The American War Predicament

March 1, 2003

An extended editorial in The New York Times last Sunday (2/23/03) moaned that "things don't look promising for those of us who believe this is a war worth waging, but only with broad international support." "It seems clear to us," the editors continued, "that the United Nations should enforce its own orders and make Iraq disarm, even if that requires force. But in the end, sometime in March, the United States may have to decide whether it should do the job on its own."

For all of its insight into the dilemma President Bush faces, the Times editorial fails to expose the root of the predicament. The editors treat the potential war, the enforcement of UN orders, and "the job" that needs to be done as a single, undivided subject.

As I see it, however, the predicament in which the Bush administration (and thus, the United States) finds itself has arisen precisely because there is not a single subject here. Instead, a conflict has emerged and has not yet been resolved between two different subjects: on the one hand, the responsibility and authority of the UN Security Council and, on the other hand, the responsibility and authority of the United States.

When President Bush first declared that Saddam Hussein had to go, he was speaking from his position of responsibility for American self-defense against what he sees as the combined danger of terrorism and rogue states. From that position, a decision to go to war requires a solid, just-war argument that the US faces an imminent threat from an aggressor. Self-defense, when it can be carried out by just means and with a just end in view, is recognized both by the terms of the Christian just-war tradition and by international law recognized by the UN. For defense against an imminent military threat from another state, no nation needs approval from the UN Security Council. The question that arose early and still remains on the table is whether President Bush has made an adequate just-war, self-defense case for military action against Iraq. We'll return to this in a moment.

In contrast to national self-defense, UN "enforcement" of Security Council resolutions is, by definition, an international responsibility quite different from that which belongs to individual states. Many people today, including some members of the Bush administration, no longer believe that the UN is relevant, if it ever was. But whether or not one respects or disrespects the UN, the US remains a part of it, and the rules by which its Security Council functions require unanimous agreement among the five permanent members (China, Russia, France, Great Britain, and the US) for any action it takes. The Security Council may, indeed, be incapable of addressing any significant security threat in the world, since any one of those countries can keep it from authorizing international use of force. This appears to have been the case for the last 12 years with respect to Iraq, because the Security Council has never voted to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

In my estimation, the current dilemma or predicament in which we find ourselves is the result of steps the Bush administration has taken that have confounded and frustrated the two distinct responsibilities that belong to the US, on the one hand, and to the UN on the other. The president first declared that the US would topple Hussein by itself with or without UN support. Only later, secondarily, did he ask the Security Council to enforce its own resolutions requiring Iraq to disarm itself of WMD. In effect, the president asked the Security Council to back American national security aims rather than volunteering US military forces to participate in Security Council enforcement of UN responsibility. As a result, the two different kinds of responsibility and authority were confounded and the UN was belittled.

Now, out of frustration, American Hawks say that if the US is justified in acting alone, Bush shouldn't have bothered trying to get UN backing because it wasn't necessary and has only slowed things down. Frustrated Doves and the leaders of France and Germany, on the other side, say that if the US really intended to work by UN rules, the US should be willing to abide by whatever the Security Council decides and not try to make the UN do America's bidding. The frustration on this side helps to explain the seemingly irrational response of France, Germany, and some other American allies on the Security Council who now seem to be more interested in embarrassing and frustrating the US than in compelling Saddam Hussein to comply with UN mandates.

Editorialists at The Philadelphia Inquirer on February 23 got closer to exposing the predicament when they said, President Bush "could have made the case to the United Nations that it must lead the effort to contain such rogue nations--without first undercutting that message by declaring his disdain for anything the UN says or does." The Inquirer's editors admit that "Bush deserves credit he isn't getting for using the threat of force to get inspectors back into Iraq. But the White House hasn't been able to translate that success into a plan enough allies can support."

Why has the Bush administration run into this roadblock? The reason, I think, is that Bush's national self-defense argument has not been strong enough to convince a sufficient number of people that US military action against Iraq is necessary at this time. Those, like the New York Times' editors, want to see UN backing. But the UN doesn't exist to back the military actions of nations that have not made a convincing case that they are in imminent danger. Thus, instead of the Security Council concentrating on its responsibility to enforce its own resolutions, some of its members are concentrating on trying to keep the US from misusing the Council for purely American purposes.

Furthermore, the awkward and even embarrassing diplomacy at the UN has had time to raise suspicions about the original Bush argument for US aggression against Iraq for reasons of self-defense. The more the US urges the UN to enforce its own resolutions in order to give moral backing to a US-led invasion, the more the US diminishes its claim of justification for its own independent military action, because if US security is truly and imminently threatened, then why take time to seek UN approval for such actions. Moreover, if the UN Security Council cannot in the end reach agreement to enforce Resolution 1441, and if President Bush chooses to act militarily against Hussein anyway, then the US will look like it is disregarding and defying the UN. All the more then, the US needs a shut-and-closed case for using force against Hussein in self-defense. Yet the latter case is, as we said, one that the president has not yet made convincingly.

In the meantime, the disputes that have arisen in the UN and in NATO over American strategy threaten to weaken the highly important international cooperative campaign against terrorism that will need to continue indefinitely. This is exactly counterproductive to US stated aims. The US needs to be strengthening the confidence of other nations in the American commitment to work cooperatively to defeat terrorism, but many believe the US is trying to reshape the world on its own, regardless of what the UN and certain important allies think. In the short term, then, the US may be jeopardizing its own security against terrorists by antagonizing some of the very allies it needs to carry forward the cooperative international fight against terrorists.

It is possible, of course, that events in the next few months will resolve the dilemma I have described above. And any such resolution may include a reconciliation of viewpoints, a strengthening of the UN and NATO, and new prospects of peace in the Middle East, including for the people of Iraq. Yet it is also possible that the deeper tensions that underlie the immediate debates over role of the UN, over American strategy toward the world, and over conflict in the Middle East and other parts of the world are tensions that will remain or even grow, regardless of what happens in Iraq. For these reasons we need to understand the decisions that are being made today and that are shaping the future.

---James W. Skillen, President

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