The US, UN & Iraq II

Someone wrote:

To attack you must vanquish
To defend you must merely survive

Perception added

To survive with DIGNITY you must be free
To be FREE you must sometimes vanquish

To survive without freedom and dignity is to merely exist
To merely exist is not one of my options.

If you do not really want to seriously think about this proposition you are in such deep denial that there is no hope.

Snood thanks for reposting my comment.

Spent the evening reading through the New York Times Sun-Tues and would like to share the following:

[quote]Viewing the War as a Lesson to the World
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, April 5 — Shortly after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld issued a stark warning to Iran and Syria last week, declaring that any "hostile acts" they committed on behalf of Iraq might prompt severe consequences, one of President Bush's closest aides stepped into the Oval Office to warn him that his unpredictable defense secretary had just raised the specter of a broader confrontation.
Mr. Bush smiled a moment at the latest example of Mr. Rumsfeld's brazenness, recalled the aide. Then he said one word "Good"; and went back to work.It was a small but telling moment on the sidelines of the war. For a year now, the president and many in his team have privately described the confrontation with Saddam Hussein as something of a demonstration conflict, an experiment in forcible disarmament. It is also the first war conducted under a new national security strategy, which explicitly calls for intervening before a potential enemy can strike....
...Some hawks inside the administration are convinced that Iraq will serve as a cautionary example of what can happen to other states that refuse to abandon their programs to build weapons of mass destruction, an argument that John R. Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, has made several times recently.
The administration's more pragmatic wing fears that the war's lesson will be just the opposite: that the best way to avoid American military action is to build a fearsome arsenal quickly and make the cost of conflict too high for Washington....
...Several of the hawks outside the administration who pressed for war with Iraq are already moving on to the next step, and perhaps further than the president is ready to go. R. James Woolsey, the former director of central intelligence, said on Wednesday that Iraq was the opening of a "fourth world war," after World War I, World War II and the cold war, and that America's enemies included the religious rulers in Iran, states like Syria and Islamic extremist terrorist groups.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/06/international/worldspecial/06POLI.html?pagewanted=print&position=top

TRB FROM WASHINGTON
Sovereign Powers
by Peter Beinart

Post date 03.24.03

Many Americans are looking forward to the "we told you so" moment. The moment--after Iraqi troops surrender en masse, after the residents of Basra and Baghdad embrace our GIs--when people around the world finally admit that we were on the side of the angels all along. But, even if Iraqi troops do surrender and Iraqi civilians do cheer, that moment of public international redemption will probably not arrive. That's because the global debate over war was never really about whether Saddam Hussein could be easily toppled or even whether the Iraqi people would rejoice if he were. [..] The critical debate was about the risks of not toppling him. Most Americans became convinced, after September 11, 2001, that we lived in a new era in which the risk of inaction in Iraq seemed grave. Most non-Americans thought the risk was trivial, and the most menacing thing about this new era was America's new pretext for war. By invading Iraq, we will necessarily leave that debate unsettled--since no one will ever know what Saddam, in tandem with terrorists, might have done if left in power.

<snip>

[T]here is another problem, which hawks have not yet adequately faced: The United States cannot be an international pariah and simultaneously lead a global crusade for democracy. No U.S. administration will continue promoting free elections if they bring anti-American regimes to power. Already, in the post-September 11 era, elections in Pakistan have seen the dramatic rise of radical fundamentalist parties. The result is an elected parliament considerably more hostile to the United States than the unelected general, Pervez Musharraf, who presides over it. In recent years, the United States has urged the Turkish military to pull back from politics and allow full democracy to flourish. And so, this month, Ankara's pro-war military stood by and watched its parliament deny assistance to America's war effort in Iraq. In Jordan, pro-American King Abdullah has twice postponed parliamentary elections, which he reportedly fears will be won by fundamentalist parties. If war with Iraq turns Jordanian opinion further in the Islamists' direction in the coming months, will the Bush administration really push the king to give them a shot at power? Or will it decide that, while Iraq needs democracy, Jordan already has more than enough?

<snip>

But, when the United States imposes such limits on others and brazenly refuses to accept them itself, it makes things much worse. And this is exactly what the Bush administration has done, by embracing a post- September 11 interventionism without shedding its pre-September 11 isolationism. In the 1990s, the obsession with violations of U.S. sovereignty became something close to a credo on the American right. The Contract with America, for instance, said nothing about world affairs except that the United States should restrict its participation in international peacekeeping, and American troops should never serve under the U.N. flag. President Bush has continued in this spirit [..] The result has been a dizzying rejection of international treaties. To get the cumulative effect, consider the following headlines: "U.S. BOYCOTTS NUCLEAR TEST BAN MEETING" (The Washington Post, November 12, 2001); "U.S. SCUTTLES GERM WAR CONFERENCE" (The Washington Post, December 8, 2001); "U.S., EUROPE CLASH AT CHILD SUMMIT" (The Washington Times, May 9, 2002); "EUROPEAN UNION RATIFIES TREATY AIMED AT CURBING GLOBAL WARMING; U.S. ALONE IN OPPOSITION" (Associated Press, May 31, 2002); "U.S. OPPOSITION TO NEW INTERNATIONAL COURT GETS BAD REVIEWS ABROAD" (Kansas City Star, July 13, 2002); and "U.S. SLAMS TORTURE CONVENTION REFORM" (Associated Press Online, November 7, 2002). Remarkably, each of these rebuffs took place after September 11, 2001, after the Bush administration had declared its right to intervene aggressively in the internal affairs of countries throughout the world.

The point isn't that the United States was wrong in each fight. It is that, compared with America's war against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, the stakes in each fight were trivial. But they served as a disastrous backdrop to America's efforts on Iraq at the United Nations. After all, within close to a year of torpedoing half a dozen U.N. initiatives, in September 2002 President Bush journeyed to Turtle Bay to tell the assembled nations that, unless they sanctioned America's war with Iraq, they were dooming the United Nations to irrelevance. Are we really surprised that the result was, and continues to be, anti-American fury across the globe?

To survive with DIGNITY you must be free
To be FREE you must sometimes vanquish