A few weeks back, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen chastised Sen. McCain for his support of the president on Iraq. Cohen noted that he, too, once supported the war, but his reason for doing so vanished once the claim of weapons of mass destruction turned out to be “bogus.” The problem is back in March 2003 Cohen's argument for the war went beyond the issue of Saddam's wmd stockpiles. But a reader wouldn’t know this from reading his May 2006 column.
The other day, George Will took issue with a series of Weekly Standard foreign policy editorials. Fine: There should be serious debate about U.S. national security policy. But to read his comments about Iraq in that column, one could get the impression that Will was opposed -- or at the very least was neutral -- on the question of removing Saddam from power. The record suggests otherwise. Here are just a few examples of Will on Iraq in no particular order:
Commentary delivered on ABC’s This Week, March 16, 2003:
[O]pposition to the war against Iraq rests on and sometimes does not rise above a truism, the fact that war costs lives. Opponents say if we leave Saddam in power but continue today's policy of containment, lives will be saved. But that is not true…. Under the UN sanctions, Saddam is allowed to sell enough oil to purchase food and medicine to meet the basic needs of the Iraqi people, but Saddam uses the money to fuel his war machine and lets the babies die. So another ten years of containment would involve the slaughter of at least another 360,000 Iraqis, 240,000 of them children under five. Walter Russell Mead says those are the low estimates. If the UN's numbers are right, another decade of containment would kill one million Iraqi civilians, including 600,000 children. So as Americans debate the morality of the war against Iraq, remember these numbers and remember this picture of an Iraqi child suffering the effects of the current policy of containment.
Duluth News-Tribune column, February 23, 2003:
Today's demonstrators against a war to disarm Iraq can hardly be explained by fear for their safety, or by sympathy for Saddam Hussein's fascism. The London demonstration -- 1 million strong, the largest in British history -- was not as large as the death toll from the war Saddam launched against Iran. The demonstrators simultaneously express respect for the U.N.'s resolutions and loathing for America, the only nation that can enforce the resolutions. This moral infantilism -- willing an end while opposing the only means to that end -- reveals that the demonstrators believe the means are more objectionable than the end is desirable….
And the demonstrators must know that if they turn President Bush into "the noble Duke of York" (who "had ten-thousand men, he marched them up to the top of the hill, and he marched them down again"), Saddam will bestride the Middle East, and emulators -- and weapons of mass destruction -- will proliferate....
Times Union column, March 5, 2003:
Counting from April 18, 1991, the 15th day after passage of U.N. Resolution 687, more than 4,330 days have passed since Iraq put itself in material breach of international obligations. It did so by ignoring that resolution's 15-day deadline for listing the locations, amounts and types of all its chemical and biological weapons, all "nuclear weapons-usable" materials, and for disclosing the location of Scud and other ballistic missiles with ranges beyond 90 miles. So the current "rush" to war has consumed almost half again as many as all the 3,075 days of U.S. engagement in World Wars I and II and the Korean War.
As the world waits to see whether the United Nations will cudgel Iraq with a "second" U.N. resolution, which actually would be the 18th, President Bush weighs when, not whether, he will order an attack on Iraq that Congress authorized by much larger majorities than his father achieved on Jan. 12, 1991, authorizing the Gulf War. And the President's domestic and foreign critics, showing an amazing tolerance for cognitive dissonance, fault him simultaneously for acting as though the United States can be the world's constable -- and for allowing Iraq to divert him from the task of solving the North Korean crisis….
Into this welter of foolishness….
ABC’s This Week, March 23, 2003:
TERRY MORAN: Are there any signs that … people … are welcoming us?
GEORGE WILL: Well, when it's over they're not going to come out in the street and say, please bring back Saddam Hussein. That's not a regime that's hard to improve on. And I think once they're sure it's gone, and once they know that they're not going to be betrayed as they feel they were betrayed internally after the '91 cease-fire, then you will see that. But on the protection of civilians. One of the most morally dubious wars we fought was the one in Kosovo, not because it wasn't worth fighting, but we fought it at 15,000 feet. It was a war worth killing for, but not worth dying for. Zero NATO causalities. But sometimes the civilians took the punishment because we were doing this from a distance and we're fighting a more just war this time….
