Posted on 10/03/2002 7:00:18 AM PDT by aculeus
The approaching war with Iraq is essentially a 21st-century problem. Strictly speaking, it has no precedent in history, and in terms of presidential power and national sovereignty, Mr. Bush is walking into unknown territory. By comparison, the Gulf War of the 1990s was a straightforward, conventional case of unprovoked aggression, like Germany's invasion of Belgium in 1914 and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.
Yet I do not think Mr. Bush need hesitate to change the Iraq regime by force. Nor will he. He is quite clear on what he has to do. He can occupy Iraq by force under Security Council Resolution 678 of November 1990 and Number 687 of April 1991. To get further and explicit authorization from the U.N. is courteous but superfluous, and justified only by the need to line up as many allies as possible.
Moreover, Mr. Bush, and the United States, are lawfully empowered to take action against Iraq by Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which states plainly that nothing in the charter "shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense . . . until the Security Council has taken [the] measures necessary to maintain international peace and security." It is the last two words which are crucial. A year ago, the U.S. was subjected to an unprovoked attack of an unprecedented kind, which not only killed 3,000 people and destroyed much of the country's main financial district but was designed also to destroy America's legislative body and/or its executive, and its main defense headquarters. The scale of the attack, and the presumption that it would be followed by others, gave the U.S. the right, under Article 51, to punish the aggressors and to take all necessary steps to ensure its future security by destroying the source of their power, present and future.
Hence the occupation and regime-change in Afghanistan was merely the first move. The ferocity of the 11 September assault, designed to kill the maximum number of people and demolish the heart of America's government and financial strength, made it obvious that its perpetrators would use any and all weapons of mass destruction the moment they acquired them. Hence, to ensure its security, the U.S. is plainly entitled, under Article 51, to prevent this from happening.
There are two countries where sympathy for Moslem fundamentalist terrorists makes the possibility of supplying mass-destruction weapons likely. Pakistan already has a small arsenal of nuclear bombs. Mr. Bush has now satisfied himself that the present regime there will not supply them to terrorists and will prevent their theft. He would have an absolute right to prevent any change of regime, or indeed government, in Pakistan, if the consequences were likely to increase the risk of nuclear weapons' falling into terrorist hands. Granted Pakistan's instability and fragility, drastic steps such as the destruction of its nuclear stockpiles may still be necessary. Indeed the only long-term solution, desirable in itself, is the reunification of the Indian subcontinent, which ought to be an object of Western policy.
Iraq's consistent sympathy and active support for terrorist movements, and the regime's record of unprovoked aggression, make us presume that its consistent efforts to make a wide range of mass-killer weapons will end in their use, against either the U.S. or Israel or both. Whether the regime plans to use them itself or supply them to terrorists is a detail. It is clear that the only safety for the U.S. is to ensure that the program is scrapped once and for all, and the experience of the past eleven years shows that this can be achieved only by changing the regime. Thus a U.S.-led invasion having this object is lawful under Article 51 and a country's inherent right of self-defense.
What applies on the international plane applies a priori on the domestic one. It will be surprising if any substantial segment of opinion, inside or outside Congress, opposes the Bush resolve to end the threat from Iraq. The three basic tasks of government are to ensure external defense, to maintain internal order, and to operate an honest currency. Mr. Bush would be failing in the first two, and would make the third increasingly difficult, if he neglected to take all measures in his power to protect the people from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
Instead, not only must he change the regime in Iraq; the question is: What further precautions must he take to make the U.S. reasonably safe? In the second half of the 20th century, the American government was obliged to answer this question by doing two very expensive and risky things. First, it had to build up a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons and continually update its delivery systems to maintain a balance of terror and/or first- and second-strike capabilities. Second, it had to construct a worldwide spread of alliances and bases to ensure its conventional superiority.
These measures are still necessary but they have receded into the background. The foreground is occupied by the need to eliminate regimes which, in one way or another, make international terrorism on a large scale possible and threaten to produce mass-destructive terrorism. Such states include not only all "the usual suspects" — Iran, Libya, Syria, Cuba, and North Korea (as well as Iraq) — but Saudi Arabia too, whose authoritarian monarchy pays protection money to terrorists and spreads the religious fundamentalism which lies at the root of the problem.
