Krauthammer urges Bush to hold that line at the U.N.

(Washington, D.C.): Few syndicated columnists of our time address matters of state with the vision and verve of Charles Krauthammer. These qualities were recognized by the Center for Security Policy on 5 September when Dr. Krauthammer received its second annual “Mightier Pen” award — a distinction conferred on individuals who have, through their published writings, contributed to the public’s appreciation of the need for robust U.S. national security policies and military strength as an indispensable ingredient in promoting international peace.

The latest example of the deservedness of Charles Krauthammer’s “Mightier Pen” award is his column published in today’s Washington Post, entitled “Don’t Go Wobbly.” It echoes themes of sovereignty and leadership that Dr. Krauthammer spoke to in his acceptance remarks including, notably the following:

The Founders spoke of “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind.” [Recently,] in an article critical of the Administration and of our policy on Iraq, and particularly of American unilateralism, that phrase was cited as a way of saying that somehow unilateralism is a betrayal of this original American idea.

In fact, the Declaration of Independence twice self-consciously says that it must explain itself to the world. That is true. But what is striking about the document is the authors’ utter confidence in their own explanations. The entire train of logic that underlies the right of revolution in the Declaration is prefaced by the assertion of self-evidence. We are, said the founders, relying on nothing but axioms on self-evident truths, not on the opinion of mankind. What did the founders do? They declared, when they made war, the opinion of mankind was to be addressed, but nowhere was it consulted, no amendments were solicited, no compromise from prevailing views or opinions from other cultures, or other political persuasions, or other societies, was even contemplated….

The Security Council is essentially a committee of the great powers who manage the world in their own interests. The Security Council is on the rare occasions in which it actually works, realpolitik by committee. By what logic is it the repository of international morality? The Chinese, the Russians, the French will be making decisions in the Security Council entirely in pursuit of their own interests. Why that ought to confer legitimacy or morality onto our actions is beyond me.

For a quarter century this primacy of world opinion or international legality were the staple of liberal internationalism. Liberal internationalists sincerely believe, and when in power they make a fetish of, multilateral action; in particular, action blessed by the UN as, in and of itself, morally superior and more legitimate than American action unilaterally asserting its own national interests.

Again I ask, by what logic is action that is taken with the blessings of the ex-apparatchiks in Moscow, or the cynics in Paris, inherently more worthy than the action taken by the people of the United States in Congress assembled….

This is not an argument in principle against consultation. It has its place as a tactic to assuage, occasionally to gain wisdom. We may not have thought of everything, that is true; nonetheless, we have no moral obligation to consult. We do it because it might be useful to achieve our own ends. Not because the foreign advice intrinsically carries more moral valance than our own delibera tions….A decent respect for the opinion of mankind impels us to state our reasons, to present our facts to a world, candid or not, and then to act, regardless….

Amen.

The American people, in Congress assembled, have given President Bush the authority to use force to disarm Saddam Hussein. The president has delegated to Colin Powell the authority to negotiate this with the U.N. Security Council. Powell is in the process of negotiating away that authority to France. And France’s game is to give that authority to Hans Blix, the bureaucrat weapons inspector whose most salient characteristic is politeness.

Blix was director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which, before the Persian Gulf War, gave Hussein the nuclear Good Housekeeping seal, consistently rating as “exemplary” his compliance with IAEA inspections. After the Gulf War, it was discovered that Hussein had not one but several parallel clandestine nuclear weapons programs going on at once.

Powell has now spent seven weeks negotiating the president’s position at the United Nations. He has already made numerous concessions to France, watering down a U.S. draft, eliminating an automatic trigger for military action and dropping a clause allowing permanent members of the Security Council to attach their own inspectors to the team.

It is now down to the bottom line. For the American threat to disarm Hussein to retain any credibility, the State Department will have to hang on to three elements of the current U.S. draft resolution:

(a) Citing Hussein as being in “material breach” of the resolutions he signed to end the Gulf War. Material breach is recognized as a casus belli.

(b) Threatening “serious consequences” if Hussein does not comply with the new inspection regime.

(c) Devising a tough inspection regime that not only includes Hussein’s presidential “palaces” but also allows the safe and free interrogation of Iraqi scientists who know where the weapons are — which means taking them out of the country and giving their families asylum if they so request.

The French, who have spent the past decade on the Security Council acting as Hussein’s lawyer, at every turn weakening measures to force him to disarm, are now at it again. At first they tried to keep the words “material breach” out of the resolution. This requires gall, because the material breach is undeniable: Everyone acknowledges that Hussein has violated more than a dozen post-Gulf War U.N. resolutions.

Finding it hard to get around this inconvenient fact, the French are proposing to make the phrase meaningless. They are willing to say that Hussein “was” in material breach but that things will get serious, and military action be warranted, only if he ends up in “further” material breach. Which makes all of the previous material breaches immaterial.

Will Powell buy this sophistry that undermines America’s right to act on Saddam Hussein’s current and past egregious violations? I don’t know.

Furthermore, the French want to leave the question of future material breaches to Blix. God help us. Why should the United States forfeit to him — and his proven track record of failure — its freedom of action to defend itself against a supreme threat to its national security?

But the French go one better. They want a third check on American freedom of action, a third point at which they can shut down the United States. They insist that even if Blix finds Hussein in material breach, the question must come back to the Security Council, so that the French (and the Russians and the Chinese — and the Mauritians and the Cameroonians and the Guineans) can judge how material the breach actually is.

Most crucial of all, however, is the attempt to water down U.S. condition (c) on the nature of the inspections. The only way we’re going to find these weapons is if Iraqi scientists tell us where they are. Satellites are not going to find stuff that can be hidden in a basement. In the mid-1990s, inspectors missed Hussein’s huge stocks of biological weapons until we learned about them from defectors.

Now, if you interrogate the scientists in the presence of an Iraqi government minder, you’ll get nothing. They know that if they say anything, they — and their families — will be tortured and killed. Unless these scientists are taken to safe locations, we can write off in advance the entire inspection process as a farce.

Blix says there are “practical difficulties” with this approach.

Well, solve them, Hans!

The French want to leave the question of “safe” interrogation to Blix. Not a chance. He’ll likely take the path of least resistance, the one with the fewest “practical difficulties” — questioning scientists in Iraq, hostages of Hussein. And when he does, the United States will be left powerless.

Why we should agree to these conditions is beyond me. Why is Colin Powell even negotiating them? And why does the president, who is pledged to disarming Hussein one way or the other, allow Powell even to discuss a scheme that is guaranteed to leave Saddam Hussein’s weapons in place?