Give this to Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. What Spain’s prime
minister-elect lacks in diplomatic tact and a general willingness
to offend terrorist sensibilities, he more than makes up for with
his impeccable sense of timing.
Last Thursday, for example, just as Mr. Zapatero was slandering
the American liberation of Iraq, which he called “a failure,” and
demanding a stronger U.N. presence, which he claimed was the only
thing that could save Iraq, polls were showing that Iraqis were
happier than ever. News from a beleaguered region, meanwhile,
confirmed that the U.N. was as hapless as always.
According to a survey by Oxford Research International, one
year after the toppling of a tyrant, Iraqis are overwhelmingly
happier. When asked how they saw their lives these days, 70 percent
of Iraqis said their situation was very good or quite good. Only 15
percent said things were very bad. Taking the long view, 71 percent
said they expected conditions in their lives to be much better or
somewhat better a year from now. Among the more discouraging
statistics were the 17 percent who said attacks against coalition
forces were justified. But compare that to last week’s Pew poll, and you find that the popularity of attacks
against Americans and Westerners in Iraq pales next to the support
such attacks enjoy in supposedly pro-American Muslim countries (31
percent favor them in Turkey; 70 percent in Jordan).
AT THE SAME TIME as these polls were confounding Bush-bashing
newsrooms the world over, the limitations of a United Nations
peacekeeping force were becoming tragically transparent. Mosques
burned, 28 people were dead, a civil war loomed, and politicians
issued ominous warnings about an influx of foreign terrorists.
Baghdad? Try Belgrade.
Nearly half a decade after the U.S. intervention and the
appointment of a U.N. authority, discord persists in the war-torn
capital of Serbia-Montenegro. In the latest burst of violence,
Serbian nationalists last Thursday rioted and clashed with police,
at one point even setting fire to a 17th century mosque. In
response, one Serbian minister cautioned that violence against the
province’s Muslim Albanian majority could lure terrorists to the
troubled region.
I mention this partly because conservatives, especially American
ones, often are accused of being insufficiently deferential to the
U.N. Allow me to remedy this state of affairs: the U.N. should be
acknowledged for its role in perpetuating the chaos in Kosovo. Lest
I judge too harshly, let me point out that the U.N.’s solution to
the region’s conflict is typical of its solution to every
international conflict: announce that everything is fine, then hope
reality cooperates.
It may be equally poor etiquette to argue that the U.N. inflamed
ethnic rivalries. And yet, by willfully glossing over the
long-simmering tensions between the Albanian Muslim majority and
the Serbian Christian minority, the U.N.’s plan to preserve a
single multiethnic state did exactly that. As last week’s eruption
of violence attests, the effect of the U.N. plan was akin to
throwing a blanket over a bonfire. Bleak and bloody, Kosovo today
is a testament to the shortsightedness of a U.N. administration and
the fecklessness of its oversight.
NONETHELESS, THE FICTION THAT only the U.N. can win the peace
remains, for some people, a compelling one. The New York
Times, chief exponent of the
see-no-evil-unless-you-can-pin-it-on-Bush school of editorial
writing, assures us that “Winning the cooperation of
countries like France and Russia will require the Bush
administration to be far more serious about turning over real
responsibility in Iraq to the United Nations and NATO.”
Here we have an interesting glimpse into a particular kind of
liberal psyche. For the Times, the most important question
concerning our efforts in Iraq is not whether democracy is working
for Iraqis, but whether it’s working for those countries that
strongly opposed its establishment in the first place. True,
acknowledges the Times, Iraqis are better off without
Saddam; on the other hand, Russia and France clearly are not.
Follow the syllogism? The Times’ editorialists are willing
to concede that the administration pursued the right policy in
ousting Saddam, but only by putting their rhetorical weight behind
the opponents of said policy. They’re for it because they’re
against it, you see. No wonder they’re hot for John Kerry.
For my part, I trust Spectator readers won’t think me
too radical if I confess my belief that we did not go into Iraq to
please the French and the Russians. That’s why we called it
Operation Iraqi Freedom, as opposed to, say, Operation Appease the
French and Russians, which anyway was co-opted by Spanish
socialists. And while the gradual reduction of terrorism created by
a free, pluralistic Iraq will certainly benefit both these
countries, at this stage at least, it is certainly the Iraqis that
matter. Harping about France and Russia seems a tad misguided.
DON’T GET ME WRONG. I’M all for criticism of the president. Basic
democratic freedoms — i.e. the right to speak out against the
government without ending up like human mulch — rank highly on my
long list of reasons for supporting the war in Iraq. Servicing
Jacques Chirac’s galactic ego and saving Vladimir Putin’s ballistic
missile client, needles to say, did not make the list. Nor is it
unreasonable to suggest that, far from a moral outrage, French
whining and Russian coolness to Iraq may actually mean that
something is right with the world. One reason for their hostility,
after all, is that the end of Saddam has meant an end to the U.N.
oil-for-food program from which they made out, quite literally,
like bandits.
More worrying for Paris and Moscow, is U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan’s announcement last Friday that an independent
commission will go beyond an internal U.N. probe to uncover the
corruption and mismanagement in the oil-for-food program. This must
come as a serious blow. Under the program, remember, oil companies
handpicked by Saddam stashed money in a U.N. account that allegedly
delivered some $10.1 billion to, among others, France and Russia.
So long as a United Nations probe was tasked with the
investigation, both countries could trust in the U.N.’s
incompetence to keep them in the clear. Their luck may have just
run out.
To its everlasting credit, the Bush administration long ago
concluded that an organization whose Security Council is headed by
Syria, the Hezbollah fill-up station, has only a limited utility in
the war on terror. The U.N. is needed for one purpose and one
purpose only: to help bring about free elections to hand the
country back to Iraqis. That this wisdom has yet to filter down to
some of our center-left cognoscenti should hardly be surprising.
They’re still singing the U.N.’s praises for mopping up that whole
Kosovo mess.
