This editorial from The Economist is perhaps the most brilliant and cogent position statement on Iraq that I have read yet. In sum, it makes the case as to why it is necessary to attack Iraq, why UN support would be a good idea, and ultimatel why the US must attack Iraq without UN support, should it be refused.
JDG George Bush at the UN Confronting Iraq Sep 12th 2002 >From The Economist print edition Saddam Hussein must be dealt with�by the United Nations if possible, without it if need be TO HEAR his many critics tell it, George Bush had serious charges to answer this week before the United Nations court of international opinion. The leader of the free world stands accused of threatening to disrupt international law and order. America's insistence that Iraq be stripped of its illicit weapons of mass destruction, as a matter of urgency, by force if necessary, is anyway surely a ruse, since Mr Bush has publicly admitted his aim is to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein. Although America has called on others to join it, Mr Bush has said he will go it alone if necessary. Such rampant unilateralism undermines the very authority of the United Nations. The charges are preposterous. Yet Mr Bush had some explaining to do. In a democracy, any leader contemplating going to war has a duty to explain�in Mr Bush's case to Congress and the American people, but also to the wider world�why this needs to be done. His speech to the UN General Assembly on September 12th came too late for The Economist to gauge its impact. But whether the world stands with him in dealing with the menace Iraq poses, as he has asked it to, or against him, it is not Mr Bush who needs hauling into the dock, but Iraq's dangerous regime, and those members of the UN Security Council which for years have helped Iraq wriggle out of the disarmament obligations the council itself imposed. Ends and means �Not without United Nations approval� is the near-universal chant that has greeted Mr Bush's insistence that doing nothing about Iraq's illicit weapons is no longer an option�as if the Security Council were the moral conscience of the world. Would that it were. It is instead a collection of powerful states, all pursuing their own interests with what one can only hope is a sense of wider responsibility. There was nothing high-minded, for example, about Russia's refusal to countenance military action to halt Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. It backed the butcher of the Balkans to the bitter end. Some still claim that NATO's intervention there was illegal, since it lacked explicit UN endorsement. Yet 19 of the world's strongest democracies were surely right to act where the UN, divided, could not. The case of Iraq is different, admittedly. Saddam Hussein has killed far more of his own people and his neighbours than Mr Milosevic ever did; and he has sent his armies and his rockets well beyond Iraq's borders. The Security Council, at first letting principle triumph over pusillanimity, repeatedly declared him in open breach of his disarmament obligations. What it failed to do was rectify that situation. When it came to the crunch�authorising force to back up the inspectors' right to search out and destroy Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological stocks�first Russia and China backed off, keen to close all weapons accounts, see UN sanctions lifted and return to oil-business-as-usual. Then France did the same, leaving America and Britain to attempt to hold the line. The result has been much worse than stalemate: as a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies points out, Mr Hussein has hung on to his still-hidden arsenal and has had four years free of inspections to restore and conceal as much as he could of what the inspectors had earlier destroyed (see article). To those who, when told that Iraq is a mortal threat to the peace of the world, say �prove it�, the only sane reply is: what more proof could anyone need? If it was right to act in Kosovo where the Security Council was stymied, it is surely right to act in Iraq where the council has failed, with potentially disastrous consequences, to deal with what it has accepted itself is an even more potent threat. Then ask yourself, who is undermining the authority of the UN and its Security Council�those who seek to uphold its repeated resolutions on the nuclear, chemical and biological frisking of Iraq, or those who stand in the way? Credible threats Yet while it may sometimes, regrettably, be necessary to act without UN approval, isn't America guilty at best of poor judgment, at worst of hypocrisy, in calling not just for inspectors to return to disarm Iraq but for Mr Hussein to be turfed out of power? Won't he be even more tempted to use his horrific weapons rather than see his regime destroyed? The fact is, it has taken the credible threat of massive force to get Iraq's�and others'�attention. Without it, Mr Hussein would not even be hinting at new inspections (someday, with strings attached). Russia would not now be forced to contemplate how closely to move alongside Mr Bush in order to protect its business dealings in a post-Saddam Iraq. France's president would not this week be reversing himself, to propose a tough new Security Council resolution demanding that Iraq admit inspectors within three weeks, or else (though the �or else� still has no force to it). If Mr Hussein's only concern were to stay in power, he could have done so by handing over his banned weapons and had sanctions lifted. Instead he has treated inspections as a continuation of the Gulf war by other means. That suggests he has more dangerous plans. It is plausible to conclude that Iraq will not give up its weapons of mass destruction unless he goes. And if he were to surprise the world, and hand them over after all? Then even Mr Bush might conclude that the threat he poses had been suitably deflated. It is the Security Council's failure to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, not a gun-slinger's determination to look for trouble, that prompts Mr Bush to insist that America, with others where possible, must finish the job. Yet it is not too late for Russia, China and others who say they want him to work with the UN rather than around it to come up with a properly effective plan for dealing promptly with the threat Iraq's weapons pose. All they have lacked is the will. And for his part, Mr Bush knows that the more international support he can muster, the better, not just to contain and disarm Iraq, but to set the place on its feet properly again once the disarming is done. Why else bother to take his case to the UN at all? But, with or without the UN, disarmed Iraq must be. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
