(Host) Commentators John McClaughry and Madeleine May Kunin offer Two Views of the United Nations and the failure of diplomacy. Here’s John McClaughry:
(McClaughry) Back in September, Secretary of State Colin Powell explained to the French foreign minister that if France was prepared to support a tough resolution demanding that Saddam Hussein disarm or face serious consequences, then France would have to be equally prepared to support a second resolution authorizing armed force against him. According to the New York Times, the French picked over every word of Resolution 1441, agreed to it, voted for it, and committed to support a war resolution if Saddam failed to perform.
Then France switched sides. Why, we don’t know for sure. Perhaps it was the risk of losing lucrative oil contracts in a post-Saddam Iraq. Perhaps it was a resentful President Chirac’s urge to bring down the upstart Americans.
Now the French are shocked to learn that a U.S. President takes tough U.N. resolutions seriously and is willing to use armed force to rid the world of a vicious dictator, who has for 12 years mocked U.N. resolutions demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction.
French perfidy at the U.N. has dramatically crippled both American friendship with France and our support for the U.N. Most thinking Americans understand that, for better or worse, it has fallen to the United States to shoulder the heavy burden of leading the people of the world toward peace, prosperity, and freedom. And those people should thank whatever God they pray to that America, which 55 years ago so generously brought defeated Germany and Japan into the family of democratic and prosperous nations, again has a president with the vision, courage, sincerity and faith to lead us in that role.
This is John McClaughry; thanks for listening.
(Kunin) How did we get here – the end of diplomacy and the beginning of war? Now that we’re here, we must support our troops. But we also must try to understand what this new policy of pre-emptive war means in the long run.
If we stay this course, will we follow this preventive war with an attack on North Korea, on Iran? The failure of diplomacy is a radical departure from the policy of containment and cooperation. In the past we worked with our allies, not against them.
Now we are at war not only with our enemy, Iraq, but also on a diplomatic level with our friend, France, who gave us the Statue of Liberty. How did this rupture with our friends begin? Some attribute it to the early days of the Bush administration when the United States decided to abandon the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and a series of other international agreements.
Ironically, in his campaign for the presidency, Bush promised America would be humble and that we were not into nation building. Now the United States is going forward without the U.N. and is taking on the daunting task of creating a democratic country which has not a smidgen of experience in self government, a move that will reek of colonialism.
The most immediate tragic outcome of this failure of diplomacy will be the loss of life, on our side and theirs. The longer-term tragedy is that the United States will no longer be seen as the democratic leader of the free world, a model for the rest of the world.
The Bush decision to sidestep the Security Council is also a dreadful blow to the United Nations, our only hope for worldwide peace and cooperation. We are giving the signal that it’s proper to start a war to prevent a war. As Doonsbury said, “War is peace.”
Regardless of the outcome of the war, the failure of U.S. diplomacy weakens the infrastructure for peace in the world, a structure that has worked well for more than 50 years. This is a time of mourning, not only for those who will surely be killed in the struggle to remove Saddam Hussein, but also for a nation which has reversed its position in the world – from a harbinger of peace, to war.
Madeleine May Kunin is a former governor of Vermont; John McClaughry is president of the Ethan Allen Institute, a Vermont policy research and education organization.