Clicking on banner ads enables JWR to constantly improve
Jewish World Review Jan. 23, 2002 / 20 Shevat, 5763

Robert W. Tracinski

Tracinski
JWR's Pundits
World Editorial
Cartoon Showcase

Mallard Fillmore

Michael Barone
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Don Feder
Suzanne Fields
Paul Greenberg
Bob Greene
Betsy Hart
Nat Hentoff
David Horowitz
Marianne Jennings
Michael Kelly
Mort Kondracke
Ch. Krauthammer
Lawrence Kudlow
Dr. Laura
John Leo
David Limbaugh
Michelle Malkin
Chris Matthews
Michael Medved
MUGGER
Kathleen Parker
Wes Pruden
Sam Schulman
Amity Shlaes
Roger Simon
Tony Snow
Thomas Sowell
Cal Thomas
Jonathan S. Tobin
Ben Wattenberg
George Will
Bruce Williams
Walter Williams
Mort Zuckerman

Consumer Reports

The Iraq charade


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | The headline of an Associated Press report from Tuesday declares, "Gaps Appear to Widen over Iraq within UN Security Council." The wording is, perhaps unintentionally, precise: the gaps only appear to be widening.

The report informs us -- to no one's surprise, I hope -- that France, Russia and China are opposed to a U.S. invasion of Iraq. In other words, everyone has spent the past four months skirmishing on tactics -- the U.S. asking for inspections in a bid to line up support for an invasion, other nations approving the inspections in a bid to head off the invasion -- but neither side has moved an inch on substance. So we are now exactly where we were four months ago, when President Bush started this U.N. charade.

And it is, increasingly, looking like a charade. Even as the administration has wrangled over Security Council resolutions and talked about making inspections more effective, the U.S. has moved enormous quantities of men, ships, tanks, planes and materiel to Iraq's border. The exact details are classified, but there has been no attempt to hide the overall outlines: more than 150,000 soldiers, fully equipped command centers with all of the key personnel to coordinate an attack, hundreds of tanks, hundreds of attack helicopters, hundreds of planes and their ground crews, and anywhere from three to six carrier battle groups -- all at a cost of tens of billions of dollars.

No nation has ever gone to such lengths or built such a massive offensive force without using it. The administration still says that President Bush has made no decision on invading Iraq. But all of the facts on the ground indicate that Bush made that decision six months ago, that he has just been going through the motions at the U.N., in an effort to stall congressional critics, mollify Arab regimes and mark time while the U.S. prepares its invasion.

There is, however, a far more ominous possibility: that the administration is actually sincere about seeking U.N. support and continuing with weapons inspections, that the military buildup is the real charade. A recent hint at this possibility comes from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who told reporters, "There is no question but that the deployment of troops in the Middle East is being done in the service of diplomacy." If this is the case, the massive buildup is just for show, to provide diplomatic pressure to encourage Iraqi compliance.

I hope not. Bush promised us, in his last State of the Union address, that he would not "wait on events while dangers gather." Well, the last year has looked a lot like waiting on events, as Bush has subcontracted crucial foreign policy decisions to our appeasing "allies" -- our Iraq policy to the U.N. and Hans Blix, our North Korea policy to South Korea and Japan, the Venezuela crisis to the Organization of American States. What our foreign policy needs is a reminder that the U.S. is not a paper tiger, that we are still capable of acting independently to protect our interests.

But even with the best outcome, Bush has still undermined America's credibility. If he goes to the U.N. for permission to attack Iraq, he is conceding its moral authority -- the moral authority of an organization that just elected a Libyan diplomat as chairman of its Commission on Human Rights. By kowtowing to the U.N., Bush has undermined America's moral authority if we attack Iraq without U.N. permission -- which we are almost certain to do. And if we don't attack Iraq, there is a more devastating loss of credibility: if the U.S. fails to follow through on such a massive buildup, no nation will ever believe our threats.

