Fred Barnes, executive editor
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AFTER IRAQ INVADED Kuwait in 1991, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher met with the first President Bush and urged him not to "go wobbly." Bush didn't. Now, when the current President Bush confers with Prime Minister Tony Blair in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Monday, he'll return the favor by offering similar advice. This time, however, the prospect of wobbliness is not on the war, but on who controls Iraq after the war and guides it toward democracy. Bush believes it should be the United States and Great Britain. Blair has a soft spot for the United Nations.
The backdrop for the Belfast summit is a concerted effort by the antiwar countries of Europe, plus China, to wrest control of Iraq from the presumed victors, the Americans and the British. The non-combatants are demanding that from now on, as French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin put it, "the United Nations must play a central role" in administering Iraq, though U.S. and British troops should provide security in the short run.
This is an idea whose time has not come. A large postwar role for the United Nations may be the worst idea of the entire Iraq episode--worse than the U.N. arms inspections regime doomed to failure from the start, worse than reliance on countries like Angola and Guinea and Mexico to enforce U.N. resolutions, and worse than believing, as Bush initially did, that France would join the coalition against Saddam Hussein.
France and its allies claim the United Nations is the only body with the
international legitimacy to administer Iraq. But is it? The United Nations failed miserably in its supervision of Kosovo, Bosnia, and Somalia. Until Bush stepped in last year, it had completely dropped any attempt to get Iraq to disarm. The United Nations has never successfully fostered a democracy. This isn't surprising, since many, if not most, of its members are non-democratic countries and a police state (Libya) heads the U.N. Human Rights Commission. And have we heard a peep from the United Nations, particularly Secretary General Kofi Annan, about Fidel Castro's new crackdown on Cuban advocates of democracy? If so, I missed it.
There's at least one group of people among whom the United Nations has no legitimacy: That's the 24 million Iraqis who've suffered under more than two decades of Saddam's rule. Iraqis have seen U.N. inspectors come and go. They've seen Annan rush to Baghdad to confer with Saddam with no easing of repression as a result. They've watched as U.N. resolutions, including those obligating Saddam to respect human rights, go not just unenforced or not even cited in passing by the United Nations.
Nor are Iraqis likely to cheer a U.N. role that enhances the power of France and Russia and China and Germany, all countries which made commercial deals with Saddam and cynically tried to thwart the military liberation of Iraq. All of them, especially France and Russia, are desperate to maintain in free Iraq oil concessions granted by Saddam. Also, the Germans built a bunker for Saddam designed to withstand a nuclear attack. The French constructed the nuclear reactor at Osirik, which the Israelis destroyed in 1981. And so on.
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