My View from the Soapbox: Wasteful diplomacy has delayed war unnecessarily

As America now sits on the eve of war, I thought it would be interesting to look back at what a long, strange, frustrating trip it has been to the Iraqi border. What started out as a multilateral push for disarmament and freedom has now become a bit of a diplomatic quagmire, with the United States drawing a line in the sand that many of our allies have thus far refused to cross.

In the months after Sept. 11, the Bush administration seemed divided over what to do about Iraq. The hawks, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed that a fast, unilateral attack was necessary to depose Saddam Hussein and neutralize his weapons of mass destruction. On the other side, Colin Powell led the semi-doves, who felt that the United States would need to go through the United Nations if there was to be any action against the Hussein regime. In the end, Powell won out, and Bush went to New York to plead his case.

It has now been six months since President Bush gave his stirring address to the United Nations, in which he charged the institution to stand up for itself and demand that Iraq disarm. But since that day what has been accomplished? Aside from uncovering the occasional empty mustard gas canister, not much. Instead, our list of dissenters has tripled, we’ve been double-crossed by our allies, and anti-Americanism has become the newest chic fashion throughout the world. Where did we go wrong?

Our biggest problem in dealing with the United Nations is just that: we’re dealing with the United Nations, an institution that rarely stands up for itself when faced with the possibility of armed conflict. The problem is that the United Nations is just like any other legislative body in that all its members are looking out for themselves.

For example, don’t assume that the French are blocking U.S. war plans because they believe in some kind of better world where peace and justice prevail over all; the truth of the matter is far less glamorous. At this particular time, it’s very advantageous for the French to exercise power over the Security Council by defying the United States on such a monumental issue. By emerging as a leader against U.S. policies, the French are hoping to develop more clout in a very competitive European Union, and they can preserve their many assets and interests in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Since the United States can’t get the support it needs based on the argument of ‘enforcing international law,’ we’re forced to ‘lobby’ (read: bribe) other nations into agreeing with us. Last week, Colin Powell spent hours meeting with representatives from Angola; I can’t even find Angola on a map, but since they’re on the Security Council this month, the United States needs their vote, and must therefore spend weeks in futile talks with that nation’s representatives. The lobbying process takes a long, long time, and has drawn out the conflict for months, eroding away any favorable allies still with the U.S. cause.

So after all of this debating, deliberating, wheeling, dealing and bribing, the United States is going to war now, and the United Nations still steadfastly refuses to cooperate just as they did six months earlier. In the meantime, Saddam has spent this drawn-out interim period preparing for our inevitable attack.

When the war in Iraq begins, the best-case scenario assumes the conflict will be over within a week, and the U.S. troops will spend their time sorting out POWs instead of actually fighting. Sadly, this probably isn’t going to happen, as Hussein has wisely spent what precious little time he has left moving troops into Baghdad in preparation for a Stalingrad-type showdown.

Saddam knows he can’t fight us off, but he can sure as hell make it a difficult and costly victory for U.S. and British forces. While Powell was busy pleading with our unsympathetic ‘allies’ in New York, Hussein had his troops fortifying their positions inside Baghdad, rigging oil wells with bombs and outfitting soldiers with Western-styled army uniforms, in the hope of orchestrating large ‘U.S. Army’ massacres for the Al-Jazeera TV crews. Just yesterday, Fox News reported that Hussein has also opened up his caches of chemical weapons and has begun arming troops and missiles (I guess the U.N. inspectors must have missed those).

So after looking back at this long and wasteful period of shady diplomacy, it makes me wonder why we even bothered to go through the United Nations in the first place. After playing this silly game for so long, we have nothing to show for it, save the guarantee that more people will die now than had we attacked six months ago.

Bush and Powell disregarded the safety of our troops and wasted far too much time expressing the importance of ‘multilateral support’ when everyone knew that the United States was going to do whatever it needed to do anyway. This ridiculous charade in which we tried to humor the rest of the world was insulting not only to their government officials, but their citizenry as well. While it’s impossible to guess what would have really happened if Bush had listened to Rumsfeld, Cheney and the hawks, instead of Powell and the semi-doves, one thing is for sure: at least it would have been honest.