The deeper charade that everyone is playing is the pretense that ideas don't matter. The essence of this charade is the assumption that a nation's declared foreign policy is just talk and lip-service, the hoops you go through and the incantations you mouth to get what you really want. Let others play that game. Let France and Russia mouth platitudes about "multilateralism" to cover up the fact that what they really want is to see America weakened and humbled.

Bush's worst crime is that the truth is on his side. The brutality of Saddam Hussein's regime and the futility of the inspections whack-a-mole game are obvious to all. Yet our president does not have the courage to pursue America's interests honestly.

America has nothing to hide and nothing to apologize for. We have no need for charades.

Enjoy this writer's work? Why not sign-up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.




Comment on JWR contributor Robert W. Tracinski's column by clicking here.

01/17/03: Atlas Shrugs in Venezuela
01/03/03: Goodbye to Gehry's bad joke
12/19/02: The Dems' sorry lot
12/11/02: Venezuela's lonely rebellion
12/05/02: Red-tape conservationists
11/27/02: The craven appeasement of Islam by the West
11/20/02: The real revolutionaries
11/14/02: President must still release himself from political trap
11/06/02: The election we deserve
10/31/02: The rush from judgment
10/23/02: The grand illusion
10/17/02: Loose lips in the pressroom
10/10/02: Permission to speak
10/03/02: The bear market makes the case for privatizing social security
09/27/02: Enron vs. Atlas Shrugged
09/19/02: Bush loses the war, again
09/11/02: What have we lost?
09/05/02: The case for "destabilization"
08/29/02: "Sustainable" development's unsustainable contradictions
08/22/02: The photographing of public art and architecture has apparently been deemed a threat to the Republic
08/14/02: Talk vs. ideas
08/12/02: Blood for oil
08/06/02: The welfare debate we're not having
07/30/02: Newsflash: Hauling CEOs away in manacles makes market soar!
07/23/02: Clearing the way for real airport security
07/16/02: The war on CEOs
07/09/02: Small-time crooks
06/27/02: Martha and the tall poppies
06/21/02: The post-colonialist famine
06/12/02: America's Maginot Line
06/07/02: Time's up for Pakistan
05/28/02: Freedom's defenders
05/22/02: What they knew and when they knew it
05/16/02: The mixed-economy monster
05/08/02: Conference in Cloud Cuckoo Land
04/25/02: The 'Palestinian" victims?
04/18/02: Why Israel must not withdraw
04/09/02: LIVE FROM RAMALLAH: The Theater of the Absurd
03/26/02: Campaign finance corruption
03/21/02: Who is George Bush?
03/14/02: The prophets of defeatism
02/21/02: The war on terrorism and the war on reality
02/14/02: Multilateralism's one-way street
02/05/02: The Powell Problem
01/29/02: A profligate and irresponsible distortion of congressional priorities
01/22/02: Liberal conspiracy theories
01/15/02: Fading shock and fading resolve
01/08/02: Argentina's intellectual collapse
12/31/02: The real person of the year
12/26/01: With friends like us ...
12/19/01: Ending the "peace process war"
12/11/01: The ruthless grip of logic
12/04/01: War powers without war
11/27/01: An Afghanistan Thanksgiving
11/20/01: The end of the beginning
11/06/01: The phony war
10/30/01: A war against Islam
10/23/01: The economics of war
10/16/01: A culture of death
10/11/01: An empire of ideals
10/01/01: Why they hate us
09/24/01: The lessons of war
09/20/01: What a real war looks like
09/17/01: America's war song
09/12/01: It is worse than Pearl Harbor
09/11/01: Out of the fire and back into the frying pan
09/05/01: The UN Conference of Racists
08/28/01: Waging war on profits and lives
08/20/01: The Bizarro-World War
08/08/01: The death toll of environmentalism
07/31/01: Where does America stand?
07/25/01: Barbarians at the G8
07/17/01: The carrot and the carrot
07/11/01: The real Brave New World
07/03/01: The child-manipulators
06/19/01: The scientist trap
06/11/01: The National Academy of Dubious Science

© 2002, CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.