Someone must step out of box
Published 12:00 am Monday, March 17, 2003
China had its boxer rebellion in 1900 and England has its boxing day after Christmases, but today we have an international conflict between three boxes. Saddam Hussein has boxed himself in with pretensions of invincibility and George W. Bush has boxed himself in with intransigence, while the United Nations has boxed itself in with cowardly irresponsibility. Each hunkers down within the box and refuses to come out, while waiting for one or the other to expose himself. Not until at least Hussein, Bush, or the UN steps out of his self-made box will the Iraq conflict be resolved.
Hussein has killed off all the active opposition within Iraq so he has no counselors left, alienated himself from Arab neighbors who are his natural allies, and positioned himself as Iraq's messiah. He is all Iraq has and Iraq is all he has. If he cannot have Iraq, he has nothing and, so, he has everything to lose and nothing to gain by capitulation. If he continues to claim he has no weapons of mass destruction, no one will believe him. If he should be able to prove he has none, he loses his international leverage and his people's confidence. If he should go into exile, he surrenders the only thing in the world that has ever meant anything to him.
President Bush's dogmatic single-mindedness is perhaps the biggest political gamble any president of the United States has ever made. If he is correct -- or if he manages to make it appear so -- he is a shoe-in for a second term and will have secured his place in history. If he is mistaken -- and we learn so -- he has already elected the next Democrat to the White House and would be fortunate if history forgot him. If he pulls back from Iraq now, no one will know if what he is saying about Hussein's intentions is true unless this mad man carries them out. Then Bush will be condemned for not having persisted. If he destroys Hussein's arsenal, he destroys the evidence he needs to prove he is correct.
The box in which the United Nations -- whatever that is -- finds itself in was not so much made by its officials as accepted by them from such as Germany and especially Russia and China and principally from France. The UN, after all, isn't so much an entity as it is the sum of its member nations. The one thing it has demonstrated throughout its history is that these nations are anything but united. It has almost consistently shown itself to be impotent to make any significant difference in the world. All it can do, it appears, is to pass pointless and never-enforced resolutions.
The UN -- and more specifically -- such as France can self-righteously accuse America of hostility and then hide behind the safety of our opposition to Iraq and other expressions of terrorism. These nations, and the other Arab nations as well, can indulge themselves and then count on America to do what we all know needs to be done and then pretend to be guiltless. They feel they can eat the cake of America's responsibility for world order and have their cake of unaccountability for mistakes.
So, here we are on the brink of war because three parties refuse to step out of their boxes when any one of whom doing so could avert war. Each has boxed self in, and to each belongs the opportunity of deciding to step out as well as the responsibility of choosing the means.
Dr. Wallace Alcorn’s commentaries appear in the Herald on Mondays.