Right Disease, Wrong Cure
You know the UN is losing support when even the NY Times doesn’t find it credible:
Sudan’s leaders sent out a letter last week warning governments against volunteering their troops for a United Nations peacekeeping force for Darfur. Khartoum was obviously feeling cocky. But why shouldn’t it? The Security Council — or more to the point, the big powers that run the Security Council — made clear that it won’t send in troops to stop the genocide unless Sudan first agrees.
Then there’s Iran, which is still defiantly enriching uranium. And the North Koreans, who blew off the rest of the world when they blew off what they said was a nuclear weapon this week.
Welcome to the new age of impunity.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Iraq war and President Bush’s with-us-or-against-us war on terrorism was supposed to frighten the bad guys so much that they wouldn’t dare cross the United States. But the opposite has happened. President Bush has squandered so much of America’s moral authority — not to mention our military resources — that efforts to shame or bully the right behavior from adversaries (and allies) sound hollow.
There is plenty of blame to go around when it comes to empowering rogue states. The Chinese have been shielding Sudan and North Korea. The Russians have been shielding Iran. Were it not for Iraq and Mr. Bush’s other troubles, there would be ways to shame or bypass those roadblocks. When the Russians blocked U.N. action in Kosovo, President Clinton got NATO to stop the killing.
Mr. Bush appears to care deeply about Darfur. But the United States is so overstretched in Iraq that no one in this White House is even talking about sending NATO to stop ethnic cleansing that has already left more than 200,000 dead and displaced more than two million.
Closing our eyes for another two years isn’t an answer. Washington needs to assert its leadership, no matter how tattered, on all these fronts.
I’m perfectly prepared to agree with anyone who says the U.S. has less credibility itself than it has for quite some time. Whether it’s because of our resources being tied up in Iraq, because of the WMD intelligence debacle, or because we have no good solutions and we’re bluffing, we’ve got to quit making threats if we don’t intend to keep them.
But the Times‘ solution is woefully off-course:
Beijing and Moscow would find it harder to say no if Mr. Bush made a clear pledge — no caveats and no fingers crossed behind his back — that he would not try to overthrow North Korea’s government if it abandoned its nuclear weapons. Mr. Bush needs to make the same unambiguous offer to Iran.
Sorry, but that’s not going to cut it. If the U.S.’s credibility is suffering, the credibility of Iran and North Korea is non-existent. Any solution that relies on our word for theirs is a fantasy. Let’s be clear – countries don’t de-proliferate. No nuclear power has ever willfully given up that power, least of all the likes of these two.
No, the solution must be more robust than wishful thinking. We need a new multilateral organization devoted soley to combating the threat of nuclear terrorism at a high level. It’s that serious. In the excellent if terrifying new issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (available for free download here), Matthew Bunn, a senior research associate at the Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a former advisor to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, provides a very plausible mathematical model that puts the odds of a nuclear terrorist incident in the next decade at 29%.
Let that sink in (and by all means, read the study and the entire issue, and doubt away, if you choose, as I choose to be a skeptic on the Lancet study), and imagine the horrifying implications of a greater than 1 in 4 chance of nuclear terrorism in the next ten years.
Fortunately, there are, if not outright solutions, moves that we can make to lower that risk. This is a subject I’ll be revisiting from time to time, because it truly is the paramount foreign policy issue of our generation. Briefly, though, some of those ideas (as covered in the Annals) include tighter materials controls, new deterrent strategies, an orientation towards combating non-state proliferation (i.e., terrorists getting the bomb), but most importantly, an acknowledgment from all parties that this is the issue that dwarfs all others and is not a partisan issue, nor solely a U.S. concern…
“Beijing and Moscow would find it harder to say no if Mr. Bush made a clear pledge — no caveats and no fingers crossed behind his back — that he would not try to overthrow North Korea’s government if it abandoned its nuclear weapons. Mr. Bush needs to make the same unambiguous offer to Iran.”
more carrots, no sticks.
Any country would lose credit with the rest of the world if half of the politicians turned traitor and fought the president at every step and turn. The democrats of today could care less how many American soldiers are killed by their show of support for the terrorists. They lost power and their ego’s are wounded so they turned traitor. Like a little child they will bite anyone who interupts their temper tantrum or interferes with their drive to regains power. There will never be a speck of respect for the democratic party the rest of this old man’s life and I spent the first 40 years of it as a democrat. They are not only anti-american, they are out and out traitors, and should be tried and shot as such.