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This state of affairs has been almost inevitable since the arrival of President Bush in the White House. In a lifelong writing career I have never been more sad to be correct as I have turned out to be when I predicted that the new Republican administration would act in such a way that the rest of the world would have to form an alliance against it.
This is not because there is anything peculiarly unpleasant about the United States but because the balance of power is an amoral mechanism made all the more necessary since clear signals that Washington has little patience with international agreements except for those made under the aegis of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
The illusion that there are more benign forces at work than those leading to a a complete split between America and the rest has been temporarily preserved by the bravery of British Prime Minister Tony Blair . The Prime Minister has laboured as a matter of principle and against his own party political interests to keep Mr. Bush honestly enfolded in the equivocal embrace of Hans Blix. But nobody who succeeds Blair will have the political capital to do what he has done in the past year. Even the opposition Conservatives will be forced to tone down their Atlanticism.
What makes the situation so terrible for the future safety and stability of our world is that all of this was predictable and should have been known by heart in the State Department. Blair has always had limited room to manoeuvre, has punched way above his weight and could not have played the hand dealt to him more skillfully but he leads a party that has always been substantively anti-American. The British Labour Party currently has the luxury of indulging its anti-war sentiments because the opposition Conservatives are largely supporting the Government. Labour might have supported a Gore War but they will not listen to the argument that a thing might be right even if Bush supports it. Some have not cast off their socialist-bred anti-Americanism, many more are too old to be grateful for World War II assistance but old enough to remember Vietnam. Most of all, their political activists and constituents are all telling Parliamentarians that there is nothing to be gained and everything to lose by going to war. In peace time there is always a natural majority against war.
France, in general, and Chirac in particular has 'form' as long as your arm on Iraq. The only intriguing question to which there is not a public answer - although the CIA should know it - is whether Chirac personally pocketed millions of dollars through arms deals with Saddam or whether the money went into campaigning slush funds. The possibility of blackmail from Iraq fits neatly with a 'pro-European' and anti-American stance on a matter of supposed principle, particularly when the cause unites Chirac's natural right wing supporters with the anti-American left. We might also want to balance which of the two Western powers, France or Britain, has the more disproportionate illusion about its post imperial clout.
The German position has been known for so long that it is a standing doctrine; and the strategic importance and dilemmas of Turkey must surely be a compulsory textbook in Washington. Berlesconi will overreach himself, Aznar is vulnerable and the Eastern Europeans will opt for the political and economic drip feed of the European Union over the alternating indigestion and starvation that is American assistance. There may be private congratulations from a clutch of Sheikhs and embarrassingly noisy support from Israel but against the rest, these are nothing.
Even worse than all of this misreading has been the sheer tactical ineptitude. On the grand scale there has been a miserable failure to explain the need for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein which can be justified securely on United Nations Resolutions and at the almost trivial level that justification would be bolstered not by a Second but by an 18th Resolution.
It has been argued that you cannot enforce one Resolution against Iraq without enforcing all others, against Israel in particular; but there is a difference between UN cease fire stipulations and Resolutions which depend upon interlocking actions by protagonists.
Israel can plausibly argue, when discussing Resolution 242 - that it cannot withdraw from anywhere without security guarantees and it could further argue that since 1948, when it was founded by the UN, it has been the only protagonist to put forward reasonable peace proposals, notably in 1948 and again under Mr. Barak in July 2000. At a more fundamental level, however, the idea that you cannot do anything until you can do everything is not tenable.
The charge that the proposed war on Iraq is somehow driven by something vague called "oil" is also pretty absurd; the threat of war and war itself tend to raise oil prices. If the USA was really worried about oil it would have leaned much more heavily on the parties in Venezuela to settle and it would be establishing even closer ties with oil rich (and weapons of mass destruction rich) Russia.
Worse still, however, for Bush and Blair, is that the moral case for going to war, though not clear cut, is pretty respectable. Given the long drawn out refusal of Saddam to meet UN imposed cease fire terms, the use of force is legally justified although, not for the first time, the UN discredits itself by legislating and then ignoring its own pronouncements. This is why we are now in the highly emotional and symbolic tangle over what is incorrectly called the "Second Resolution" which is not actually legally required. From listening to global discussions it is hard to grasp this central fact; the only bit of justification for war that is crystal clear is legal.
We would have no legal justification for attacking him because he is cruel to his own people. I believe we should have such legal leverage based on what happened in Kosovo but we do not. The third argument of this sort is about the supply of weapons and chemicals to terrorists but they can pick up all they need from a variety of rogue and dilapidated states, including Russia, without ever dealing with Saddam. The fog here has arisen because Bush and his allies have conflated Saddam's internal cruelties, his mild military threat to external parties and the possibility that he might supply weapons and chemicals to terrorists. These three arguments for intervention are weak on their own and putting them together makes them no stronger.
Which brings us to the question of pre-emptive action. The doctrine on this as set out by traditional Christian teaching arises from a very different kind of warfare than that through which they lived. In an era of aerial bombing and missile warfare the argument that you must wait until attacked before doing anything makes no sense. There is, then, nothing wrong with being pre-emptive as long as the cause is just and the action is a matter of last resort.
