Presidential hopeful and former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.) appeared on Meet the Press yesterday to argue against war with Iraq. Unfortunately, when host Tim Russert confronted the candidate with some of his own past remarks, Dean seemed to stumble:
RUSSERT: [In your speech last week] you talked about the president using a unilateral attack against Iraq. In fact, that's inaccurate, isn't it? It would not be unilateral. There are now more than 20 countries signed up with the U.S.
DEAN: Well, I'm not so sure how inaccurate it is. Tom Friedman used that word to describe his actions today in The New York Times. And Tom Friedman knows a lot about foreign policy. So although technically it might not be unilateral, the truth is, this is driven by the president of the United States, and the rest of them are pretty much along for the ride.
Tom Friedman does indeed "know a lot about foreign policy," but shouldn't a presidential candidate be able to explain his security policy without defaulting to The New York Times op-ed page?
The heart of Dean's position is not an objection to unilateralism on principle. After all, if Iraq were really an imminent threat, he says, of course we'd have to fight, with or without allies. But Dean believes war with Iraq is unnecessary at this time:
[President Bush] has not made the case for Saddam possessing nuclear weapons. He has not made the case that he has any kind of a credible nuclear program. And he has not made the case that Saddam is giving weapons of mass destruction to the terrorists . . . Saddam, in my view, has been successfully contained for 12 years at a relatively low cost . . . We can stop Saddam Hussein from doing anything for another 12 years if we have to without invading.
That all seems reasonable enough. But Russert again confronted Dean with a quotation in which the former governor seemed to be trying to sound muscular in speaking about a hypothetical situation -- but one that has already come to pass:
RUSSERT [Reading]: "In a [January] meeting . . . with Roll Call editors and reporters, Dean said that if President Bush presented evidence that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction, 'Then I'd go back to the UN and get a new resolution that [Hussein] either disarms in 60 days or we go in.'"
Isn't that exactly what the president did in November? He went to the United Nations, made the case, and it's now been 120 days and Saddam Hussein is still not cooperating.
If Dean's position is that war is unnecessary -- that Saddam Hussein can be contained -- why should he be in the business of setting deadlines at all?
Dean seemed more comfortable talking about North Korea. He argued that it poses a more serious, more immediate threat than Iraq, and that the situation is better suited to unilateral action -- though of the diplomatic, not military, variety -- by the United States: "We now have a huge problem in North Korea, which the president is claiming is a regional crisis," he said. "I think it's an enormous world crisis which isn't being paid enough attention to."
Dean's overall performance was underwhelming. Still, in one of his better moments, he elegantly handled a problem that has plagued anti-war Democrats: how to argue against war while still acknowledging that Saddam Hussein is a menace who needs to be dealt with. Dean hinted at a strong answer:
Right now, in my view, Saddam is a threat to nations in the region. The United Nations' job is to disarm Saddam so that he will not be a threat to nations in the region. It is our job to protect ourselves. Going into Iraq has very little do to with protecting the United States of America, and that's why I think this is a job for the United Nations and not for the United States of America.
Prior to Dean's appearance on Meet the Press, Russert asked Secretary of State Colin Powell why the rest of the world is unconvinced of the need for war. His response? The rest of the world just doesn't get it:
I think people are not willing to face up to what we are willing to face up to . . . Unfortunately, there are some members of the council, and many people in the world, who thought that [Resolution] 1441 was just words. It wasn't words.
OK. We expect this kind of behavior from France; appeasement is its specialty. But what about, say, Turkey? Not only is Turkey a close ally, it's also Saddam Hussein's neighbor -- and one of the neighbors to whom he is apparently such a grave threat. Powell defended Turkey, saying, "Even though they have internal domestic political problems, they wish to be supportive of our effort."
Turkey's main "domestic political problems" are, of course, that it is a democracy and that war with Iraq is wildly unpopular there. Last week, the Turkish parliament rejected a resolution to allow American ground troops to invade Iraq from Turkey. (Though even as I write this, U.S. troops are setting up an operations base there.)
What came through most clearly yesterday, from Powell and from other administration officials, is that the battle lines are firmly drawn. The arguments have been made, and the administration's mind will not be changed. Barring something drastic -- a coup in Iraq, unprecedented diplomatic ingenuity from Europe or Russia -- the administration doesn't appear to be budging.
Russert challenged Powell on whether the administration's likely failure to secure a second resolution at the UN Security Council -- this one setting a firm deadline for Iraqi disarmament -- is the natural result of its brusque, alienating policies toward the rest of the world. The host rattled off a familiar list of these episodes: withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, refusal to participate in the International Criminal Court, scrapping of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Powell responded by calling the November passage of UN Resolution 1441 a "triumph of American diplomacy" and pointed to the extension of the Doha trade round, NATO expansion and "encouraging the expansion of the European Union" as foreign-policy bright spots for the Bush administration. (Don't bother asking what the United States actually did for EU expansion.)
Powell seemed genuinely offended by the suggestion that America was damaging the United Nations by its actions:
People are talking about us, you know, somehow affecting the United Nations in a negative way. It is Saddam Hussein who ignored the legitimacy of the United Nations for 12 years and some 16 resolutions, when finally the president of the United States, not taking unilateral action but going to the United Nations, said we must deal with this. We must not let him get away with this.
And the rest of the world just doesn't get it.
On Face the Nation, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice faced one of the tougher questions of the morning, from columnist Tom Friedman: How can the administration explain its inability to sell this war to the rest of the world as anything but an embarrassing diplomatic letdown?
FRIEDMAN: Dr. Rice, governments aside . . . if anyone took a global poll today, or if anyone just looked at polls from across the globe, it's clear that public opinion isn't just slightly against this [war]. It's -- it's overwhelmingly against [it] in the Middle East and Europe, in Asia. How did you lose a public-relations war with Saddam Hussein?
RICE: Well, Saddam Hussein has been winning against the Security Council for 12 years. People have kind of gone to sleep about Saddam Hussein. Apparently there is the . . .
FRIEDMAN: Well, why?
RICE: Well, the -- because I think after 12 years of managing to manipulate the process, manipulate his neighbors, to do this all rather quietly and in secret and since 1998 he has had no inspectors, there has been a tendency to be lulled to sleep.
"Lulled to sleep"? Does Saddam Hussein have the world under hypnosis? Is that the best the administration can do to explain its diplomatic failures of the last six months? Even the pro-war Friedman understands that the Bush administration has done a lousy job of selling its ideas to the world. And Tom Friedman knows a lot about foreign policy.
Gabriel Wildau is a senior at Brown University and a former Prospect intern.
