HONOR SYSTEM

Why hit the U.N.? (Martin Walker, 8/21/2003, UPI)

[T]he United Nations now faces a major test. The Anglo-Americans have no choice; they own the war, and they own the aftermath. They have an obligation to their original decision to take military action, to their dead troops, and to their wider strategic goal of implanting a stable and prosperous democracy in the heart of the Arab world. They must stay the course -- whatever the exigencies of the U.S. election timetable.

The United Nations is different. Not only does the United Nations as an institution have a choice -- whether to scuttle or to remain half in bed with the Anglo-Americans and increasingly responsible for the stabilization of Iraq - it also has a decision-making process that puts an onus of choice on France, Russia and China as veto-wielding powers. They agreed that the U.N. staff should return to Baghdad, and to that extent they share in the responsibility to respond to their slaughter.

The issue is plain enough. Do these three great powers, and through them the United Nations as a whole, recognize that the suicide bombers of Baghdad who killed the U.N. staff are now the common enemy of humanity, and join to hunt them down? Or do they take refuge in their earlier pedantries, backing Resolution 1441 to require Saddam to carry out his various obligations, but ducking the military resolve to enforce it?

In the dulcet tones of French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, or the brisk self-contradictions of his Russian counterpart, Igor Ivanov, one can already hear the footsteps of appeasement, of blaming the Americans, of identifying some supposedly righteous force of Iraqi resistance to the occupier.

None of this can change the raw fact. The United Nations has been attacked. The international community is honor bound to rally to its defense and to haul the men behind the attackers to justice.

The Anglo-Americans have actually achieved their main aim, rendering Iraq impotent as an enemy. The failure to find WMD suggests that there need not be much fear of whatever regime succeeds Saddam's, which was always the reason for not just assassinating him. We could just leave, but probably won't because we are honorable.

It is the UN instead that has a main interest in the rebuilding process and in the type of the successor regime, but how can an international community and an institution without honor be bound by same? Posted by Orrin Judd at August 21, 2003 1:20 PM