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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (7298)	9/24/2002 2:25:18 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

Misspeak by Peter Beinart The New Republic Issue date 09.30.02 President Bush's speech to the United Nations last week received rave reviews. By casting Iraqi defiance as a threat to the credibility of the U.N. and casting himself as a muscular multilateralist, Bush supposedly outmaneuvered his European critics. And since the Democrats' primary objection to the war had been the opposition of America's allies, European acquiescence pulled the rug out from under the president's domestic opposition as well. Saddam Hussein himself implicitly recognized Bush's diplomatic coup this week when he reversed course and agreed to weapons inspections. Not bad for one 25-minute speech. Not bad--except that Bush's speech was fundamentally dishonest. Before he took the podium on Thursday morning, the United States had one rationale for war with Iraq: to prevent Saddam from gaining the nuclear capacity that could threaten the world. By the time Bush stepped off the podium, the United States had another: to make the United Nations relevant. It is this second, multilateralist rationale that has won President Bush newfound goodwill among European leaders who don't particularly fear Saddam but who love the U.N. That goodwill, however, rests on a fiction. The Bush administration is not going to war to empower the U.N., a body that until last week it treated with scarcely concealed disdain. The gap between Bush's speech and the reality of American policy will come back to haunt this administration sooner or later. And the bogus war rationale Bush has ginned up for the world is already undermining the clarity of his case at home. In his speech on Thursday, Bush declared, "We want the United Nations to be effective and respected and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced." But this is nonsense. While the Bush administration wants enforcement of U.N. resolutions on Iraq, it has no broader interest in an "effective and respected" United Nations. In fact, the Bush administration has spent the last 20 months making sure the U.N. is ineffective. The administration has downgraded the job of ambassador to the U.N. from the Cabinet status it enjoyed under President Clinton and didn't have its appointee in place for a whopping nine months. It hasn't fully paid America's long-outstanding U.N. dues. It has fought bitterly against the U.N.'s big, new multilateral body, the International Criminal Court. This month it snubbed the U.N.'s conference on sustainable development--attended by virtually every prominent world leader except Bush. And at every turn it has blocked the body's efforts to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, vetoing two Security Council resolutions that would have expanded U.N. involvement in the crisis. Some of these U.N.-undermining decisions make sense and some don't. But it isn't hard to see the problem the administration is creating by loudly committing itself to the U.N.'s empowerment over Iraq. President Bush's rhetoric will surely be repeated back to the United States the next time the U.N. wants to intervene aggressively against Israel or the next time the Bush administration scuttles a U.N.-sponsored treaty. In fact, Bush's rhetoric could even catch up to the United States on Iraq itself. If America can't get Security Council backing for war against Saddam and attacks over the U.N.'s objections, it will be the United States that is accused of making the U.N. irrelevant--a charge that will carry far more weight in the wake of Bush's speech. At a time when the United States is already considered hypocritical by much of the world, Bush's speech just exacerbates the problem. But the bigger problem with Bush's speech isn't that he embraced a false rationale for war, it's that he obscured the real one. By suggesting that America's causus belli is Saddam's violations of U.N. resolutions, Bush raised a number of previously ignored--and entirely unconvincing--pretexts for war. He demanded that Saddam release the "Kuwaiti, Saudi, Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Bahraini, and Omani nationals [who] remain unaccounted for" from the Gulf war. He demanded that Iraq "cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shia, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans, and others." And he demanded that Iraq "immediately end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program ... to ensure that the money is used fairly and promptly for the benefit of the Iraqi people." When Saddam seemingly capitulated on weapons inspections this week, the Bush administration said it wasn't good enough because he hasn't fulfilled these other demands. The Bush team may think itself shrewd for having raised these other issues and thus given itself an excuse to deride Saddam's inspections offer. But focusing on peripheral issues is not shrewd at all. As much as the Turkmen deserve not to be persecuted, as much as Oman deserves a full accounting of its Gulf war prisoners, and as much as it galls us to see Saddam spending his oil revenue on palaces, these are not the reasons we are going to war. The president's defenders will note that Bush was tailoring his message to his U.N. audience. But that is precisely the problem. If the Bush administration appears to select from an array of justifications for war depending on the audience, it will breed cynicism about its motives. And it will lead Americans to suspect that the real rationale for war--Saddam's potential nuclear capacity--is just as trivial as all the others. Instead of cooking up new and disingenuous reasons for attacking Saddam, the Bush administration needs to refocus on the primary one. That means explaining why Saddam's "unconditional" weapons inspections offer is a fraud--rather than suggesting that weapons inspections don't matter because the real issue is Kuwaiti prisoners of war. It means laying out in more detail what we know about Saddam's efforts to obtain nuclear material. Above all, it means clearly confronting the most serious critique of the administration's preemption doctrine: that Saddam can be deterred. The Bush administration has not adequately explained that Saddam is prone to recklessly underestimating America's resolve--which is part of the reason he wasn't deterred from invading Kuwait. And it hasn't adequately explained that while deterrence "worked" vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, there's no guarantee it would have continued to work had the USSR endured for another 50 years. (Even during the cold war, after all, there were some very close calls.) The United States relied on deterrence against the Soviet Union not because deterrence was foolproof but because we had no other choice: We could never have preemptively attacked the USSR; the costs would simply have been too great. But the United States can preemptively attack Iraq. Deterrence is no longer our only option, and it isn't our safest one. This--not the honor of the U.N. and not the minutiae of its resolutions--is the reason to go to war against Iraq. And the sooner the Bush administration gets back to it the better. ________________________________________________ Peter Beinart is the editor of The New Republic. tnr.com