They may be assuming, as Osama bin Laden assumed, on the basis of the Marines being blown out of Beirut airport by one bomb, and on Black Hawk Down, the Mogadishu shambles, that the American people have what the strategists call, casualty dread, and they can't keep, take casualties. They should understand the American people look upon this as a continuation of the war that began September 11th and therefore we've already taken 3,000 casualties. If you take all the terrorism back to the Berlin disco in '83 or whenever it was, we've had 5,000 and some casualties. The American people are not casualty averse when they know what they're fighting for and this time they do….
Charleston Daily Mail column, March 11, 2003:
The war against Iraq has begun - much as America's war against Nazi Germany really began months before Pearl Harbor and Hitler's Dec. 11 declaration of war on America…. Soon the bow wave created by the movement of the great ship America into full-scale war will wash away Lilliputian nuisances, such as French diplomacy….
It is not a "scenario," it is a virtual certainly that absent Israel's 1981 pre-emptive attack, Iraq would have had nuclear weapons in 1991, and today, as Gerard Baker of the Financial Times writes, Kuwait would be the 19th province of Iraq - and Saudi Arabia would be the 20th.
France's goal - less violence - would have been achieved because the First Gulf War could not have been fought.
Fortunately for the United States, which has serious things to think about, the French foreign minister continues to demonstrate the absurdity of his country's demand to be taken seriously.
ABC’s This Week, March 30, 2003:
MICHEL MARTIN: The issue is not just, Iraq is not the only issue. The broader audience for this is the broader Arab and Muslim world. And in fact, the question is, how are [they] going to see [sic] seeing these people's doors knocked down? They've seen these pictures already in the disputed territories of Israel, and it's infuriating.
GEORGE WILL: How are they, how are they going to feel when they see the police apparatus of Saddam Hussein put on trial? How are they going to feel when there's actually an election? How are they going to feel when there is a large state in the middle of an Arab culture without a democracy….
Again, Michel, two months, two months from now, let's suppose the war is over in two months, and I don't think that's an extravagant thought, all of this, these micro-frictions are not going to matter. The brute fact of changing the regime of a nation of that size and complexity is going to radiate through the Middle East.
Chicago Sun-Times column, March 20, 2003:
The president demonstrated Monday night that he understands a tested political axiom: If you do not like the news, make some of your own…. To Saddam Hussein, his two sons and other satraps, the president said: Get out of Dodge by sundown Wednesday. To the incredibly inflated United Nations secretary-general, Kofi Annan, who earlier Monday had said that a war without UN approval would be illegitimate, the president reasserted America's "sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security." To the Iraqi people, who could listen to a broadcast of a simultaneous translation of his words, he said the war is against "the lawless men who rule your country" with "torture chambers and rape rooms." To Iraqi officers he said: "Your fate will depend on your actions." Do not fight "for a dying regime." And he warned that the Nuremberg defense--"I was just following orders"--would be unavailing at the war crimes trials that await officers who order the use of weapons of mass destruction "against anyone, including the Iraqi people."
… Monday, a few hours before the president spoke, Daschle said the president had "failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war." Well. Presumably Daschle meant that Bush has failed to secure the support of the French and a majority of other Security Council members for enforcing the plain meaning of Resolution 1441, which the French co-authored and which the Security Council unanimously adopted. But had the president succeeded, the result would have been the "serious consequences" 1441 calls for: war. The French and everyone else, including Daschle--the regime-change-endorsing, use-of-force-authorizing Daschle--understood that….
ABC’s This Week, March 2, 2003:
GEORGE WILL: The Administration has been very clear that the liberation of Iraq means the liberation of a unified Iraq, with its territorial integrity. One part of Woodrow Wilson's heritage that we've seen quite enough of and are not embracing this time around is ethnic self- determination which produces Yugoslavias…..
FAREED ZAKARIA: …Everything we know about building democracies is if you go, if you get out quickly, the whole thing will be a shambles.
