I'm like CVIII on this one - a lot of 'on the one hand/on the other hand'. Hussein is a scoundrel, the international community is indecisive at best and cynical at worst ,the world is probably more dangerous now than in the worst days of the Cold War and vacillation can be a worse sin than impulsiveness. Tom Friedman is right when he says "I look around the UN Chamber and don't see any white hats".
Yet I keep coming back to one basic question: if we can do what we want, without some validating endorsement from the only international tribunal we have, where are we? In the end, we have to be guided by some coherent principle that goes beyond doing whatever we convince ourselves is the right thing to do at the moment. Because once you've endorsed that view, you can't draw any meaningful conclusions other than that the guy with the power to do what he wants is always right.
And that's dangerous stuff. Right now, we and our supporters - Blair, Berlesconi, the Spanish PM, Bulgaria - are in the catbird's seat. But tomorrow it's China - and what do we have to say if they decide that Taiwan represents a mortal threat to them? What besides the fact that we don't agree gives us any purchase in deterring them from nuking Taipei?
There is one distinguishing principle that might have supported unilateral action in this case: that Hussein is in league with Al Qaeda and the rest of the headcases that have been spewed out of fundamentalist Islam. The problem is that proposition has been pursued by the administration (along with about 25 others) and we come up short. There is no prrof that Saddam in fact has ever been in cahoots with that gang. To the contrary, he has been ruthless in crushing extremist elements.
One of our problems is that the conclusion drawn by our government (Saddam must go) has driven our analysis, rather than the other way around. For whatever reason, Bush and his administration are obsessed with expelling Hussein, and we are perceived as fitting our rationale for doing so to this idee fixe, and the necessary invasion time-table, rather than the other way around.
The weakness of our arguments for immediate action is obvious even to our friends. Our bull-headedness and insistence on the right to act unilaterally has placed enormous strains on our traditional alliances. Right now, NATO is fragmented, much of Europe is hostile, Turkey's government may split over this issue, North Korea (a far more dangerous place) has seen an opening to revice its nuclear capacity...and the laws of unintended consequence haven't even begun to work yet.
That's why in the end I think the only recourse is to pursue diplomacy, as frustrating as that is, and to live with the molasses-like process of flooding Iraq with inspectors and grinding away at him, while recruiting broader international support for initiating action if he ever tries again to shrug off international monitoring, to expel investigators or to deny access to presidential palaces. Because diplomacy, as frustrating and inadequate as it is, remains the only possible bulwark against sliding into moral anarchy. And in the long run, I think that's far more dangerous than Saddam Hussein, because long after he's gone, we'll all still be living with the adverse consequences of shredding the international political system.
HTH
Listening to: 'Easy Living' from 'Easy Living' by 'Ike Quebec' on Media Center 9.0
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Topic: OT - Can we talk about the war here (Read 10963 times)