All these regimes need to be changed. By whose right, and with what authority, can the U.S. undertake such a wide-ranging program? It is this which takes us to the heart of the new, 21st-century form of geopolitics. The risk of great-power conflict is now small. The risk of nation-to-nation wars is diminishing. But the risk of colossal attacks on centers of civilization has increased, is increasing, and must be diminished.
Imagine a world in which the United States was stricken by a successful series of nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks. Putting aside the appalling loss of American lives this would involve, the global consequences would be horrifying. The world would be plunged into the deepest depression in its history. There would be no power-of-last-resort to uphold international order. Wolf and jackal states would quickly emerge to prey on their neighbors. It would be a world as described by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan (1651), in which, deprived of a giant authority figure "to keep them all in awe," civilization would break down, and life, for most of mankind, would be "nasty, brutish and short."
Hence, we do well to look at the crisis not as solely or even primarily an American problem, but as a global one. We need a Leviathan figure now much more than in the 17th century, when the range of a cannon was a maximum of two miles and its throw-weight was measured in pounds. America is the only constitutional Leviathan we have, which is precisely why the terrorists are striving to do him mortal injury, and the opponents of order throughout the world — in the media, on the campus, and among the flat-earthers — are so noisily opposed to Leviathan's protecting himself.
But Leviathan will not be deterred. He is in arms, and knows what he has to do. Moreover, he is not a solitary autocrat as in Hobbes's day, but a constitutional ruler with an educated people of nearly 300 million behind him. To vary the metaphor, the clock is ticking towards high noon but the sheriff is buckling in his belt and the citizens are aroused. Mr. Bush has been given a mission by the brutal logic of events and he must carry it out promptly and in full. Is America, then, a world policeman? The answer must be: Yes, and thank God for it. Progress has contracted all distances and made destructive forces almost limitless. So the world is now too small, and the weapons of the malefactors too devastating, for us to do without a constabulary enjoying full powers and global reach. As Mr. Gladstone once said, "the resources of civilization are not yet exhausted," and Mr. Bush has no moral alternative but to put himself at the head of them, and point the 21st century in the direction of world order and peace.
— Paul Johnson, the British journalist and historian, is the author, most recently, of Napoleon.
Since when do Conservatives use United Nations resolutions as alleged 'evidence' to support their point of view?
"He can occupy Iraq by force under Security Council Resolution 678 of November 1990 and Number 687 of April 1991."
Since when do Conservatives use United Nations resolutions as alleged 'evidence' to support their point of view?
The author of the article pointed out the fact. Do you have a problem with pointing out facts?
The sentence immediately following the one you quoted is this: "To get further and explicit authorization from the U.N. is courteous but superfluous, and justified only by the need to line up as many allies as possible." [emphasis mine]
I'm not a conservative and I do know how to maintain honesty and integrity in my posts.
Cuba can probably be left for Castro to die. Nobody lives forever. I concur with the other states on this list.
The lynchpin is Iraq. Saddam has to be taken out first, and the rest will follow.
I'm surprised and gratified to see how many people agree that Saudi Arabia must be on this list. That is the heart of darkness, and in due course the Saudis must go and the country must be divided in two, one with oil, the other with Mecca and Medina as a sort of Islamic Vatican State. Control over world oil and control over Islam is too dangerous a combination to trust to any state, especially any Arab state.
A closer analogy for the latter might be the sort of ultra-pure Aryan land the SS planned to set up in Burgundy if the Germans had won WWII.
You need some help with your politics and your reading comprehension.
Focus your attention on another segment of the quotation:
To get further and explicit authorization from the U.N. is courteous but superfluous
JohnGalt's point is right on target. The author's blanket justification is a set of UN regulations. Nothing he says later steps away from that. If anything, deferring to the UN argument a second time reinforces its importance.
We do not elect Presidents to chase lemmings.
I also think Bush has handled the UN quite well. He's wrangling in the UN security council as an ally -- as well as could be expected, IMO -- rather than distancing the UN as an enemy.
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