A Costly Charade At the U.N.
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, February 28, 2003; Page
A23
America goes courting Guinea, Cameroon and Angola in search of the nine Security Council votes necessary to pass our new resolution on Iraq.
The absurdity of the exercise mirrors the absurdity of the United Nations itself. Guinea is a perfectly nice place and Guineans perfectly nice people. But from the dawn of history to the invention of the United Nations, it made not an ounce of difference what a small, powerless, peripheral country thought about a conflict thousands of miles away. It still doesn't, except at the Alice-in-Wonderland United Nations, where Guinea and Cameroon and Angola count.
For a day. As soon as their votes are cast, they will sink again into obscurity. In the meantime, however, we'll have to pay them off. Their price will be lower than Turkey's, but, then again, Turkey is offering something tangible -- territory from which to launch a second front. Guinea will be offering a raised hand at a table in New York.
The entire exercise is ridiculous, but for unfathomable reasons it matters to many, both at home and around the world, that the United States should have the permission of Guinea to risk the lives of American soldiers to rid the world -- and the long-suffering Iraqi people -- of a particularly vicious and dangerous tyrant.
It is only slightly less absurd that we should require the assent of France. France pretends to great-power status but hasn't had it in 50 years. It was given its permanent seat on the Security Council to preserve the fiction that heroic France was part of the great anti-Nazi alliance rather than a country that surrendered and collaborated.
A half-century later, that charade has proved costly. In order to appease the French, we negotiated Security Council Resolution 1441, which France has thoroughly trashed and yet which has delayed American action for months.
Months for the opposition to mobilize itself, particularly in Britain, where Tony Blair is now hanging by a thread. Months for Hussein to augment his defenses and plan the sabotage and other surprises he has in store when the war starts. Months, most importantly, that threaten to push the fighting into a season of heat and sandstorms that may cost the lives of brave Americans. We will have France to thank for that.
France is not doing this to contain Iraq -- France spent the entire 1990s weakening sanctions and eviscerating the inspections regime as a way to end the containment of Iraq. France is doing this to contain the United States. As I wrote last week, France sees the opportunity to position itself as the leader of a bloc of former great powers challenging American supremacy.
That is a serious challenge. It requires a serious response. We need to demonstrate that there is a price to be paid for undermining the United States on a matter of supreme national interest.
First, as soon as the dust settles in Iraq, we should push for an expansion of the Security Council -- with India and Japan as new permanent members -- to dilute France's disproportionate and anachronistic influence.
Second, there should be no role for France in Iraq, either during the war, should France change its mind, or after it. No peacekeeping. No oil contracts. And France should be last in line for loan repayment, after Russia. Russia, after all, simply has opposed our policy. It did not try to mobilize the world against us.
Third, we should begin laying the foundation for a new alliance to replace the now obsolete Cold War alliances. Its nucleus should be the "coalition of the willing" now forming around us. No need to abolish NATO. The grotesque performance of France, Germany and Belgium in blocking aid to Turkey marks the end of NATO's useful life. Like the United Nations, it will simply wither of its own irrelevance.
We should be thinking now about building the new alliance structure around the United States, Britain, Australia, Turkey, such willing and supportive Old Europe countries as Spain and Italy, and the New Europe of deeply pro-American ex-communist states. Add perhaps India and Japan and you have the makings of a new post-9/11 structure involving like-minded states that see the world of the 21st century as we do: threatened above all by the conjunction of terrorism, rogue states and weapons of mass destruction. As part of that rethinking, we should redeploy our bases in Germany to Eastern Europe, which is not just friendlier but closer to the theaters of the new war.
This is all for tomorrow. The imperative today is to win the war in Iraq. However, winning the peace will mean not just the reconstruction of Iraq. It will mean replacing an alliance system that died some years ago, but whose obituary was written only this year. In French, with German footnotes.
The Plan for a Postwar Iraq
By Steve Hadley
Friday, February 28, 2003; Page A23
If Saddam Hussein refuses to disarm and makes war inevitable, it will be a war of liberation, not occupation. As President Bush said in his speech to the United Nations last September, "Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause and a great strategic goal. The people of Iraq deserve it, and the security of all nations requires it."
Securing this liberty and sustaining it in a post-Hussein Iraq will be a huge undertaking. But we are well prepared. Planning has been underway for months, across every relevant agency of the U.S. government.
The goals for which we plan are clear. First, along with our coalition partners, we must ensure the rapid flow of humanitarian relief into Iraq. The current humanitarian situation in Iraq is tenuous. For food, most Iraqis rely on rations from the oil-for-food program. But the Iraqi regime's manipulation of the program has led to mortality and malnutrition rates worse than before the Persian Gulf War.
Hussein has a history of manufacturing humanitarian crises. We must be prepared for this -- and we are.
The U.S. government is stockpiling nearly 3 million Humanitarian Daily Rations to meet emergency food needs. We are also stockpiling blankets, water containers, essential medicines and other relief items capable of helping up to a million people. Much of this material is already in the region, and more is on the way.
To distribute these and other materials, we will rely primarily on civilian relief agencies. We are counting on the efforts of international organizations such as the United Nations and the Red Cross and Red Crescent, as well as various nongovernmental organizations. These groups have the expertise, personnel and equipment that can literally mean the difference between life and death. We will fund and facilitate their efforts to the greatest extent possible.
In circumstances where no U.N. agencies or nongovernmental organizations are available, the U.S. military may be required to provide limited relief. Such relief will be under the guidance of civilian experts, with the goal of getting civilian agencies into these areas as quickly as possible.
To coordinate all this activity, the U.S. government is training a 60-person civilian disaster assistance response team, the largest in U.S. history. Made up of humanitarian emergency professionals from several agencies, the team will soon have representatives in Kuwait, Turkey, Jordan and Qatar.
We will also work to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, which for years has been mismanaged and neglected. Early efforts will include restoring electricity and clean water, as well as addressing the immediate need for medical care and public health.
Over the longer term, we will assist the Iraqi people in creating a more stable and more vibrant economic system. Specifically, we will help them create a modern system of taxation and budgeting, stabilize the dinar, and resolve debt and reparations obligations.
A critical part of the reconstruction effort will be ensuring that Iraq's natural resources are protected from acts of sabotage by Hussein's regime and that they are used for the benefit of the Iraqi people. Iraq's natural resources belong to all the Iraqi people and -- after decades of being used to build palaces and weapons of mass destruction -- will finally be used for their benefit, not Hussein's.
Finally, a post-Hussein Iraq should be truly free and democratic. The United States will not seek to dictate to the people of Iraq the precise character of that regime. But no one should be interested in simply replacing one dictator with another. The goal -- which we are confident we share with Iraq's people -- is an Iraq that is moving toward democracy, in which individual rights are protected regardless of gender, religion or ethnicity.
Assisting and rebuilding a post-Hussein Iraq will require an enormous effort. Success will be possible only by working with Iraq's neighbors and the international community. And, most of all, we will need the support of Iraq's people. The United States will work to win that support.
Many are already asking how long America is prepared to stay in Iraq. The answer is straightforward: We will stay as long as is necessary, but not one day more. We will, from the outset, draw free Iraqis into the task of rebuilding their country, and we will transfer responsibility to Iraqi entities as soon as possible.
This is an awesome responsibility. When future scholars look back on the history of the Middle East at the beginning of the 21st century, instead of asking, "What went wrong?" they may instead ask, "Why did it go right?" If they do, one of the answers will be that the free nations of the world understood that their values and their interests pointed in the same direction: toward freedom.
The writer is deputy national security adviser to President Bush.