GEORGE WILL: But, again, Japan was not a promise, after generations of military fascism was not a promising place for a laboratory of democracy, 1950, it was on the way to democracy, same was true of Germany. I'm not saying that . . .[sic]
FAREED ZAKARIA: Yeah but that's five years, George.
GEORGE WILL: Five years, my goodness, we're still on the Rhine.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you think we're prepared for that kind of .
GEORGE WILL: Yes. The American, General Howe was the first, but not the last, to underestimate the staying power of the American people.
ABC’s This Week, February 23, 2003:
GEORGE WILL: I don't think there's a slightest chance of this because Saddam Hussein is clearly trying to string this out until public opinion shifts in his favor and the allies crack. Now, he's underestimating his adversary who is not Hans Blix, it's not Kofi Annan, it's George W. Bush. George W. Bush is not going to make the defense of the United States against successive acts of war contingent upon the permission of a Security Council that includes France, busy in Ivory Coast without the UN permission, China, the butchers of Tianenmen Square and suffocators of Tibet without the UN permission and Russia, currently waging war in Chechnya….But even there it seems to me this is not apt to be in 2004 an election on it's is the economy, stupid. We're going to be at war then. One war will be over by then, but we'll still be engaged in a protracted war against terrorists. And that is how the people are going to cast their votes. And I come back to the fact that the Democratic party on the most vital issue of our day is at daggers drawn with itself.
Chicago Sun-Times column, February 20, 2003:
Today the UN, toyed with by France, is making more likely a war that might not be impending if the UN had not been so centrally involved in dealing with Iraq 12 years ago. In August 1990, the first President Bush vowed that Iraq's aggression against Kuwait "will not stand." He said that before involving the UN in reversing the aggression. Had he organized the reversal of that aggression outside of UN auspices--as President Bill Clinton organized the 1999 campaign against Serbia--Iraq's regime might have been changed. One reason Desert Storm did not reach Baghdad was that it was constrained by a UN mandate to merely liberate Kuwait….
Now, fast forward to Hans Blix addressing the Security Council last week, continuing the 12-year tutorial of Iraq concerning UN unseriousness. Blix--no Pollyanna, he--acknowledged that Iraq has so far, in his priceless locution, "missed the opportunity" to account for thousands of tons of chemical and biological agents that "many governmental intelligence organizations" believe exist. But this little missed opportunity was less important to Blix than his being able to report:
That "we have obtained a good knowledge of the industrial and scientific landscape of Iraq." That Iraq had enacted "legislation" forbidding itself to have weapons of mass destruction. That Saddam Hussein has formed not just one but two commissions, one to search high and low "for any still-existing proscribed items," and the other--with "very extensive powers of search in industry, administration and even private houses"--to look "for more documents relevant to the elimination of proscribed items and programs."
That Iraq has provided inspectors with papers that contained "no new evidence" but "could be indicative of a more active attitude" by Iraq.
And that Iraq remains committed to "encourage" people whom the inspectors want to interview outside the country to comply. These inanities illustrate why Iraq can feel confident that its comprehensive noncompliance with Resolution 1441 will have no consequences. That resolution, the text of which announced zero tolerance of Iraqi deviations from it, now stands as proof that the UN policy is inexhaustible tolerance.
The next application of that policy may have been foreshadowed last Sunday when the French ambassador to Washington, appearing on ABC's "This Week," would not say that if Iraq refuses to destroy the missiles that are proscribed, the refusal would constitute a "material breach" of 1441….
The UN's serene reception of Blix's most recent report subtracted further from the UN's dwindling stature. Another such reception of another such report should put the UN in the company of the Hanseatic League. UN inaction on Iraq is further proof of its irrelevance.
Extended Excerpts
ABC’s This Week, March 16, 2003:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: George, you're convinced this war is going to save lives.
GEORGE WILL: George, opposition to the war against Iraq rests on and sometimes does not rise above a truism, the fact that war costs lives. Opponents say if we leave Saddam in power but continue today's policy of containment, lives will be saved. But that is not true.
