Is the U.N. Imploding?
Hans Blix is looking increasingly like a shill for the French. The chief U.N. weapons inspector's upbeat oral presentation to the U.N. Security Council Friday fit right in with Paris's agenda of allowing Iraq to evade the demands of Resolution 1441 and its 16 predecessors. Blix and France's Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin spoke glowingly of Iraq's "progress" in cooperating with inspectors.
Anyone who's read Resolution 1441 knows this is a sham. The resolution, on which France voted oui, demands "immediate compliance" from Iraq, not small steps dragged out over months. But Blix may have done more than simply collaborate with the French in its effort to deny the plain meaning of 1441. Saturday's Times of London reports that Blix's written report "contained a hidden bombshell" that Blix did not bother to mention when he appeared on Friday: "that inspectors have recently discovered an undeclared Iraqi drone with a wingspan of 7.45m [just under 25 feet], suggesting an illegal range that could threaten Iraq's neighbours with chemical and biological weapons."
Today's Times adds that "Britain and the United States will today press the chief UN weapons inspector to admit that he has found a 'smoking gun' in Iraq." The report notes that the Iraqi regime had not even declared the existence of the drone. "It would be the first undeclared weapons programme found by the UN."
Today's New York Times reports that inspectors also found "a new variety of rocket seemingly configured to strew bomblets filled with chemical or biological agents over large areas." The Iraqis at first claimed that the delightfully named Frog rocket "was designed as a conventional cluster bomb, which would scatter explosive submunitions over its target, and not as a chemical weapon," the Times reports, citing an unnamed American official. "A few days later, he said, the Iraqis conceded that some might have been configured as chemical weapons."
And although Iraq is obliged to destroy all chemical and biological weapons, London's Sunday Times notes that Blix "said there was 'credible information' that Iraq never destroyed 21,000 litres of biological warfare agents, including 10,000 litres of anthrax, stored during the 1990 Gulf war. There was also 'credible information' that Iraq had 7,000 litres more biological warfare agents in bombs and warheads than it had declared."
Despite all of this, a U.N. resolution declaring Iraq not to be in compliance with its obligations faces the threat of a veto from the perfidious French. Little wonder that, as Reuters reports, Saddam Hussein feels emboldened to demand that the U.N. lift sanctions against Iraq and disarm Israel instead. One can hardly fault the Iraqi dictator's logic. If the U.N., led by the French, isn't serious enough about its resolutions to enforce them, why shouldn't it simply repeal them and welcome this murderous tyrant back into the "family of nations"?
Fortunately for all of us, and above all for the Iraqi people, President Bush has made clear that America will step in even if the U.N. shirks its responsibility. This is what galls the Gauls, who see the U.N. chiefly as a means of restraining American power, regardless of the cost to freedom and international security. Which leads us to a question: If the U.N. has become primarily an anti-American outfit, is there any reason for America to continue participating in it?
This question may have occurred to the administration as well. The Daily Telegraph's Stephen Pollard reports:
Well-connected advisers tell me that if, as now seems likely, the UN refuses to back action against terror, Mr Bush will announce a "temporary" suspension of America's membership, to be accompanied by an offer: if the UN gets its act together and carries out long-overdue reforms, America (and its money) will return. But if there is no reform, the temporary withdrawal will, de facto, become permanent.
When we were in Washington earlier this month, we heard similar rumors. There's certainly an argument to be made that the U.N., as presently constituted, is worse than useless. For one thing, despite the U.N.'s professed aversion to war, what it really seems to object to is victory. In the U.N.'s 58-year history, two wars have been waged under Security Council auspices: Korea and the Gulf War. Both ended with less than total victories, leaving in power two of the worst tyrannies on earth, which are now two of the world's most dangerous rogue states. (If the U.N. instead of the Allies had fought World War II, Germany might still be ruled by Nazis instead of weasels.) U.N. peacekeeping operations, too, are at best a mixed bag, with a record of failing to prevent such horrors as the Srebrenica massacre and the Rwanda genocide.
