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Politics : DON'T START THE WAR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (7175)	2/10/2003 11:58:04 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25898

The Real Cowboys - Colin Powell vs France and Germany Watching Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council last week was a riveting experience. Riveting not simply because of the irrefutable evidence of Saddam Hussein's contempt for the U.N. inspections process. And riveting not simply because of the implacability of the French, Chinese and Russian responses. It was riveting primarily because this was Colin Powell. And this was the U.N. No one can claim that Powell is viscerally opposed to multilateral diplomacy or to the U.N. itself. On the contrary, Powell has long been the strongest advocate of such diplomacy in this administration - or indeed in any administration in recent times. And no one can claim that Powell is a natural hawk. Like most military men, Powell loathes warfare. He knows its tragedy and horror and unpredictability. He has viscerally opposed almost every use of military force by the U.S. in recent years. Most significantly, he is perhaps the man most responsible for restraining military force against Saddam Hussein when the dictator was on the run in 1991. Why? Because the multilateral coalition assembled in the first Gulf war opposed any such extension of the war's goals. And Powell took his orders and his legitimacy from that U.N.-blessed coalition. Here's a simple question, then: Does any government figure on the planet have more credibility on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein than Powell? Even those who argue that Bush's cabinet is a den of trigger-happy imperialists must nevertheless concede that Powell cannot even faintly be pushed into that caricature. Now recall Powell's demeanor that Wednesday morning. It was composed; it was measured; but it was also packed with fury and determination. It seems to me that Powell's insistence on enforcing U.N. Resolution 1441 must therefore be a centrepiece for any debate on the looming war. Why, an anti-war advocate should ask herself, is this man so angry and so resolute? Let me suggest a reason. Powell's fury and determination is not because he has doubts about the United Nations, but because he believes in it. He wants the body to work. He's not naive enough to believe that a body that can place Libya as the chair of a human rights commission has a moral center. And he's not stupid enough to hold that power-politics don't play a critical role in making the U.N. effective. But he does believe that the U.N. is the worst way of organizing international relations - except for all the others. He sees a real value in having world affairs channeled through a genuinely international prism. And he sees universal values - peace, human rights, disarmament, the prevention of genocide - as best enforced through collective rather than unilateral endeavors. And that's why Powell is now pro-war. Resolution 1441 was not a resolution passed by the U.S. Congress. It was passed unanimously by the United Nations Security Council. Unanimously. After twelve years of delay, obfuscation and intermittent avoidance of the problem, the U.N. demanded immediate, active and complete cooperation by Saddam in his disarmament and threatened severe consequences if he did not. Again, that's not my interpretation. It's the simple meaning of 1441, a resolution which Powell had a vital hand in drafting. He drafted it because he believed that the U.N. is the place to resolve such disputes and ameliorate such crises. Not a single member of the Security Council agrees that Saddam has done anything like enough to comply with the U.N.'s demands. The chief arms inspector, Hans Blix, himself has confirmed this. Powell's evidence confirms something far worse: an active attempt by Saddam's regime to foil the inspections. Not a single member of the U.N. has provided any evidence that Powell's presentation was inaccurate or false. None has openly disputed anything in it. 1441 is unequivocal about what should be done in that event. The critical fact about the next two weeks is therefore not whether an international coalition of the U.S. and dozens of other free countries will disarm Saddam. The question is whether the United Nations can survive as a credible international institution. Powell's passion - and Blair's - is as much about rescuing the U.N. as it is about protecting Western citizens from Saddam's nerve gas, anthrax and botulism. If a U.N. unanimously-mandated war is prosecuted against the opposition of a majority of Security Council members, the institution will effectively be an oxymoron. It will be demanding that its own resolutions not be enforced. It will be a joke. To say, as the French have said, that the response to a deliberate attempt to foil inspectors should be to send more inspectors to be foiled is absurd on its face. No one has a credible argument that doubling or tripling the number of inspectors will make the slightest difference. Finding such arms in a country the size of Iraq is like finding a contact lens in a football stadium. Without Iraqi willingness to tell us where these arms are, we might as well stay home. Moreover, to keep this farce going amounts not just to impotence, but to a flagrant attack on the U.N. itself. 1441, supported by France, put the entire onus for disarmament on Saddam not the inspectors. How can 1441 be enforced by insisting upon the opposite? The French position cannot be explained because Saddam has altered course. Even with a quarter of million allied troops breathing down his neck and a last last last chance offered him by the U.N., Saddam is still shunting mobile chemical and bio weapons factories around the country; and hoodwinking inspectors. What chance is there that if the U.N. now essentially interprets 1441 as a piece of magical realist fiction, Saddam will feel more pressure to comply? Zero. On the contrary, he will rightly take the climbdown as an incentive to maintain his current strategy of Potemkin cooperation. Any sincere multilateralist knows this. The choice now is not between war and peace. It is between a credible 21st Century multilateralism and a return to pure Great Power unilateralism. Ironically, the British and Americans and East Europeans are the multilateralists in this instance; while the French and Germans and Chinese and Russians insist on wrecking the credibility of the U.N. To put it in terms that the Old Europeans might understand, the French and the Germans are the cowboys in international relations right now, treating U.N. resolutions as so many fictions to be dispensed with when they seem to wound national pride, or worse, might actually empower the United States. The reason Powell is now so adamantly pro-war is therefore no mystery and no surprise. He is not a former dove who has become a hawk. He is a multilateralist who is actually being consistent. His position is now what it has always been. He naively believed that the U.N. wouldn't actually pass a resolution it would subsequently revoke under pressure. And the source of his anger at Paris and Berlin is not because of natural differences, but because they are the ones now threatening a complete collapse of international collective security. They are the cowboys now. And Powell has another reason for his anger. He knows that Americans are deeply uncomfortable about acting alone in the world. For all the hyperventilation about a so-called American empire ready to spring from its lair, the default position of most Americans is still isolationism. September 11 killed that dream for a while, but the further we get away from that awful day, the more those instincts return. Powell knows that if the U.N. undermines itself fatally in the next couple of weeks, the chances for a future American presence around the world will diminish. Americans psychologically need international sanction to wield their power. That's why even this instinctually unilateralist president after the first attack on the American homeland in almost 200 hundred years, nevertheless went the U.N. route to tackle al Qaeda and Saddam in the first place. If at the end of that process, the U.N. is revealed as a body that does not care if its own resolutions are enforced, then either America will cease to consult it in the future, or America will withdraw again from the world. Both options should terrify anyone who hopes for a peaceful and stable global future. What Powell is fighting for is the responsible, credible use of American military power channeled through the United Nations. What France and Russia and China and Germany are now fighting for is U.N. irrelevance, followed by bouts of American super-power unilateralism or isolationism. Those are the choices. Given Powell's past, given his convictions, given his commitment to multilateralism, is it any surprise which option he is now passionately trying to defend? andrewsullivan.com