U.S. AT BAY? OR U.N.?

By William F. Buckley Jr.

There's no question that the administration misjudged the extent of the Iraq (news - web sites) problem. That problem is the problem of Iraq, No. 1, and No.2, the problem of our allies and of the United Nations (news - web sites). The doom box is loud and vibrant, e.g., the Daily Telegraph, whose Daniel Johnson reports a meeting at 10 Downing Street between Jack Straw, foreign secretary, and Tony Blair (news - web sites), prime minister, and speaks of "confidential advice to the foreign secretary" which "depicts a country on the brink of collapse." Readers were told that "participants at the meeting were invited to think the hitherto unthinkable: 'We are at risk of strategic failure in Iraq.'"


That isn't going to happen, though we have to acknowledge that there are allies out there who rather wish it would happen. They call this Schadenfreude, which is the pleasure covertly taken from adverse developments. Hear now the tone of the editorial in India's Hindustan Times:


"America has found out at last that the taste of the pudding is in the eating. Five months ago it short-circuited a debate in the U.N. Security Council when it found it would not be able to secure approval for invading Iraq, and went ahead with its plans anyway. But the Bush administration has since discovered that toppling Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was the easy part. Thus, it now proposes to go back to the U.N. it had so haughtily ignored to seek a resolution authorizing the setting up of a multinational force to stabilize Iraq, a task which the predominantly U.S. occupying force has found well beyond its capability. The truth is that before deciding to go back to the U.N., Washington solicited nearly every country it thought it could leverage, India included, for troop contributions for Iraq. But it drew a blank."


The Bush people have to maneuver through swampy ground. It is of course not correct that we ignored the United Nations. We operated under the auspices of several U.N. resolutions. Legally, it having been established that the government of Saddam Hussein had not lived up to its obligations under the peace treaty of 1991, the old war was still in force, its sanctions continuing. But it is true that a French veto threatened, this time around, and that threat forced the U.S. to proceed without the ultimate formality of an ad hoc Security Council resolution. To charge that we traduced the U.N. by declining to accept a French veto on strategic policy is to say more than history is likely to hold.


But it is true that we would be glad for more help than we are getting. Nations that have useful peacekeepers at their disposal probably aren't going to come in to do their share about the collegial problem in the Mideast. The administration acknowledges this by the verve with which we are setting up an Iraqi governing council to take over as much of the burden as can be shared.


The crystallizing position of our summer friends is that they wish U.N. authority to replace U.S. authority in Iraq. The French and the Germans are pretty direct on this point, and the U.N. bureaucracy is itching for authority.


It isn't immediately obvious just what points of contention there would be between the U.S. and the U.N. in the management of the Iraqi problem. Oil revenue, perhaps, though any surplus is many years down the road. What would threaten joint action is the importunate voice of Muslim fundamentalism. Kofi Annan (news - web sites) is not built to press his own views athwart the hard opposition of non-Western opinion.


The Bush people are no doubt prepared, if necessary, to get on with the true liberation of Iraq without help, even from those neighbors who would most profit from a detoxified Iraq. Jordan's Al-Dustur reports that "The American adventure has reached its impasse. The American arrogance has been stripped of its peacock feathers." What would the Jordanian paper recommend? What was that paper saying in 1991 when Jordan sided with Saddam Hussein?


The Bush appeal for United Nations cooperation should be carefully made. Experienced observers will soon see that any failure in Iraq owing to a failure of other nations to discharge collegial responsibilities will damage the United Nations far more gravely than any clerical inattention to it by the United States. The sacred ideal of joint action is at stake.


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=128&ncid=742&e=14&u=/030907/45/574b4.html

again?
Is this now the conservative mantra?

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EI10Ak02.html
Down aways, it discusses the UN....that they are going to wind up cleaning up the mess......



PART I: SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY

(SNIP)

Whatever the spin, George W Bush's decision of asking the United Nations to issue a mandate for a multinational stabilizing force in Iraq is viewed in the corridors of the European Union as concrete proof that the arrogance and incompetence of the neo-conservatives led them to a quagmire. Diplomats warn that Bush, as he appeals for help, will try simultaneously to dictate his conditions to the UN. So "old Europe" - France and Germany, plus Russia - is caught in a dilemma: how to help this American adventure that has been condemned from the beginning? An EU diplomat sums it all up, "We cannot allow Iraq to sink into horror and abjection just because we want to punish George W Bush. But at the same time we cannot just bow our heads and march into this mess the Americans themselves created, and now want to get rid of."

The EU, meeting in Riva del Garda, Italy, this past weekend, remains deeply divided. Great Britain and Spain support Washington's proposal to the UN, France, Germany and the Scandinavians are against it. As Anna Lindh, the Swedish foreign minister puts it, "You cannot have a situation where the US remains in control over what happens in Iraq and at the same time others have to move in and take care of security and reconstruction."

UN blue helmets - which in fact are little else than mercenaries - may eventually be offered the honor of trying to clean up the mess. So in the corridors of the European Union inevitably there's great sadness about what is ultimately the UN's irrelevancy and lack of independence: "The fact is the UN simply cannot do anything against the will of the US. The maximum the UN can aspire to is to clean up the empire's mess," says another diplomat. Most Iraqis - who, let's not forget, are among the most well-educated people in the Arab world after the Palestinians - share exactly the same view.
As Tariq Ali stresses, "For the US, the main thing in Iraq is to push through the privatization of Iraq's oil, to achieve the liberalization of the Iraqi economy and to get the big US corporations in there. They are not too concerned as to how the country will be run. We are witnessing imperialism in the epoch of neo-liberal economics and the 'Washington consensus'. Why rebuild hospitals and recreate the state health service in Iraq when you are dismantling it in your own countries?"

It's all there in Executive Order 13315, signed by Bush on August 28 and conceived to "expand the scope of the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22". By "blocking property of the former Iraqi regime, its senior officials and their family members, and taking certain other actions", the Executive Order in fact places Iraq's state assets under total control of the US Treasury. It is by all means the institutionalization of the looting of Iraq, under the banner of "Iraqi reconstruction". Without any Iraqi being consulted, the Executive Order implies that what benefits the Iraqi people benefits the US. With this Executive Order duly signed, the Bush administration shouldn't have any problems if it is forced to hand over a little control of Iraq to the UN.
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2) no stories that are more than 12 hours old. This story is from Saturday 9/6

3) You must cut-and-paste 3 or 4 paragraphs from the article. You cannot cut-and-paste the entire article and repost it here on DU. It's copyright infringement


see the rules here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=87249

I am new to this site

He implies that the U.S. didn't want a France veto. But France didn't have to veto--China and Russia were against this little adventure too. Indeed, with a just a straight yes or no vote among members of the Security Council, from what has been reported, Bush did not have the votes.

I don't think the majority of the Security Council wanted the U.S. to invade, so by invading anyhow, Bush deemed their voices to be irrelevant, which IS ignoring the U.N.

Having thus been treated, I hope none of them come to bail Bush out of this completely unnecessary war.

The year after George H.W. Bush (1949) Buckley has also attended Billdeberger Conferences and has connections to the Knights of Malta. His motives are suspect and evil.

"The Bush people are no doubt prepared, if necessary, to get on with the true liberation of Iraq without help, even from those neighbors who would most profit from a detoxified Iraq."

Have at it, Georgie!

samapala, the rules of this forum require a poster to limit article excerpts to four paragraphs or less.

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Please review the rules of the Latest Breaking News Forum, which can be found at the top of the topic listing page, or here:

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VolcanoJen
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