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).