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Originally posted by Joeiss
I think this is the main reason why some people are confused about this war. I mean, why is America just all of a suddenly enforcing the UN's ruling on Iraq? Why didn't they start as soon as Iraq defied it 12 years ago?
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I would chalk that one up to the president. Back then, we had the elder George Bush who was a very diplomatic man. After him came Clinton who was even more cooperative with everyone and never ever wanted to actually risk American lives (he resorted to cruise missiles and bombing from way up high instead).
Whatever else you can say about George W. Bush, he does what he says he's going to do. Since it's ultimately the President's decision to send troops into war, whether or not we went into Iraq pretty much depended on who was sitting in the Oval Office.
Speaking of that, I kind of wish the elder Bush were running this war instead of his son. He used to be the ambassador to China, after all. He knows how international politics works, and he understood that whether France could actually do anything about the situation didn't matter. He knew that he would have a much easier time if he at least had the appearance of international backing even if the only people in Iraq were American and British. To that end, he was very good at listening to other countries and making them feel as if their opinion mattered. He went on from there to build an international coalition against Iraq.
And the thing is George W. Bush had a chance to do the same thing. Anybody remember Russia suddenly becoming big buddies with the United States? Putin reached out, and the current Bush took what was offered. It was looking like Russia was on the verge of some major changes both in its economy and in its relationship with the world. Many people at the time considered the Russia situation to be one of the diplomatic successes of the Bush administration.
So why couldn't Bush get Russia to vote for the war on Iraq in the Security Council? We may never know the answer, and maybe I'm missing something. But I have the feeling that Bush just stopped listening to Putin's concerns about the war. He wouldn't make concessions. He probably decided that Russia would be militarily irrelevant, and that's probably true. But the thing is if he had gotten Russia to vote for the war, he would have had three out of five votes on the UN Security Council. He would automatically get four votes from there because China almost always votes with the majority. He would have ended up with the U.S., Britain, Russia and China in favor of the war and France probably not in favor of the war. How would that have made the French look? And one thing is for certain: France wouldn't have dared to veto the resolution.
With a majority vote from the permanent members of the Security Council, Bush could have easily persuaded the non-permanent members to go along. And with that, he has all he needs to claim international backing for his war.
The U.N. may be irrelevant from an economic, military and even political point of view. But that doesn't mean that our President should snub the U.N. if he can avoid it. Look at all these protests we've been seeing around the world. A lot of them didn't need to happen, or at least they didn't have to be so big. Why go through the trouble if you don't have to?
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