President Bush’s reversal from unilateralism to multilateralism was entirely predictable. He is merely following the internationalist principles that guide his administration.
This article makes me very uneasy. What do others think?
‘‘Unilateralism!" "Cowboy diplomacy!" Clintonites and other denizens of the one-world Left had been using such expressions to vent their outrage over President George W. Bush’s foreign policy long before he launched Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the March 19 invasion of Iraq started a new round of hyperventilating by the fervid internationalist choir. The president was undoing the multilateralist world order set up after World War II, they wailed. He was scorning and undermining the United Nations, they declaimed.
| I believe the phrase was "get on board or get out of the way"... |
Many American patriots, on the other hand, were elated. Finally an American president was standing up to the UN and putting America’s security and well-being first. Shame on the UN! Shame on the Frenchies, Germans, Russians and other fair-weather friends who opposed our retribution on Saddam for the 9-11 terror atrocities! The radio waves crackled with jubilant hurrahs from the Rush Limbaugh-Sean Hannity-Ollie North end of the broadcast dial. Rush-bots and Bush-bots exulted: Hurray for President Bush and America First, go-it-alone unilateralism!
| And some of us think Bush is simply doing the right thing, no suspension of disbelief required. So what's yer point? |
On March 7, just a couple weeks before our troops entered Iraq, I received a telephone call from one of these newly elated patriots. An old friend and a longtime subscriber to THE NEW AMERICAN, "Joe" was calling to see if I was aware of the good news. "Did you hear Bush last night?" he asked excitedly, referring to the president’s March 6 press conference. "Boy, wasn’t that fantastic?" Joe continued along these lines. (I’m recounting this conversation from notes, not precise quotes from tapes.) "He really blasted the UN, didn’t he?" enthused Joe. "Did you hear the thunderous applause he got from that? Now, is THE NEW AMERICAN going to be willing to admit it was wrong about Bush being a pro-UN internationalist?"
| Or even worse, a pragmatist? |
I assured Joe that we would be supremely delighted to find ourselves wrong in this case. Unfortunately, the president’s rhetoric notwithstanding, we had found no reason to issue mea culpas yet. Joe was dumbstruck. "What? You can’t be serious!" he exclaimed. According to Joe, George Bush had just dealt the UN its death blow. Bush had completely exposed and discredited the world body. This is the first time, said Joe, that he could recall hearing people on the street, in the office, and on talk radio all saying we ought to get out of the UN. "That’s what you guys have been calling for for years," Joe exclaimed. "I’d think you’d be ecstatic."
| Or not. Sometimes people travel in the same direction without being headed for the same place... |
There will be ecstasy aplenty, I explained, once President Bush signs legislation ending our participation in, and cutting off funding for, the UN and all of its subversive agencies and activities. But I cautioned him not to hold his breath while waiting for that glorious day to come. Far from leading a U.S. withdrawal from the UN, Bush has repeatedly praised the UN and restated his support for it. "Of course! He has to say things like that to show he is for the things the UN claims to be for — like peace," Joe, the elated patriot, explained. "But he has made it clear to the UN and the ‘international community’ that we don’t need their permission to defend ourselves."
| We've been occasionally profuse with our praise of Pakland, too. I don't think anyone doubts that Bush realizes the truth about it. Some of the UN's functions are valid and legitimate. Some aren't. I don't think Bush believes in a "world government," but neither does he believe in an inalienable right of nations to do terrible things to each other without some sort of accounting... |
The president had indeed sounded a welcome note of sovereign defiance. His biggest applause line on March 6 was his declaration that "when it comes to our security, if we need to act, we will act. And we really don’t need United Nations approval to do so." Bravo! Well said! This was followed a few seconds later with a bold reiteration proclaiming that "when it comes to our security, we really don’t need anybody’s permission." More rapturous applause. "You should be rejoicing," my friend continued. As he saw it, it was goodbye Clinton UN multilateralism and hello Bush America-First unilateralism.
