Node Of Evil - Fair And Balanced Reporting

Monday, August 25, 2003

 
Remember when there were grumblings that the U.N. was now "irrelevant" because it failed to support the U.S. war against Iraq?:

'After last week's attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad, Democratic Senator Joe Biden and Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote to Mr Bush about the "urgent need" for more foreign forces in Iraq.'

'"It is worth enhancing the role of the United Nations because it will allow us to share the huge risk and expense of securing, policing, and reconstructing Iraq, tasks that will take tens of thousands of troops and tens of billions of dollars over many years," they wrote.'

'The US is desperately trying to encourage other countries to commit troops to Iraq and this week a resolution is likely to be presented to the United Nations Security Council that would encourage and seek greater international involvement in Iraq.' (from the Independent)


The nice thing about collective security enforcement (the article of the U.N. charter invoked to gain support for the first war against Iraq in 1991) is that the costs of war are spread among many allies instead of being concentrated in one place. While U.S. forces may not be over-extended quite yet, the time is soon approaching where the threat of being over-extended is real. While common sense tells us that allies are a good thing, it was apparent during the run-up to war that the Bush administration didn't want anything to do with common sense. Alienating France and Germany, among others, has put the U.S. in a tricky position where it has to backpedal from its earlier rhetorical positions against those countries in order to secure their support for Iraqi reconstruction.

Andrew 9:54 AM : |

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