Last week this man, Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations, writing in "The Washington Post" argued that containment is deadlier than war, especially for Iraqi children. The 1991 Gulf War killed between 21,000 and 35,000 Iraqis, between 1,000 and 5,000 were civilians, but the UN itself estimates that the current UN policy of trying to contain Saddam with economic sanctions kills 5,000 Iraqi children under five years old every month, 60,000 a year. Mead says that some estimates are lower, but he says, "By any reasonable estimate, containment kills about as many people every year as the Gulf War, and almost all the victims of containment are civilians, and two-thirds are children under five."
graphics: effects of economic sanctions
over 5,000 iraqi children under the age of five killed every month
a total of sixty-thousand a year
GEORGE WILL: Under the UN sanctions, Saddam is allowed to sell enough oil to purchase food and medicine to meet the basic needs of the Iraqi people, but Saddam uses the money to fuel his war machine and lets the babies die. So another ten years of containment would involve the slaughter of at least another 360,000 Iraqis, 240,000 of them children under five. Walter Russell Mead says those are the low estimates. If the UN's numbers are right, another decade of containment would kill one million Iraqi civilians, including 600,000 children. So as Americans debate the morality of the war against Iraq, remember these numbers and remember this picture of an Iraqi child suffering the effects of the current policy of containment.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Thank you, George.
ABC’s This Week, March 23, 2003:
TERRY MORAN: Are there any signs that … people … are welcoming us?
GEORGE WILL: Well, when it's over they're not going to come out in the street and say, please bring back Saddam Hussein. That's not a regime that's hard to improve on. And I think once they're sure it's gone, and once they know that they're not going to be betrayed as they feel they were betrayed internally after the '91 cease-fire, then you will see that. But on the protection of civilians. One of the most morally dubious wars we fought was the one in Kosovo, not because it wasn't worth fighting, but we fought it at 15,000 feet. It was a war worth killing for, but not worth dying for. Zero NATO causalities. But sometimes the civilians took the punishment because we were doing this from a distance and we're fighting a more just war this time….
They may be assuming, as Osama bin Laden assumed, on the basis of the Marines being blown out of Beirut airport by one bomb, and on Black Hawk Down, the Mogadishu shambles, that the American people have what the strategists call, casualty dread, and they can't keep, take casualties. They should understand the American people look upon this as a continuation of the war that began September 11th and therefore we've already taken 3,000 casualties. If you take all the terrorism back to the Berlin disco in '83 or whenever it was, we've had 5,000 and some casualties. The American people are not casualty averse when they know what they're fighting for and this time they do….
I think Joe is trying to bait me with the provocative word, multilateral. Joe, let's compromise. I'm for, all for a multilateral administration of liberated Iraq, and it should be composed of what we will call, not entirely original, the coalition of the willing. That is, all the nations that were for the liberation of Iraq should participate in making it happen. That excludes some well-known nations.
TERRY MORAN: Well, that does raise a question. You talked a little bit about world opinion and the coalition of the willing. Ari Fleischer reminded us this week there's a billion people in it and it's 30 trillion GDP total, but some big nations, Russia, France, China, are very much already saying we are not going to sanction with UN imprimatur(PH) the occupation of Iraq. How much of a difference does that make, how much of a problem is that?
GEORGE WILL: I think we'll do it without, if they insist, we'll do it without the UN. Some of us would be pretty dried out about that relationship.
ABC’s This Week, March 30, 2003:
MICHEL MARTIN: The issue is not just, Iraq is not the only issue. The broader audience for this is the broader Arab and Muslim world. And in fact, the question is, how are [they] going to see [sic] seeing these people's doors knocked down? They've seen these pictures already in the disputed territories of Israel, and it's infuriating.
GEORGE WILL: How are they, how are they going to feel when they see the police apparatus of Saddam Hussein put on trial? How are they going to feel when there's actually an election? How are they going to feel when there is a large state in the middle of an Arab culture without [sic?] a democracy….
Again, Michel, two months, two months from now, let's suppose the war is over in two months, and I don't think that's an extravagant thought, all of this, these micro-frictions are not going to matter. The brute fact of changing the regime of a nation of that size and complexity is going to radiate through the Middle East.
