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February
5, 2003, 1:45 p.m.
Just
Like Monica
Powell speaks
to the frivolous.
By Mark Steyn
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few days ago, I said this thing was getting like Monica: by the time you're
in Year Two, no smoking gun is ever quite smoking enough. It's perfectly
obvious from Colin Powell's presentation what's going on. Ten minutes
before the flatfoots show up, the bootleg liquor is whisked away, replaced
by teacups and the gaming table gets dropped through the trapdoor and
replaced by an ornamental fountain. If you think Saddam Hussein is a lovable
rogue — as Mr. Chirac does — this is all part of a grand ongoing
comedy, to which the French and Russians made their own exquisite contribution
by proposing to strengthen the monitoring regime by doubling the number
of inspectors, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum. If the Powell evidence
made anything plain, it's this: The idea of "monitoring" a dictator
is ludicrous. Saddam is quite happy to participate for another decade
or two in an eternal ongoing U.N. field study of dictatorship.
Resolution 1441,
painstakingly negotiated by General Powell and French Foreign Minister de
Villepin, was never a test of Saddam. It was a test of the U.N. The faxed-in
boilerplate responses to the Powell presentation couldn't have been clearer.
France: "They
raise questions which deserve further investigation…."
China: "We support the continuation of inspections…."
"Russia welcomes the continuation of dialogue…. We hope that
this dialogue will be extremely concrete…. The Security Council may
need to adopt a new resolution, and perhaps more than one…."
Four, five, nine,
there's always room for one more. You got the feeling that if they could
have dragged out their expressions of condolences regarding the space
shuttle for the full seven minutes, they'd have been happy to do so.
This is serious business.
The U.S. and British remarks were sober and credible. The French, Russian,
and Chinese were frivolous. The most relevant observation was Powell's
assertion of al Qaeda's presence in Iraq for the last eight months. If
that's accurate, it's not a U.N. matter, it's a threat to America's national
security. Which shouldn't be dependent on the whims of the French veto.
— Mark Steyn is a columnist for Britain's
Daily Telegraph and Canada's National Post. His website is www.marksteyn.com.
A collection of some of his post-9/11 columns, The Face of the Tiger
has just been released and can be ordered here.
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