| Except that Bush's "unilaterialism" isn't the same thing as the Birchies' idea of "unilaterism." |
"I think you are going to be very disappointed," I told Joe. Despite President Bush’s go-it-alone bluster, I explained, the president had shown repeatedly, by deed as well as word, that he is a solid UN multilateralist, an inveterate internationalist. That he is actually leading the effort to strengthen the UN.
| I think he's leading the effort to make the UN do what it was set up to do, which wasn't to set up a "world government," but also equally not to be an international debating society noted for its inefficiency, nepotism, and graft... |
I pointed out that sandwiched in between the president’s March 6 remarks about not needing UN approval or permission was this statement by Bush: "I want the United Nations to be effective. It’s important for it to be a robust, capable body." This was a repeat of similar statements he’d made dozens of times in various speeches, such as:• "The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations...."
• "Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence?"
• "We want the resolutions of the world’s most important multilateral body to be enforced."
• "I want the United Nations to be effective.... It makes sense for there to be an international body that has got the backbone and the capacity to help keep the peace."
• "The message to the world is that we want the U.N. to succeed."
• "America will be making only one determination: is Iraq meeting the terms of the Security Council resolution or not?... If Iraq fails to fully comply, the United States and other nations will disarm Saddam Hussein."
• "Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" President Bush wants the UN to be relevant! Over and over again, he has called for the UN to exercise authority that conservatives in the past always have argued the UN should never have. He has taken a very revolutionary stand that argues for vastly empowering the UN Security Council. He has time after time criticized the UN for being too weak and has called — implicitly and explicitly — for making it stronger. But by making it appear that this is serving America’s national interest, he has disarmed those who normally would oppose such a radical shift in U.S. policy.
| Paleoconservatives see the UN as a bogeyman, to be feared for itself, because it threatens American sovreignty. Another end of the political spectrum sees the UN as an end in itself, its very existence a good and civilizing influence on the world, regardless of whether it ever does anything of substance. Bush and Rice and Powell, I believe, see the UN as a tool, not as an end. It's a method for sovreign nations to work out their differences and deal with problems without resorting to war. It's been a much more effective tool than its predecessor League of Nations was, but it's not a powerful tool — that's a feature, not a bug. If it was a powerful tool, then it would be a "world government," and despite the movement toward multilateralism in the past 100 years the world's not ready for that, and may never be. It's dependant on the cooperation of its member states to resolve those problems it's supposed to deal with. If they don't cooperate, as Iraq didn't, as NKor and Iran aren't, then it's forced to do something. If the Security Council — designed to be a check on the General Assembly — can't agree because of the clash of spheres of influence, then the body itself is rendered ineffective. Even if it can agree, the tools available to the UN are also by design limited. Other than Korea, made possible by the walkout of the Soviet UNSC member, I can't think of another war that's actually been sanctioned by the UN. |
An indication of how radical the Bush position on the UN is can be seen from the alarming compliments the president has gotten from the likes of Robert Wright. Professor Wright, an avowed advocate of world government, notes that Bush has given the UN "a prominence it has rarely enjoyed in its 57-year history." "In fact," said Wright in a New York Times piece earlier this year, "there remains a slim chance that the president could, however paradoxically, emerge as a historic figure in the United Nations’ own evolution toward enduring significance." Wright noted that "if Nixon could go to China, President Bush can go through New York." The Bush administration’s pressure on the UN to enforce its resolutions is making it easier for the UN to claim the authority to do so, and to call on the U.S. to provide it with the military muscle to do just that. By leading the charge on this issue, Bush is making it more difficult for fellow Republicans to oppose UN empowerment — just as, decades earlier, Nixon’s trip to Beijing made it more difficult for fellow Republicans to oppose opening U.S. relations with Communist China.