Chicago Sun-Times column, March 20, 2003:
The president demonstrated Monday night that he understands a tested political axiom: If you do not like the news, make some of your own…. So Monday night he delivered perhaps the first presidential speech directed almost entirely at a foreign audience. At several such audiences, actually.
To Saddam Hussein, his two sons and other satraps, the president said: Get out of Dodge by sundown Wednesday.
To the incredibly inflated United Nations secretary-general, Kofi Annan, who earlier Monday had said that a war without UN approval would be illegitimate, the president reasserted America's "sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security."
To the Iraqi people, who could listen to a broadcast of a simultaneous translation of his words, he said the war is against "the lawless men who rule your country" with "torture chambers and rape rooms."
To Iraqi officers he said: "Your fate will depend on your actions." Do not fight "for a dying regime." And he warned that the Nuremberg defense--"I was just following orders"--would be unavailing at the war crimes trials that await officers who order the use of weapons of mass destruction "against anyone, including the Iraqi people."
…The Senate minority leader is the most prominent national Democrat and will remain such until a presidential nominee is chosen. Daschle, who five years ago voted with a unanimous Senate to endorse regime change as U.S. policy regarding Iraq, and who five months ago voted with a majority of Senate Democrats for a resolution that did not mention the need for French or UN approval in authorizing the use of force--the incredible shrinking Daschle from George McGovern's South Dakota--now says that the president of the United States, not the president of Iraq, is the cause of war.
Monday, a few hours before the president spoke, Daschle said the president had "failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war." Well.
Presumably Daschle meant that Bush has failed to secure the support of the French and a majority of other Security Council members for enforcing the plain meaning of Resolution 1441, which the French co-authored and which the Security Council unanimously adopted. But had the president succeeded, the result would have been the "serious consequences" 1441 calls for: war. The French and everyone else, including Daschle--the regime-change-endorsing, use-of-force-authorizing Daschle--understood that….
Charleston Daily Mail column, March 11, 2003:
"We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation's security." - President Kennedy, during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
WASHINGTON - Wars do not always begin with an abrupt, cymbal-crash rupture of conditions properly characterized as peace. There can be almost seamlessly incremental transitions.
The war against Iraq has begun - much as America's war against Nazi Germany really began months before Pearl Harbor and Hitler's Dec. 11 declaration of war on America…. Soon the bow wave created by the movement of the great ship America into full-scale war will wash away Lilliputian nuisances, such as French diplomacy….
On "This Week," Villepin was asked: Given that Saddam Hussein has said that his mistake was invading Kuwait before he acquired nuclear weapons, do you now believe that Israel was right to bomb the reactor outside Baghdad and that France was wrong to help build it?
French diplomacy has sunk to this Villepin gaseousness:
"I think you cannot remake history. You can take lessons, you can imagine different scenarios. I don't think it's possible, today, definite answers. I think that the idea of pre-emptive strike might be a possibility.
"Have it as a doctrine, as a theory. I don't think it is really useful. Sometimes by using force pre-emptively we might create more violence, and we have to be always thinking to what are the consequences."
It is not a "scenario," it is a virtual certainly that absent Israel's 1981 pre-emptive attack, Iraq would have had nuclear weapons in 1991, and today, as Gerard Baker of the Financial Times writes, Kuwait would be the 19th province of Iraq - and Saudi Arabia would be the 20th.
France's goal - less violence - would have been achieved because the First Gulf War could not have been fought.
Fortunately for the United States, which has serious things to think about, the French foreign minister continues to demonstrate the absurdity of his country's demand to be taken seriously.
The Times Union column, March 5, 2003:
Counting from April 18, 1991, the 15th day after passage of U.N. Resolution 687, more than 4,330 days have passed since Iraq put itself in material breach of international obligations. It did so by ignoring that resolution's 15-day deadline for listing the locations, amounts and types of all its chemical and biological weapons, all "nuclear weapons-usable" materials, and for disclosing the location of Scud and other ballistic missiles with ranges beyond 90 miles. So the current "rush" to war has consumed almost half again as many as all the 3,075 days of U.S. engagement in World Wars I and II and the Korean War.
