Hawk, I'd really like to know how you can simultaneously cite UN resolutions as justification for whatever the Bushies wanted to do, yet disparage the institution at every opportunity. You are relying on, in most cases, decade-old resolutions.
You can cite resolutions until you are blue in the face, but the fact remains that the UN never sanctioned this war, and the US failed in its efforts to justify the intervention under any UN mandate.
The centerpiece of the Bush Admin's case for invasion was the presentation Feb 5, 2003 presentation by Powell at the UN. Powell's Deputy, Rich Armitage, now says that that presentation is "a source of great distress for the secretary."
You keep reasserting the basic Neocon position: "Saddam was an outlaw. We already had all the UN resolutions we needed to go to war." More to the point, the hawks understood that taking the UN route contained a potentially disastrous pitfall: To make the case for an invasion, the US would need to prove that Iraq was an imminent threat. The only way Iraq could be considered an imminent threat was if the world could be shown it had the capability to launch a WMD attack on a Western country. Of course, this was all a canard: the real goal of the Hawks was to change the political structure of the Middle East.
Only because of pressure from Tony Blair did the US take the UN route. The British position, expressed by Blair to Bush at their Crawford Summit in April 2002, was that an invasion without explicit UN support would break international law. In late July, Blair sent Bush a personal message urging Bush to put Saddam's breeches of earlier resolutions before the UN.
Mind you, this is the same UN that Bush and his buddies have disparaged openly, well before the Iraq crisis. IN March 2001, Bush pulled out of the 1997 Kyoto protocol. In May 2002, Bull declared US accession to the International Criminal Court (ICC) null and void-- a decision that looks especially bad in light of US torture and mistreatment of prisoners from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Until Bush was advised by the UK that he needed the UN to sanction the legality of invading Iraq, his administration gleefully thumbed their noses at them. Under criticism for the ICC decision, Undersecretary of State Boulton remarked that "if the UN Secretariat building in New Youk lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."
On 12 September, 2002, Bush addressed the UNGA, a pledged that "we will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions." Hey, wait, you've been saying that we had all the resolutions we needed to invade Iraq. But Bush acknowledged then we we did not.
In response, the UN pressured Iraq, and on 16 September Saddam agreed to UN inspections "without preconditions." The reaction from the White House? They were furious that Annan had given Saddam wiggle room to avert military action.
Even as the US turned to the UN for a resolution, Bush's goal was clear: it wasn't to get Saddam to disarm through peaceful means, but rather to get a UN stamp of approval for American military actions as quickly as possible.
So the US immediately began disparaging the UN inspections. Rummy on 19 September told the SASC that "the more inspectors that there are in there, the less likely somethings going to happen." On the same day, Bush told the press, "if the UNSC won't deal with the problems, the United States and some of our friends will." This could be a line from "The Sopranos".
The US wanted a single resolution (1441)--one that layed out UN demands on Iraq, and authorized invasion if Iraq did not comply. The US draft collapsed. A compromise worked out by the British included a beefed-up inspection regime, but no trigger that would lead automatically to war. The US finally signed 1441, maintaining unilaterally that it "did not constrain any member state from acting to defend itself against the threat posed by Iraq."
But again Blair insisted that 1441 would not suffice, and that the US would have to push for a second resolution. Hence Powell's 5 February presentation to the UN.
On March 7, the US paid the price for its arrogance. France announced it would not allow a resolution authorizing war to pass, and German, Russia, and China quickly followed suit. Despite intense US pressure on the six other (non-permanent) UNSC members, Mexico and Chile refused to back the US resolution for war. (Revelations that the US had been intercepting UN telephone calls didn't help).
Of course, throughout, US forces were pouring into the Gulf, preparing for the invasion. On March 17, Bush reneged on his commitment to seek UN approval. All the US bullying and braggadocio had failed. The US and UK withdrew the second resolution and retreated to the claim that 1441 provided them with ample authorization for war. But their desperate efforts to secure the second resolution had decimated this argument.
In the UK, Robin Cook resigned from the Cabinet and delivered a devastating speech to the Commons, accusing Blair of offering a "false prospectus" for the war.
The US failure at the UN stems from the same attitude you have endless put forth. We cannot expect to have support from the IAEA or the UN secretariat just when it occurs to us. This anti-UN ideology prevented the US from making what should have been a persuasive case for regime change in Iraq. The US was incapable of making that case because that would have suggested that the UN is important.
On 28 January 2004, the head of the US post-war inspection team summed up the folly of Bush's policy to make the case for war on the basis of WMD: "We were almost all wrong." I think this applies to a great many aspects of Bush's presidency. |
