That Lonesome Road

ON CONSECUTIVE DAYS this week, China and France insisted that the Bush administration seek U.N. approval before sending troops to Iraq. CNN and several other news organizations described the decision by the Chinese as a "blow" to U.S. efforts to oust Saddam. Similar fretting came Thursday after French President Jacques Chirac implored the United States to work through the U.N. Security Council.

But France and China, along with longtime Iraq ally Russia, are among the practical reasons that President Bush should be highly skeptical of any return to the United Nations in dealing with Iraq. Those countries, which occupy three of the five permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council, (the United States and Britain have the other two) have used that influential perch for more than a decade to thwart many of the serious efforts to disarm Iraq, despite Saddam's obvious and arrogant flouting of the U.N. resolutions requiring him to do so. This dissension among Security Council heavyweights no doubt emboldened Saddam as he continued developing and concealing his weapons of mass destruction from inspectors throughout the '90s.

On Thursday, only hours after the New York Times's Elaine Sciolino reported that top French officials had decided upon a more conciliatory approach toward the U.S.-Iraq confrontation, President Jacques Chirac insisted that the administration return to the United Nations before taking any action. And while Chirac stopped short of opposing all military action, he called the prospect of a unilateral move by the United States "worrying."

(The most entertaining part of Sciolino's article came when a "senior official" from France told her, "We're driving the Pentagon crazy by keeping silent." Right. War-planning has been set back for months because Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the Joint Chiefs are stuck in emergency meetings on the "France question"--"How can we make the Frogs talk?")

China, another Iraq ally, was more direct. Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen met in Beijing Wednesday with Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, and called relations between the two countries "extremely friendly."

The previous day Sabri had met with Chinese foreign minister Tang Jiaxuan. Afterwards, Jiaxuan said, "The Iraq question should be resolved within the framework of the U.N. by diplomatic and political means. Resorting to force or threatening to resort to force will not solve the problem. On the contrary it leads to more tensions and troubles."

What, exactly, does the Chinese Foreign Minister mean by "political and diplomatic means"? Jiaxuan also called on Iraq to "fully comply with the U.N. resolutions, in order to guarantee cooperation with the United States and to improve relations with neighboring countries."

And then, when Saddam fails to abide by those resolutions as he has for a decade, will an attack be justified? Not according to Beijing. As China's Xinhua News Agency reported later that day, the Chinese foreign minister pledged to his Iraqi counterpart that the Chinese would continue their "unremitting efforts" to end U.N. sanctions against Iraq.

The United Nations has participated in three rounds of discussions with Iraq this year. Each has ended without any hint of Iraqi cooperation, and with Baghdad's laughable assertion that it really has complied with all of the U.N. resolutions enacted after the Gulf War. After the last round an Iraqi diplomat even branded Hans Blix a "spy." Blix, the head of the new U.N. monitoring effort, is regarded in the U.S. as a squish on Saddam.

The politicking that led to the creation of Blix's group, known as UNMOVIC, offers another revealing example of the perils of working through the Security Council. UNMOVIC was created in late 1999, after its predecessor, UNSCOM, was rendered useless by Saddam's continued refusal to permit inspectors to conduct meaningful inspections. UNMOVIC is a watered down version of UNSCOM and, in some cases, reflects remediation of specific grievances Iraq made against the previous inspection regime. (For instance, UNMOVIC employees work directly for the United Nations, not for the countries that sent them--which is a concession to Saddam, who argued that previous inspectors were also spies. Also, the group's head is appointed directly by the U.N. Secretary General and must clear all major decisions with a mini-bureaucracy. This oversight committee would consist of appointed representatives of participating governments--people former UNSCOM head Richard Butler calls "political commissars.") In its nearly three years of existence, UNMOVIC inspectors have never inspected anything in Iraq.