As the world waits to see whether the United Nations will cudgel Iraq with a "second" U.N. resolution, which actually would be the 18th, President Bush weighs when, not whether, he will order an attack on Iraq that Congress authorized by much larger majorities than his father achieved on Jan. 12, 1991, authorizing the Gulf War. And the President's domestic and foreign critics, showing an amazing tolerance for cognitive dissonance, fault him simultaneously for acting as though the United States can be the world's constable -- and for allowing Iraq to divert him from the task of solving the North Korean crisis.
Into this welter of foolishness has waded Conrad Black, a British citizen and member of the House of Lords who is a proprietor of many newspapers, including the Telegraph of London and the Sun-Times of Chicago. In a recent London speech to the Centre for Policy Studies, he noted that the United States, far from being the "trigger-happy, hip-shooting country" of European caricature, scarcely responded to the killing of dozens of U.S. servicemen at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and on the USS Cole in Yemen….
Yet it is presumably to counter America's insatiable appetite for using its military that the idea has arisen that America should submit to plans to "collegialize" its power. The idea is that any use, even after successive acts of war against America, requires the permission of France, Russia and China, which have not sought U.N. blessings for their respective military interventions to discipline the Ivory Coast, to grind the Chechens into submission and to suffocate Tibet….
So Black is bemused by the moral calculus that produces the conclusion that the United States is morally obligated to use its military might only at the behest of, or with the permission of, nations that do not wish it well. These are nations that "do not share America's values, and that affect neutrality between a wronged America, a Gulf War coalition betrayed, and affronted international law on the one side, and the evil of Saddam Hussein on the other."
America has had "the most successful foreign policy of any major country" not just because of its strength but because "it has never had any objective except not to be threatened and when threatened, to remove the threat." And it "does not believe in durable coexistence with a mortal threat."
ABC’s This Week, March 2, 2003:
GEORGE WILL: The Administration has been very clear that the liberation of Iraq means the liberation of a unified Iraq, with its territorial integrity. One part of Woodrow Wilson's heritage that we've seen quite enough of and are not embracing this time around is ethnic self- determination which produces Yugoslavias…..
FAREED ZAKARIA: I would guess it's on the, I would guess we will end up spending on the high side. Because I think it's not just a question of how many troops. But the crucial question is how long they'll stay. And my guess is in order to achieve anything resembling a kind of liberal, democratic government, American troops will have to stay in there for quite a while, to build the institutions of democracy. You see, there will be an incentive to get out quickly, not simply because we want to go home, but because people in the region, maybe even a lot of Iraqis are going to say, give us our self- determination. Everything we know about building democracies is if you go, if you get out quickly, the whole thing will be a shambles.
GEORGE WILL: But, again, Japan was not a promise, after generations of military fascism was not a promising place for a laboratory of democracy, 1950, it was on the way to democracy, same was true of Germany. I'm not saying that . . .[sic]
FAREED ZAKARIA: Yeah but that's five years, George.
GEORGE WILL: Five years, my goodness, we're still on the Rhine.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you think we're prepared for that kind of .
GEORGE WILL: Yes. The American, General Howe was the first, but not the last, to underestimate the staying power of the American people.
Duluth News-Tribune column, February 23, 2003:
Today's demonstrators against a war to disarm Iraq can hardly be explained by fear for their safety, or by sympathy for Saddam Hussein's fascism. The London demonstration -- 1 million strong, the largest in British history -- was not as large as the death toll from the war Saddam launched against Iran. The demonstrators simultaneously express respect for the U.N.'s resolutions and loathing for America, the only nation that can enforce the resolutions. This moral infantilism -- willing an end while opposing the only means to that end -- reveals that the demonstrators believe the means are more objectionable than the end is desirable.
The demonstrators must know that Slobodan Milosevic and the Taliban would still be tyrannizing Muslims were it not for U.S. power. But they do not care.
And the demonstrators must know that if they turn President Bush into "the noble Duke of York" (who "had ten-thousand men, he marched them up to the top of the hill, and he marched them down again"), Saddam will bestride the Middle East, and emulators -- and weapons of mass destruction -- will proliferate. That the demonstrators do not care is a measure of their monomania -- anti-Americanism….
