War Diary: Thursday, March 13
Mar 13, 2003
Depending on who you listened to on Wednesday, March 12, the United States had only four votes, was up to eight votes, had the necessary nine votes -- or actually had locked down 11 votes on the U.N. Security Council. The vote was going to come on Friday, March 14, or the vote would not come at all. The United States was sticking with its March 17 deadline, was working with Britain on a new resolution to extend the deadline to March 24 or was abandoning the process all together. It has become impossible to figure out what is happening on the Security Council.
The central problem is that of the 15 Security Council members, only a handful actually care about the Iraqi issue: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and perhaps Spain and Russia. For others, such as Pakistan, Iraq is a nightmare that should go away. For yet others -- such as Cameroon, Guinea and Angola -- the Iraqi issue is completely irrelevant to their interests. Put simply, many of these governments have no interest in Iraq. Nevertheless, they must vote on the issue.
Having no interest in the subject, these countries are not internally driven to take any position. Rather, the position they will take is entirely externally driven: What can the Americans or French do to them or for them? To be crass, their votes have value, and it is their intention to maximize that value. The three African countries named here are not accidentally selected. They appear to be the key block that can put the United States within range -- or make a resolution impossible.
Anyone who has ever sold a car knows that the most delightful position to be in is in the middle of a bidding war. The longer the war lasts, the higher the price gets. Assume a world in which there are two buyers for whom winning the auction is of enormous importance. Imagine a seller who couldn't care less which one bought the car, so long as the seller got top dollar.
Closure is the last thing that the seller wants. Time is on his side. Bids go up, not down. More importantly, you never bring the gavel down until there is no hope for a higher bid. Therefore, as the bids go up, it will appear that first one side and then the other side has the vote. In the case of the Security Council, on Monday it will appear that a given country is with the United States; on Tuesday everyone will know that the country is going to abstain, and so forth. In fact, these countries themselves won't know which way they are going to vote until the last minute, when the last bid comes in.
It is not simply the smaller countries that take this position. The Russians and the Chinese are open for business, too. They each have things that they want from the United States and, to a lesser degree, from France, and they intend to hold out as well. Now, if you are trying to get the highest price, your best strategy is to pretend that you are not interested in selling. Russia in particular has played this game perfectly, but the fact is that no one knows how the Russians are finally going to vote -- and that probably includes the Russians.
Meanwhile, the British are introducing new resolutions for domestic reasons, but also on the theory that this will influence votes. Extending the voting deadline gives each player the opportunity to increase the benefits from either side. In this game, the most valuable position to be in is to be the last vote nailed down. Therefore, the United States constantly will be coming close -- seeming to have eight votes, then not having them -- because all of the players lose if the bidding stops and each wants to hit the jackpot by being the last key vote. Stratfor has tried hourly to figure out the vote's outcome, until we finally realized that the game is set up in such a way that the outcome is inherently unpredictable in any detail -- except that, in the end, the United States can outbid the French on any level. This means that, odds are, the United States can win in the end if it wants to spend the money and political capital.
The greatest danger to all of the players is that one side or the other walks away from the game. The problem is that neither side can do that easily. The United States really wants to go to war with Iraq and really wants to have U.N. backing. France really wants either to stop the United States from going to war or to at least delegitimize any victory. Therefore, neither side seems able to walk away.
This points to the essential defect of the U.N. Security Council. The vision was that nations, acting on a completely disinterested basis, would do what is best for humanity. Disinterested nations are a fantasy. What you wind up with are nations that are not disinterested, but uninterested in the issue in front of them. They are interested in other things and will swap their votes on uninteresting issues for things in which they are interested.
The reason that the Security Council vote matters is that many believe that its imprimatur has some meaning. It reminds us of Bismarck's famous line, that one should never watch either laws or sausages being made. That can be extended to Security Council resolutions. |