The cause is no more nor less just than many others, and it has a solid legal base, but in the final analysis we have to ask whether an invasion of Iraq would be a last resort. No, it would not be a last resort in the sense that we could wait indefinitely for Saddam to comply with the first 17 post 1991 cease fire Resolutions but it is a last resort for the United Nations.
If the United Nations does not sanction a military invasion of Iraq and allows Saddam to prevaricate then that will send out a signal to every unstable, decaying state in the hands of a dictator. We are faced yet again with a paradox: that those who say there cannot be war without United Nations authority really believe that Bush should not go to war with United Nations authority. Their dislike or hatred of Bush forces them to discredit the only institution which might curb him and which Bush likely wants to destroy.
The problem here, of course, is that while the invasion of Iraq is a last resort for the United Nations that is not why Bush is waging this war. In spite of millions of words written on the subject I am not very clear why he is, nor am I clear why Blair is joining him. They have failed to use the main arguments in favour of what they propose and have instead resorted to a mish mash of half baked pretexts. We are, then, presented with the irony that the United Nations has every good reason to use force whereas Bush and Blair do not.
Of course, exactly the opposite may happen. If it does then Bush will accidentally achieve one of his vaguely articulated but clear policy objectives, the destruction of the United Nations. For all its faults, it is superior in structure to the WTO and similar US-dominated international organisations. Bush may also goad Europe into taking on its proper 'twin pillar' responsibilities within NATO; conversely, if Europe does not take on those responsibilities, NATO will go the way of the UN. We are then faced with America versus the rest, a daunting prospect for all of us.
The most painful decision lies before us, all of us, and I conclude from everything that I have laid out that the better of the evils on offer is for the United Nations to save itself by resolving to support Bush, thereby seizing the legality for the hostilities from his hands and demonstrating the importance it places on its own Resolutions.
This has the unpleasant side effect of rewarding Bush's aggression but that is better than rewarding Saddam's noncompliance. The alternative of unilateral action or retreat by Bush are each in their way worse than an UN supported invasion. If Bush goes it alone then countries will rightly conclude that they must square with the West Wing and not the East River. But if Bush is forced to imitate the grand old Duke of York no country will be safe.
Those who oppose Bush's war are not necessarily cowards nor appeasers but many of them are no more honest than Bush. He thinks that force will solve the problem, they think that doing nothing will solve the problem (studiously avoiding the argument that the inspectors on whom they place so much hope would not be where they are without the threat of force) whereas the root problem is our inability to make decisions in a stable environment.
Chess Grand Masters know how the rules work but sometimes lose to idiots. We have so many 'idiots' in our world that, unless they can predict our collective response to violence, they will wreak havoc. What this comes down to, in the end, is whether we will do what we have said we will do. That depends on what we have said. We said in 1991 that Saddam must disarm in line with the cease-fire terms imposed on him by a UN coalition. If we did not mean it we should not have said it but it cannot be unsaid now.
In the cruelest paradox of all, we must go to war now to make good our previous failures. This may cost thousands of lives, of innocent civilians in Iraq, of soldiers on both sides and all because we have said one thing and done another. In a way that none of us must ever forget, we are much more to blame for the war we need to fight than is Saddam. It is bad enough when one, middle sized dictator lies to his people and the world, much worse when that world, through its collective institutions, lies to that dictator; and to itself.
By our sloth we, the collectively wise, have tempted and connived with the dangerously foolish. It is our fault that the United Nations must lead us to war; but it must. If it does not, then much more than Saddam will almost certainly die in the wake of American unilateralism. That will be our fault, too. If - the worst and least likely scenario - the US withdraws and leaves Saddam to x, we will be responsible not only for past omissions but future catastrophes.
Which leaves us with the hope that Mr. Blix will pull a series of rabbits out of his hat and demonstrate to the satisfaction, even of Mr. Bush, that Saddam has been totally disarmed. It is a blessed outcome that no party deserves, not least ourselves, but we must hope and pray nonetheless. In the meantime, the next best option is for the UN to save itself by other means.
SUSSEX, UNITED KINGDOM - If American soldiers, in an act of hollow symbolism, hoist United Nations flags over the public buildings of Baghdad without having received its sanction to do so, they will have partaken in a campaign as momentously disastrous for its prosecutors, in spite of the military victory, as the attacks of Napoleon and Hitler on Russia. In addition to the flight, the trial or the corpse of Saddam, Washington will receive a destroyed British Prime Minister, an embittered French President, a sullen German Chancellor, a resentful Turkish government and army, a non-aligned movement more hostile than any since the Vietnam War; and all that, even if the victory is swift, clean and casualty free, for what? There is not even any reasonable guarantee that it will boost Bush's re-election chances!
Whether the war would be proportionate is not so clear. How many people must be killed to save how many is not an abstract question, it was asked before nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan. In that case, it was the right decision because of what we knew about Japanese defensive intentions but in this case Saddam's potential for damaging external parties is limited.
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