Perhaps the most flattering thing former Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) ever said about the United Nations was buried in a supposedly conciliatory address to the organization three years ago: "Most Americans do not regard the United Nations as an end in and of itself -- they see it as just one part of America's diplomatic arsenal. To the extent that the UN is effective, the American people will support it. To the extent that it becomes ineffective -- or worse, a burden -- the American people will cast it aside."
Helms, of course, held the United Nations in special contempt. It's a contempt shared by the more hawkish members of the current Bush administration, which was why the president's decision last fall to seek UN approval for an Iraq invasion struck many as either a public-relations move or a grudging concession to the cautious multilateralism of the country's political center. But as Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation last Wednesday to the UN Security Council made clear, the entire gambit has turned out pretty well for the administration. Far from impeding the planned invasion, the UN inspections regime has allowed the administration to dodge some of the more tricky questions involved. The so-called inspections trap -- the hawks' nightmare scenario in which inspections would become, in the words of Helms, "an end in and of itself" -- has not materialized. Instead of a trap, the inspections have turned out to be a trip wire, and those whose tepid opposition to the war once took the form of calls to multilateralism are to blame.
The press reaction to Powell's bravura performance last Wednesday at the Security Council was summed up by Fred Kaplan in Slate: Should Saddam Hussein continue to stonewall, he wrote, "How can any objective observer, or any world leader, continue to make a case against war?" George F. Will declared that the bill of particulars Powell presented "will change all minds open to evidence." Liberal Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory titled her column "I'm Persuaded." But persuaded of what? That Hussein is not complying with inspections? That he does nasty things and develops illegal weapons? Who ever thought otherwise?
The problem with this logic is that evidence of misdeeds, even grave misdeeds, is not in and of itself a reason to invade Iraq. War isn't a matter of just deserts; it's not a punishment for a country's sins. It is, in Carl von Clausewitz's shopworn phrase, "politics by other means." But now the debate over Iraq has ceased to be a political debate; it has become a technical one over who did what when and where was the botulinum toxin on the night of so and so. The inspections have shifted the discussion from substantive grounds (Is war the best way to deal with Saddam Hussein?) to formal ones (Is Saddam Hussein obeying UN rules?) -- that is, from a point of great contention to a no-brainer.
Which is all well and good for the administration, because in truth there is plenty left to argue about. The idea that the United States is going to war to protect the reputation of the United Nations -- a reputation the United States has, as much as any other country, helped to undermine -- is laughable. Our timorous treatment of North Korea and our indulgence of Pakistan, both of which harass their neighbors and sell their nuclear secrets on the open market, belie the contention that we cannot live with rogue nuclear states. The claim that this is a humanitarian intervention would demand we take a host of our Central Asian and Middle Eastern allies to account; it might also lead us to think a bit more about how many Iraqis we will actually kill in an effort to liberate their country. Iraq's tenuous link to terrorism would require that we also roll our tanks through Qatar, which gave shelter to the same al-Qaeda terrorist that later turned up in Iraq. And the insistence that Hussein is undeterrable and that his removal will stabilize the region depends, in the words of political scientist John Mearsheimer, upon "distorted history and dubious logic."
There are, to be sure, rebuttals to these arguments -- some more convincing than others. But the administration doesn't really need to make them any more. It simply needs to point to its incontrovertible evidence of Iraqi noncompliance with inspections. And the irony is, it is the multilateralist quasi-doves of the Democratic Party who have let the administration off the hook. The narrow legal debate we're left with is the logical endpoint of Democratic leaders such as Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and former Vice President Al Gore deciding last fall to simply shunt the debate onto the United Nations. Seen in this light, Sen. John Kerry's (D-Mass.) "progressive multilateralism" seems less an argument than an abdication. And the Democratic strategy of avoiding a real debate in October is allowing the administration to avoid a real debate now.
No doubt this logic will strike many hawks -- itching as they are for an invasion to begin -- as deeply unfair. The Bush administration has played by the rules laid out last fall by multilateralist Democrats. It went through the United Nations; it gave inspections time to work; now the inspections have failed. What more could liberals possibly want? But conservatives misunderstand (or pretend to misunderstand) the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. UN approval, cooperation from our allies and a chance for inspections to dig up evidence against Hussein were always necessary conditions for an invasion; whether they are sufficient conditions for war is another question entirely. Unfortunately, the quasi-dove Democrats -- lacking the courage to simply suggest outright that this war might just plain be a bad idea -- hid last fall behind the implication that multilateralism was both necessary and sufficient. We may be about to pay for their mistake.
After all, to channel Helms for a moment, what's so great about multilateralism as an end in and of itself? The UN Security Council is made up of representatives from countries operating in their own self-interests. Just because a few European nations agree to something doesn't necessarily make it a good idea, especially when it's obvious that a good deal of bilateral arm-twisting is taking place. The administration got its inspections trip wire. But it's the quasi-dove Democrats who got stuck in the inspections trap.
Drake Bennett is a Prospect writing fellow.
