A Decision Made, and Its Consequences

By David E. Sanger, The New York Times, 17 March 2003

LAJES, Azores, March 16 Q By giving the United Nations exactly 24 hours to approve the forcible disarmament of Iraq, President Bush and his supporters on the United Nations Security Council presented a stark choice today to the deeply divided world body: Join a preventive war, or stand aside.

Absent the capitulation of Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s departure from the country, Mr. Bush and his most solid allies Q Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and Prime Minister Jose Mara Aznar of Spain Q all but said that nothing could prevent military action.

With that declaration, Mr. Bush left little doubt that he has made up his mind to try to overthrow Mr. Hussein’s government and disarm Iraq by force. The only question remaining is when he will make that decision formal, with a speech to the nation, a warning to weapons inspectors and others to evacuate Iraq, and the long-awaited order to Gen. Tommy R. Franks to strike.

It is easily the most momentous decision of Mr. Bush’s 26 months in office, one bound to define both his presidency and his political future along with the future of his closest ally, Mr. Blair.

But it is also a moment of crisis that could forever change America’s relations with the United Nations, the global institution it created with its allies at the end of World War II to keep the peace.

An angry-sounding Mr. Bush said today that the United Nations had failed miserably Q in Rwanda, in Kosovo and now in its confrontation with Iraq Q and needed to be made anew. After the invasion of Iraq, he suggested, perhaps the institution could begin to get its legs, legs of responsibility back.

The very fact that Mr. Bush had to come here this weekend, to an island free of protesters for a meeting with the previously convinced, is evidence that he has also failed, as some of his own aides acknowledge. To their surprise, he has been unable to convince leaders and countries around the world that the United Nations should support a radically different concept of national security, one that Mr. Bush has come to embrace since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The threat posed by Iraq, according to Mr. Bush, would prove his argument that containment is a relic of the cold war era, a notion that worked against a rival superpower like the Soviet Union, but one that he views as useless against enemies who can slip chemical or biological weapons into a city, unseen.

We must not permit his crimes to reach across the world, Mr. Bush said today of Mr. Hussein, pressing the point again, his fist punching the air for emphasis.

Yet clearly the Security Council remains unconvinced. The essence of the argument put forward by France and Germany, Russia and China and most of the six undecided nations is that containment is working in Iraq and that it can lead to disarmament.

Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor, repeated on Saturday his view that the inspection process is both effective containment and effective disarmament. The French president, Jacques Chirac, who was the target today of Mr. Bush’s wrath and that of several members of his cabinet, told Mr. Blair on Saturday that he would not accept an ultimatum to Saddam before the inspection process was worked through.

So when Mr. Bush decided to call the last-minute summit meeting here, he invited only those who agreed with him.

We didn’t want another debating session, a senior national security aide to Mr. Bush said. That’s not what this was about. It was about setting a deadline, an end to the debate.

Still, the refusal of a majority of the Security Council to go along has created two large obstacles Q one political, one legal Q that Mr. Bush has vowed to surmount in the next day.

The political problem is clear: if he initiates an attack without Security Council approval, which now appears likely, he will go to war without the aura of political legitimacy that he and his allies have craved.

Legitimacy is what this entire effort at the United Nations has been about, Samuel R. Berger, the national security adviser in the Clinton administration, said in Washington last week. A majority vote would convey that legitimacy, even if France vetoed.

No one needed that more than Mr. Blair, after polls in Britain showed significant support for any war conducted with the approval of the Security Council and plummeting support for any war without it. Yet a defeat at the Council would create a legal nightmare as well, because this is a preventive war, not a pre-emptive one. The distinction is important.

Pre-emption, the doctrine made famous last year in Mr. Bush’s national security strategy, gives countries the right to strike a nation that is about to strike them. Iraq, most experts say, does not fit the definition, unless Mr. Bush can prove it is handing off weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. So far, he has talked about that

A preventive war is conducted by a powerful state against a potential enemy that it fears could become powerful some day. That seems to fit the current circumstance, though administration officials do not like to talk about it in those terms, because preventive war has not been judged kindly by history.

This situation may be somewhere in between, a new category, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said months ago. We have never faced threats like this before. As the president says, this is a new kind of war.

But Mr. Bush is not a man given to explaining his strategy in broad terms. He never speaks of the consequences of a policy of pre-emption or preventive war other than to say Q as his aides repeated this past week Q that nations like North Korea and Iran should take heed that the United States will not be threatened by weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Bush has turned in recent weeks, as he did again today, to a new explanation: this is a war of liberation, the liberation of the Iraqi people. The joint statement he issued today with Mr. Blair and Mr. Aznar left no doubt that their goal is to remake political contours of the Middle East and unseat Mr. Hussein.

His problem is that those goals go far beyond any United Nations mandate. And while it speaks of an Iraq that will enjoy freedom, prosperity and equality in a unified country, there is little question it will involve a lengthy military occupation.

Wars of liberation are popular in America. Occupations Q long, messy, expensive Q are not. How well Mr. Bush executes the first and manages the second may be the measure of his first term, and his prospects for a second.