THE BEST OF TIMES:

The last emperor: One thing was made crystal clear yesterday: there is no other authority than America, no law but US law (Polly Toynbee, September 13, 2002, The Guardian)

There he stood, this unlikely emperor of the world, telling the UN's 190 nations how it is going to be. The assembled nations may not be quite the toothless Roman senate of imperial times, but at the UN the hyperpower and its commander-in-chief are in control as never before: how could it be otherwise when the US army is the UN's only enforcer? This is, President Bush said, "a difficult and defining moment" for the UN, a challenge that will show whether it has become "irrelevant". He pointed his silver-tongued gun with some delicacy and a certain noblesse oblige, but there was no doubt he was holding it to the UN's head: pass a resolution or be bypassed.

It was a fine and gracious speech that might have been borrowed from better presidents in better times. He spoke of a just and lasting peace for Palestine. He promised a surprise return by the US to Unesco. He spoke of the tragedy of world poverty, disease and suffering, of offering US aid, trade and healthcare. Earnest and uplifting, it was very like the speech he made soon after the twin towers attack last year. But how long ago that suddenly seemed. Back then the world tried hard to believe him, full of sympathy and hope that this earth-quake had indeed turned him internationalist. But this time belief was stretched beyond breaking. The skills of the best speech writer could not blot out the gulf between last year's rhetoric and the reality that followed. [...]

One thing was made crystal clear yesterday - there is no other source of authority but America, and that means there is no other law but US law. What the US wants, the UN had better solemnise with a suitable resolution - very like the Roman senate and one of its lesser god-emperors. But this is not the real America. A small cultish sect is battling for the "imperium" within this bizarre administration, resisted by mainstream Republicans - so what is Tony Blair doing in there with them?

It's hard not to find columns like this one ineffably sad. Ms Toynbee yesterday felt the residual tug of Western ideals but finds it impossible to accept the messenger or even the message. Were she still capable of believing in freedom and justice she might recognize--as so many Americans do, not just the tiny cult of her imagination--that this is a better president and these are the best of times. America is always at its best when it is challenged to defend and extend the principles that gave it birth:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

What a pity that the Left no longer shares the belief that all Men--be they American, British, Afghan, Palestinian, Iraqi, Cuban or Chinese--share the God given right to liberty and to be governed only by their own consent, not by dictators at the barrel of a gun. If we are too seldom roused to help our brothers in other countries, denied these rights by tyrants, that is a shame. But to oppose, for whatever reason, the extension of such rights to the people of Iraq and the rest of the Islamic world is shameful. Ms Toynbee says that:

Curiously, the louder Bush and Blair call for an end to this villain, the less convincing it sounds. Why now? That remains the perplexing question. Containment works well: few observers think Saddam can launch anything under present no-fly, daily bombing pressure. What is Bush's obsession? It remains a mystery. It is not a vote-winner in the US where the danger looks not clear and present, but cloudy and distant. The risks are frightening and the costs staggering. Petrol prices rise while stock exchanges fall at the prospect. Oil say some, but if US companies want Saddam's oil, an oil-driven cynical administration could make peace not war and help themselves to fat contracts.

Is this the new Left standard for liberating peoples: we'll only do it if it's easy, politically beneficial, drives up stock prices, and lowers oil costs? Containment works well? For whom? What of the millions of Iraqis whose deaths Saddam has caused by refusing to surrender power? What of the millions more who live today in the world's most oppressive state?
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 13, 2002 9:53 AM