| Bush's castigation of the UN for being ineffectual also points out the weaknesses in the body. If he desired, he could make it totally irrelevant. My personal opinion is that it's time for it to be replaced by an ever-so-slightly more effective body, but his could be different — the UN has its uses, and he sees a bigger picture than I do, or than the writer does. But the body as constituted could be more effective than it is, and I think Bush's words were a wakeup call to Kofi and Co. I also don't think they listened. |
George W. Bush has implemented many other concrete steps to expand the UN’s power and influence. In launching Operation Iraqi Freedom he did not seek a congressional declaration of war, as the Constitution requires; like his father in Desert Storm, he has cited UN resolutions for his authority. It is George W. Bush — not Clinton — who has pressured Congress into paying the UN back dues. It is Mr. Bush who has gotten Congress to pony up billions of dollars more for the UN’s AIDS program and other UN programs like the UN Millennium Challenge Account, the World Bank, etc. It is President Bush who has taken us back into UNESCO, one of the worst UN agencies, after we’d been out of it for 20 years and three administrations. "Mark my words," I told Joe, "you will witness a great reversal in Iraq." I predicted that after "unilateralist" President Bush had sent several hundred thousand U.S. troops into Iraq in another undeclared war, and after the cost of occupation began to mount — in lives and tens of billions of dollars — we would then see "multilateralist" Bush going hat in hand to seek help from the UN and all its anti-American critics. The Iraq venture would end up humiliating the United States, elevating the UN and convincing millions more Americans that independence in security and foreign policy is no longer tenable. It would mark a great advance for "collective security" under the UN.
| This is something of an oversimplification, seen through ideological blinders, if the diplomacy that's been going on since last April. Bush is doing the pragmatist thing with the UN, with the International Community™, and one-on-one with our allies and adversaries. In many respects it is a multilateralist world, as we're discovering as we're forced to pay through the nose to rebuild Iraq. If the UN was an effective organization it would be be safe to turn the rebuilding process over to it. France-Germany-Russia prefer the body to remain the way it is, so everything has to be done one-on-one in the end. |
"Not possible," said Joe, still emotionally high from the effects of the president’s speech. Bush, he insisted, had caused too great a rupture in UN-U.S. relations, and in our relations with France, Germany and other false allies. "The problem with you," my friend declared, "is that you’ve been against everything for so long you can’t believe it when things start going right. Mark my words, the UN is toast!"
| I think I used those words myself a few months ago — with the caveat that it was toast if Bush wanted it to be. |
Not long ago a decidedly unelated Joe called to unbosom himself of a growing unease over President Bush’s new multilateralism. He had read the transcript of President Bush’s September 23 address to the UN General Assembly. Particularly galling was the president’s statement that "America is working with friends and allies on a new Security Council resolution, which will expand the U.N.’s role in Iraq." The UN, said Bush, "should assist in developing a constitution, in training civil servants, and conducting free and fair elections." Could the president really be serious, Joe wondered? "Where has the UN ever conducted free and fair elections or developed a constitution worth a d***?" he asked. Unfortunately, the president is serious indeed. And if more Americans do not prevail on their congressmen to halt his reborn multilateralism, we will be skidding downhill fast.
| Bush was being conciliatory, handing the UN some fairly innocuous tasks — the sort of tasks the body was envisioned as handling. No, they don't do them very well. But try and think of something else for them to do. International politics is a game of give and take — he had to give something, and what he gave was probably as little as he could get away with... |
Paul Robinson, assistant director for the Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull in England, offered a very sobering analysis of the Bush-Iraq venture in the October 18 issue of the London Spectator. "[T]he United Nations, far from being humiliated by recent events, could well emerge invigorated," wrote Robinson shortly after the Bush administration appealed to the Security Council for material and military aid in Iraq. "The more America has to backtrack and summon help from the UN, the more it will be the latter which will be seen as the winner in the power struggle between the two.... The Americans have had to go back to the UN this week to get a resolution to bail them out in Iraq. Having declared the UN ‘irrelevant,’ they have now discovered that they cannot manage without it."
