Josh Marshall (via Matt Yglesias) describes an intelligence officer that he knows stating his biggest fear:
His greatest worry was not in the neighborhood, but the world: the costs — unreckonable to some degree — of wrecking the international state system to get this done. The pros and cons of handling Iraq have never been separable from how you do it, the costs you rack up in the doing of it, calculated against the gains you’ll get in having accomplished it. At this point, we have truly the worst case scenario on the international stage. And I think the those costs now outweigh those gains.
I do not understand how it can be stated that we are wrecking the international system, when the international system is already so broken that we have gotten to this point.
Imagine this: You are a doctor with a dying patient, the conditions as such:
Kidney Failure (Iraq chairing the Committee on Disarmament)
Liver Failure (Libya chairing the Human Rights Commission)
Internal Hemmoraging (the cold war era make-up of the permanent votes on the security council)
Memory Failure (Hitler, Srebencia, the previous 16 Security Resolutions)
and worst of all, the 10,000 paper cuts (Why can a sensible foreign policy be hamstrung by Chile, Cameroon, and Mexico? Why do the French have any say in anything? Why are we pretending that because China sits on the Security council they are somehow a moral authority?).
At any rate, you are a doctor, and that is your patient. Does it make sense for you to be worrying about saving this patient, or should you just look forward to the other patients you can help?
If the UN dies, it was not murder. It was suicide- more accurately, if you consider the cynical French behavior- assisted suicide.
More thoughts on the UN, from a liberal perspective. (Via Michael Totten).
Mac Diva
You are living in the wrong century, John Cole. Imperial Britain would have suited you to a T. However, there will be no Pax Americana. Without the U.N., the world would devolve into madness that makes the status quo look like nirvana. Instead of focusing on the U.N.’s imperfections (which you get wrong most of the time anyway), you should be addressing what can be done to improve it. And, no, I don’t mean turning it into a rubber stamp for the U.S.
Walt Pohl
Admittedly, the UN is stupid in all kinds of ways. But so what? The Bush administration better outline its alternative in advance before it smashes it. “Nothing”, which is probably what the Bush administration has in mind, is not an improvement.
Anyway, I’m sure the guy isn’t just talking about the UN. He’s talking about NATO, the informal cooperation of the world’s liberal democracies, about a United States that consults with its allies.
Sure the French are acting like big babies, but they’ve always done that and the international order has survived. (Remember, de Gaulle once pulled France out of NATO, for example.) In some cosmic sense it’s unfair that the French get to act like children, and we have to act like adults, but hey, there’s a reason we pay our presidents: they have a job to do.
barney gumble
That analogy is more tortured than one of your patients would be.
The UN was deadlocked during the entire Cold War because of the deadlocked USA and USSR, and now it is coming off its best decade ever and you think its dying?
John Cole
I guess you and I would define best decade ever differently.
Phil
The UN was deadlocked during the entire Cold War because of the deadlocked USA and USSR, and now it is coming off its best decade ever and you think its dying?
Yeah, I have its greatest hits album. It’s called “A Million Dead Rwandans Can’t Be Wrong!”
Andrew Lazarus
There are lots of signs that suggest a War on Iraq.
To use your medical analogy, there were also signs that my son needed an operation (even though he seemed fine externally). We got a topnotch pediatric surgeon, not the neighborhood butcher, and it worked out fine.
The Bush team, with its bogus “intelligence”, its absence of a reconstruction plan, its insouciant disdain for *all* the other countries in the world? On second thought, this analogy is unfair to my butcher.
John Cole
In the end, it all just boils down to Bush being a hack, doesn’t it?
Andrew Lazarus
As in duffer? Yes. And to think they talked about the “grownups in charge”.
We traded the kids of Porky’s for the grownups of Home Alone.