The Lonely Goatherd Blog And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats - Matthew 25:32
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November 11, 2002
Half a loaf is worse than none This new UN Security Council declaration of November 8, 2002 doesn't impress me much. Studying the actual text, it doesn't seem to obviously give us much that we didn't already have. It lays out demands, but does NOT give us specific authorization to do anything to enforce them. Indeed, our representative to the UN, John Negroponte, specifically emphasized as a selling point of the statement that it does not include "automaticity."
On the other hand, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card insists that the US does not need further authorization. On Meet the Press, he said "The U.N. can meet and discuss, but we don't need their permission." Colin Powell, even, is saying similar things to CNN.
What good is this resolution then? We already could claim that the Baath regime has been in material breech of dozen year old statements from the last Gulf War. We could even reasonably use those UN resolutions as legal basis for an attack without further authorization. [That is if you think that we need UN sanction in order to be legal, which is arbitrary and incorrect. Let me explain.] People (well, the French) would bitch, but they'd bitch just the same if we used this newest authorization as our justification.
The most you could say for this resolution is that it lays down the conditions for avoiding attack, and gives international credence that these terms are legitimate. That might be perceived as advancing the ball a few yards, but just is not a diplomatic touchdown; it does not give us authority to act.
What it more obviously does is to complicate matters for the US. It grants the moral authority to the United Nations such that we strongly appear to have conceded that we need the UN to make our actions legitimate. Now we have to hope that this Swede, Hans Blix, is really the tough guy that will be necessary for any of this to have effectiveness- and that the Security Council will back him up as Hussein goes to his usual tricks to game the system.
This will surely work out right. However, in the unlikely event that Hussein goes back to playing hide and seek, we're in a rough spot. We have foolishly ceded authority to the United Nations, so now we're the bad guys if we have to go in without permission from China or Russia. Also, we're likely to have some half-assed bunch of weapons inspectors running around Iraq with their penises in their hands- right in the way of stuff we're going to need to be destroying.
I support President Bush on his Iraq policy. In fairness, he has been steady and relentless. He's kept his eye on the big picture.
Perhaps he knows exactly what he's doing. Dubya has in fact repeatedly proven himself to be the sharpest tool in the shed. Maybe he's figured out how this UN resolution plays right into his hands, and I'll be proven wrong in my analysis that it makes our job harder rather than easier. I hope so.
