Readings: The Multilateralist Blog Summarizes Great Moments in UNSC Veto

David Bosco writes Foreign Policy's The Multilateralist blog and is the author of the fine 2009 book, Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World and, finally, is my American University friend and colleague.  His blog is a wonderful resource on many international law and politics questions, and particularly useful to those who are looking for blog sources broader than international criminal law - international organizations, international economic governance, development issues, etc.  Following the Russia-China vetoes of the draft Syria Security Council resolution last week, The Multilateralist offers up a quick list of leading moments in the history of the Security Council veto since the UN's founding.  Recommended too are Bosco's cautions about reading too much into the Syria vetoes as indications of the long run trajectory of the Council:

There's often a tendency to take discrete Council decisions or non-decisions and extrapolate to an argument on the organization's trajectory. After the U.S. bypassed the Council over Iraq, op-ed pages were full of commentary on how the diplomatic punch-up had damaged the institution. Who would have guessed that an explosion in UN peacekeeping was just around the corner and that two years later the Council would refer Sudan to the International Criminal Court?  The point is this: the Council is a political body whose value and role depends almost entirely on the shifting political interests of the P5. Those interests vary from crisis to crisis and will change, sometimes quickly. A Security Council that looks impotent and dysfunctional now may well appear formidable, or at least quite serviceable, in some other context.