| It's so tiresome. The one crows from one side, the other crows from the other. It's not that the truth lies somewhere in the middle — it's that the truth is more complicated and more intricate than either of them acknowledges. |
In sum, the results of the war in Iraq will probably be the very opposite of those for which it was launched. The fires of terrorism will be fuelled, not quenched; Iraq will not be a beacon of Western liberalism transforming the Middle East but a bankrupt maelstrom of discontent; efforts to create a new power bloc to counter America will not fade away but redouble; the legitimacy of the United Nations will not be weakened but strengthened; and the constraints on American power will be tightened, not removed.
| That's right. Nothing but woe and misery in our future. Better to have stayed home, poring over our geneaologies and recounting the glories of our ancestors. How can so many people, all of them putatively intelligent, make the assumpting that Bush is fighting the war without a strategy? How can they assume that the achievement of the goals set up along the way is going to lead to peaches and creme and the huzzahs of a grateful populace? Each and every time we achieve one of our goals the Bad Guys are going to attempt to counterattack and throw us back. They're going to try and take the bones out of our mouths before we get the chance to gnaw them. The diplomatic and political wars are being just as hard-fought as the military war. |
Robinson’s analysis is fairly accurate, except for his assumption that the negative results are the opposite of those intended by the Bush administration’s internationalists. My colleague, William Norman Grigg, writing months before Robinson, called it more accurately, I believe. In "Same Ends, Different Means" (published in the March 24 issue of this magazine shortly before the beginning of the most recent war with Iraq), Grigg observed: "The president and his subordinates have made their intent transparently clear: The impending war on, or occupation of, Iraq is intended to carry out the UN Security Council’s mandates, not to protect our nation or to punish those responsible for the September 11th attack. The war would uphold the UN’s supposed authority and vindicate its role as a de facto world government." In a subsequent article ("Baghdad Bait-and-Switch," June 30), Grigg warned that the protracted occupation of Iraq would result in "a steady and worsening hemorrhage of national power, wealth, and prestige," leading to a situation in which "American servicemen and their families, weary of the burden of empire, would eagerly embrace transferring that burden to the UN" — a radically empowered UN boasting its own standing military.
| That's one possible outcome. I wouldn't put it into the "most probable" category, though. |
In pursuing this course, George W. Bush is following the internationalist inclinations that guide him and his coterie of advisers and handlers. As the presidential election of 2000 was entering its climactic weeks, the September/October 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs clued in its multilateralist reading audience not to take George Bush’s unilateralist utterances too seriously. James M. Lindsay of the left-wing, one-world Brookings Institution noted in that issue that "both Al Gore and George W. Bush are internationalists by inclination...." Foreign Affairs is the weighty journal of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the group that has been in the forefront of promoting UN one-worldism and world government for the past 80-plus years.
| Them and the Illuminati and the Learned Elders of Zion. And the Masons... |
Lindsay and the crew at Foreign Affairs were not merely guessing at George W.’s inclinations. They knew that his father is a devoted internationalist and a former top CFR member. Just as important, they knew that candidate Bush had surrounded himself with advisers who were (and are) CFR stalwarts, many of whom had served in the first Bush administration: Condoleezza Rice, Richard Cheney, Stephen Hadley, Richard Perle, George Shultz, Paul Wolfowitz, Dov Zakheim, Robert Zoellick, Elliott Abrams, Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, et al.
| I'm not too sure how Scowcroft and Kissinger got on the list — neither is part of the administration. Nor is Schultz. Zakheim is CFO of DoD, so I don't know what the beef is with him. |
They knew for certain that the new Bush administration would end up taking a pro-UN, multilateralist course — even if it had to march under a false America First, unilateralist banner, in order to get patriots like Joe onto the one-world bandwagon. Unfortunately, too many Joes still don’t realize they’re being taken for a ride.
| When Walt Kelly parodied the John Birch Society in Pogo, he named them the Jack Acid Society. Gosh, I miss Pogo. |
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