Cold War over, the Americans and Soviets have found that cooperation can turn the United Nations into a potent instrument. This cooperation has enabled it in the last three years to take a significant role in encouraging the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, arranging the cease-fire in the Iraq-Iran War, supervising the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, monitoring elections in Namibia and ending the civil war between the Contras and Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

Urquhart believes that the true test of the supposed strength of a new United Nations depends on whether members undertake a thorough post-mortem of the Gulf crisis.