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Politics : America Under Siege: The End of Innocence -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (22074)	3/20/2003 10:37:48 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27666

Jack Kelly Was getting the UN involved worth it? URL:http://jewishworldreview.com/0303/jkelly.html newsandopinion.com \| The U.S. effort, which began last September, to get the United Nations Security Council to enforce its 17 resolutions calling upon Saddam Hussein to disarm has ended in failure. Was it worth the attempt? Two sets of folks say no. Those who oppose military action against Iraq revel in Bush's diplomatic "defeat" and "humiliation." Bush's "arrogant" policy, they say, has alienated our "friends and allies." "America's unprecedented power scares the world, and the Bush administration has only made it worse," writes Fareed Zakaria in the current issue of Newsweek. Conservative hawks who have always regarded the UN as a collection of duplicitous weenies say this outcome was to have been expected, and the U.S. should have gone forward with its "Coalition of the Willing" last fall. Valuable time, they say, has been lost, and so has some legitimacy. "The U.S. now goes into the war without even a figleaf of UN support," wrote David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who coined the phrase "Axis of Evil." "In November, we could have said we were going to war on the authority of UN Security Council 1441 - or because Iraq had violated the terms of its 1991 armistice. Now, we're going to war despite being told "no" by the UN." The argument of the doves can the more easily be dismissed. If war with Iraq goes well, success on the battlefield will overcome temporary diplomatic setbacks. If Iraqis cheer liberation, and weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda are found, it will be those who opposed war who will be on the diplomatic defensive, not Britain or the United States. If the war goes badly, Bush and Blair are toast, even if Hans Blix and Jacques Chirac were to bless a nuclear strike on Baghdad. The hawks have a better argument. Saddam has had more time to prepare. North Korea has had more time to make mischief. Uncertainty is roiling the financial markets and suppressing economic growth. These costs are real. And they are serious. Delay in war with Iraq has come at a heavy price, but, I think, with a gain that justifies the cost. "The public judgment of this great country forms slowly," said Sen. Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin nearly a century ago. "It is intelligent. No body of men in this country is superior to it." The crawl to war has given the American people time to form three important judgments: That Saddam must go. That the UN is worthless. That the French stink. All three of these judgments are critical for providing Bush with the public support he'll require for remaking the postwar world, which will be its biggest makeover since the end of World War II. Frum has noted that "nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has passed." The United Nations and NATO are relics of bygone eras badly in need of reform. The crawl to war has made that need apparent. The UN was created chiefly by the United States to foster democracy and human rights throughout the world. It has degenerated into the principal instrument through which tinpot despots try to heap restraints upon the United States. From our perspective, the UN is worse than useless. It is a danger. Our principal adversary in the UN is not Russia or China or any other former foe. It is France, considered an "ally" only because we rescued the French from the Germans twice. When Baghdad falls, it is likely we will capture documents proving Saddam has suborned UN weapons inspectors, and that France and Germany have provided massive assistance to his arms programs. We should use that evidence to force the UN to reform, and to punish France. Once the war is over, the president should announced a temporary suspension of U.S. participation in, and financial support for, the United Nations. The United States should rejoin the UN only if India and Japan are added to the Security Council, and France is dropped from it. We ought also to move NATO headquarters from Belgium (France lite) to more hospitable quarters in Prague or Budapest.