Last Chance For The U.N.
By Peter and Helen Evans (03/15/03)
The war on Iraq is over. This is true in the sense that, very shortly, Saddam will be gone, along with most of his regime. The debate currently taking place in the U.N. Security Council isn't really about should we or shouldn't we invade, although it is couched in those terms. What we're witnessing at the UN and in recent international diplomacy is a jockeying for position in the New World Order. That's the world order that explicitly acknowledges the global leadership of the United States and its moral authority to do the right thing for the good of the world.
While the military outcome of the invasion of Iraq is a foregone conclusion, speculation in the watching world is shifting from the short term question of what post-Saddam Iraq will look like, to the longer-term, and much more intriguing, question of what the world will look like after the precedent-setting preventive use of force by the United States and those 'early adopters' of the new world order, the coalition of the willing.
Only days after the most horrific act of terrorism the world has ever witnessed (and the whole world did witness it), President Bush declared war. The literal-minded among us nattered that you can't declare war on an 'ism', but the rest of us understood what he was talking about. You can't bring to justice a suicide-bomber who has already acted. It's simply too late. They must be prevented from acting. Terrorism is a threat, not just to the United States or whoever the specific target. Terrorism is a direct threat to civilization itself. The continued existence of terrorism renders any sort of diplomacy meaningless and drags the whole world toward the brink of the howling abyss.
Disrupting the nest of vipers that the Taliban had become, was simply the first battle in a long-term process that is nowhere near over. The world can't realistically ever imagine returning to business-as-usual until the threat of terrorism is greatly diminished. Those who cry out for "Peace Now!" should have tried waving their signs under Saddam's moustache or picketing Osama's cave. No, as distasteful as it may seem, peace belongs to those who are willing to fight for it and then to keep it in their hearts.
Twelve years ago, the world expressed its demand, through the United Nations, that Saddam Hussein must disarm. Finally, the United States has stepped forward and is basically offering to save the U.N. from irrelevance by supplying the muscle to back up the U.N.'s mouth. What did we see then? We saw France, Germany, Russia and China (who have all profited handsomely from their clandestine trade with Iraq, flouting the U.N. sanctions they hypocritically supported) opposing the actual implementation of the demands they all made.
The recent flurry of last-minute new resolutions, supposedly to give Saddam (another) last chance to comply, are really designed to give those nations who aren't already on board the coalition a last chance of their own to decide whose side they're on. With terrorists lurking worldwide and the coalition forces poised on Iraq's borders, the hot winds of spring are beginning to blow. The United Nations has little time to decide if they'll be coming up roses in the New World Order or... pushing up daisies.
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