US must affirm its goal is not simply to disarm Iraq, but to liberate it

The oppressed people of Iraq are the most important allies President Bush has to help eliminate the threat of Saddam Hussein. With American support they can do much to end the tyrannical regime.

However, the diplomatic compromises struck to pass UN Security Council Resolution 1441 may have included terms and precedents that constrained or crippled the President’s hand.

The unusual Security Council unanimity came at a price. Just how high a price remains to be seen. As Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney writes in the November 15 Wall Street Journal, it is unclear what precisely the Bush administration promised the French, Russians, Chinese, Syrians, and perhaps other Council members, to get them to vote for the draft put forward by Washington and London.

More immediately worrying is the cumulative, potentially ham-stringing effect of the various accommodations reached over the past two months in the negotiation of Resolution 1441 itself. The president and his subordinates claim that the U.S.’s freedom of action has been preserved but, according to the terms of the resolution, it has been conditioned on three crucial points, as Gaffney’s article explains.

It would be a serious strategic error for President Bush to allow such affronts to American sovereignty to go unchallenged.

The place to start is by reaffirming that the objective of this exercise is not simply to disarm Iraq but to liberate it. As a practical matter, you can’t have the first without the second.