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Daniel
Pipes "If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will …" George W. Bush used this formulation five times in his speech to the United Nations Thursday, listing a long series of demands about weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, persecution, the aftermath of the 1991 Kuwait war, and its use of oil revenues. The president then goes on: "If all these steps are taken, it will signal a new openness and accountability in Iraq." In other words, Saddam Hussein gets another chance.
I full well know that this is intended as a ploy. It assumes that Saddam will do nothing of the sort and it counts on this then inducing the United Nations Security Council to endorse an American military campaign against the Iraqi regime. But it is too clever by half. The U.S. government should not be offering Saddam Hussein any way out. His 30-year career shows him to be an irredeemably aggressive, thuggish totalitarian megalomaniac. No representative of the United States should ever offer him a path to respectability, just as it should not allow the United Nations to have any control over the key decisions of American foreign policy. For these reasons, the president's speech is a severe disappointment.
That the president twice referred to the Iraqi regime as a "gathering danger" was a subtle and masterful way of linking his case against Iraq and his prescribed course of action with Churchill's stance against Nazi Germany. In The Gathering Storm, one of the greatest wartime leaders recounts how he foresaw the Nazi threat, but how his call to action went unheeded by the community of nations. That the League did not enforce Germany's compliance with the resolutions to which it agreed upon its defeat in the First World War, that it watched and did not prevent German rearmament, the League proved itself to be ineffectual. Bush's speech was a warning to the United Nations that it faced the same fate as its predecessor if it failed to enforce the conditions it imposed on Iraq in the Gulf War settlement. Like Churchill, Bush did not demand new resolutions, or in this case a tougher inspections regime. He insisted that the U.N. not allow Iraq to continue threatening the community of nations with its flagrant violations of numerous Security Council resolutions. The United Nations failure to act in this case would confirm the belief shared by many that its pronouncements are empty ideals supported by wishful thinking, not coercive power. Iraq is the U.N.'s testing case. There has rarely been a clearer, more-justified summons to action as this one. As Bush stated in his address: "We created a United Nations Security Council so that, unlike the League of Nations, our deliberations would be more than talk, our resolutions would be more than wishes." The Churchillian message of the president's speech was subtle, but audible: if the U.N. does not act in accordance with its founding principles to subdue the Iraqi threat, it thereby forfeits any legitimacy to which it may once have laid claim. Iraq is not Nazi Germany; but it is a state dominated by a power-starved tyrant who could, if left unchecked, continue to destabilize his region and eventually threaten the rest of the world with weapons of mass destruction. If left in power, he will eventually attain a nuclear weapon that, if handed off to a terrorist cell, would make September 11, 2001 remembered not as "the day the world changed," but as "the warning left unheeded." For eleven years Saddam Hussein has foiled the United Nations and scoffed at this body's Security Council resolutions without consequence. Just as Churchill learned from history, so too has the Bush administration. It understands why the League of Nations was not worth the paper on which it was printed. Saddam Hussein's Iraq is a gathering storm that must now be quelled with military action, for it has proven its resolve to break the promises it made to the rest of the peace-seeking world. For the United States to be compelled to act alone against Iraq would not only spell the end of Hussein's regime, it would confirm the widely held belief that the United Nations is a worthless, ineffectual institution unwilling to put muscle behind the convictions it supposedly cherishes. |
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