WASHINGTON — President Bush’s powerful and rigorously honest speech to the United Nations on Thursday was a Nixon-to-China moment. A conservative Republican from Texas spelled out the life-or-death challenge the United Nations now confronts and then told the world body how it can save itself and create a meaningful multilateralism for the 21st century.
Bush more than lived up to his responsibilities to "make the case" for urgent and forceful action to end Iraq’s open defiance of international law, human decency and the United Nations itself. He also put the case into the right context for his audience: Iraq is not just an American problem, but a U.N. crisis that now threatens that organization’s legitimacy and future.
The president in effect was asking: If not now, when? If not in Iraq, where? If the Security Council will not meet the obligations it has willingly assumed in this unique modern case of aggressive and murderous behavior by a member state, it clearly will never act to enforce its writ and to secure human justice. It will become the odious caricature that isolationist Republicans have always painted.
There was not a word of overstatement in Bush’s indictment of Iraq’s Baathist regime, which I have reported on and analyzed since 1972. The speech was a model of sticking to known evidence. The president clearly labeled what is known and what can reasonably be assumed. Bush set the right standards as well as the right tone: He was diligent prosecuting attorney, sorrowful statesman and reluctant potential warrior.
Bush met his responsibilities in this speech. It is now up to his critics and particularly to his Democratic Party rivals to live up to theirs. Those who have been demanding that Bush make his case on Iraq must now address that case. They must employ an intellectual rigor and a respect for the historical and legal record equal to that of the president.
Those who have hidden behind an empty shell of multilateralism — of a unity for unity’s sake that prevents action — must define their disagreement with Bush’s call for a "system of security defended by all." They cannot continue to ignore, as Bush said, that "Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself" through "his contempt for the United Nations" and every principle it pretends to embody.
"Don’t act alone" has become in too many cases a dodge for saying "don’t act at all." Bush sought to make clear he had come to New York not to bury the United Nations, but to challenge it into new relevancy and effectiveness by dealing with "exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was founded to confront."
Bush began his speech by announcing that the United States will return to UNESCO. Rejoining that organization, urged in this column in March, will not in itself curb the unilateralist impulses in this administration that make internationalists uneasy. But it was an effective signal that unilateralism is not Bush’s first choice in dealing with the world’s economic, social and security problems.
The reforms UNESCO has recently accomplished make it a worthy vehicle for active American participation. Bush seemed to suggest that the same will be true for a Security Council that meets the responsibilities it has taken on. Like Nixon offering cooperation to a Chinese communist regime he had previously scorned, Bush will recognize and reward change in international organizations that he has not championed before. Unilateralism is not preordained, the president implied.
Bush wisely based his appeals for action against Iraq not on a doctrine of pre-emption. The emphasis on that obvious national option has unnecessarily clouded the debate on Iraq. Instead, he explained how the need for such drastic steps can be avoided by concerted international action. Everything he asked the Security Council — and Iraq — to do is firmly based in existing U.N. resolutions. Again, he was too polite to say it, but there is no point in passing new resolutions if the old ones are so flagrantly ignored.
International military intervention in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor in the past decade was based largely in an embryonic doctrine of humanitarian intervention. The scope and clarity of Bush’s remarks invite the elaboration of a new framework for global stability for this decade and beyond — with the United Nations playing the leading role in such an endeavor. But that can never happen if Iraq’s criminality and danger are again swept under the rug.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s well-intended remarks on global stability helpfully identified Iraq as an urgent problem. But Annan failed to provide content for the multilateralism he said was imperative in world affairs. That was left to George W. Bush, who was up to the job on the day after Sept. 11.
Jim Hoagland can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or hoaglandj@washpost.com.
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