There is not much to be gained just now from additional attempts to reason with a leader [Chirac] that tone-deaf, or from attempts to soften the monomania of those swarming in the "European street." Perhaps U.S. policy can change European minds by changing facts in Iraq.
Perhaps not. However, America's vital interests are more dependent on those facts than on those minds.
ABC’s This Week, February 23, 2003:
GEORGE WILL: I don't think there's a slightest chance of this because Saddam Hussein is clearly trying to string this out until public opinion shifts in his favor and the allies crack. Now, he's underestimating his adversary who is not Hans Blix, it's not Kofi Annan, it's George W. Bush. George W. Bush is not going to make the defense of the United States against successive acts of war contingent upon the permission of a Security Council that includes France, busy in Ivory Coast without the UN permission, China, the butchers of Tianenmen Square and suffocators of Tibet without the UN permission and Russia, currently waging war in Chechnya….
I don't think so. The question is whether the President's proposals produce economic growth by Labor Day 2004. If the economy is growing, he wins. If not, he has a problem. But even there it seems to me this is not apt to be in 2004 an election on it's is the economy, stupid. We're going to be at war then. One war will be over by then, but we'll still be engaged in a protracted war against terrorists. And that is how the people are going to cast their votes. And I come back to the fact that the Democratic party on the most vital issue of our day is at daggers drawn with itself.
Chicago Sun-Times column, February 20, 2003:
Today the UN, toyed with by France, is making more likely a war that might not be impending if the UN had not been so centrally involved in dealing with Iraq 12 years ago. In August 1990, the first President Bush vowed that Iraq's aggression against Kuwait "will not stand." He said that before involving the UN in reversing the aggression. Had he organized the reversal of that aggression outside of UN auspices--as President Bill Clinton organized the 1999 campaign against Serbia--Iraq's regime might have been changed. One reason Desert Storm did not reach Baghdad was that it was constrained by a UN mandate to merely liberate Kuwait….
Now, fast forward to Hans Blix addressing the Security Council last week, continuing the 12-year tutorial of Iraq concerning UN unseriousness. Blix--no Pollyanna, he--acknowledged that Iraq has so far, in his priceless locution, "missed the opportunity" to account for thousands of tons of chemical and biological agents that "many governmental intelligence organizations" believe exist. But this little missed opportunity was less important to Blix than his being able to report:
That "we have obtained a good knowledge of the industrial and scientific landscape of Iraq."
That Iraq had enacted "legislation" forbidding itself to have weapons of mass destruction.
That Saddam Hussein has formed not just one but two commissions, one to search high and low "for any still-existing proscribed items," and the other--with "very extensive powers of search in industry, administration and even private houses"--to look "for more documents relevant to the elimination of proscribed items and programs."
That Iraq has provided inspectors with papers that contained "no new evidence" but "could be indicative of a more active attitude" by Iraq.
And that Iraq remains committed to "encourage" people whom the inspectors want to interview outside the country to comply.
These inanities illustrate why Iraq can feel confident that its comprehensive noncompliance with Resolution 1441 will have no consequences. That resolution, the text of which announced zero tolerance of Iraqi deviations from it, now stands as proof that the UN policy is inexhaustible tolerance.
The next application of that policy may have been foreshadowed last Sunday when the French ambassador to Washington, appearing on ABC's "This Week," would not say that if Iraq refuses to destroy the missiles that are proscribed, the refusal would constitute a "material breach" of 1441.
Resolution 1441, which the Security Council would not have the brass to pass again if challenged to, announced Iraq's final chance to disarm, and concentrated the UN's mind on pushing finality far over the horizon. In 1976, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ending his sentence as U.S. ambassador to the UN--it had just declared that Zionism is racism--called the UN "a theater of the absurd."
The UN's most recent dereliction of life-and-death duty resulted in Europe's worst massacre since 1945, the 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, where they had gathered because the UN assured them it was a "safe area." The massacre occurred while UN forces loitered a few miles away.
The UN's serene reception of Blix's most recent report subtracted further from the UN's dwindling stature. Another such reception of another such report should put the UN in the company of the Hanseatic League.
UN inaction on Iraq is further proof of its irrelevance.
