After U.N. Theater, Muscle Prevails

Coming back from Baghdad on his way to New York Tuesday evening, Kofi Annan stopped in Paris for dinner with Jacques Chirac. While heaping praise on the U.N. secretary general for his magnificent diplomatic feat, French diplomats and commentators made it clear that it was French diplomacy and Chirac’s statecraft that had won the day. They cited Chirac’s bold speech calling for an end to the sanctions and his well-timed refusal to participate in the planned U.S. attack. The French, they said, had triumphed for bringing the enforcement of U.N. resolutions back to the Security Council. That Annan reported to Chirac before making his formal presentation to the Security Council was proof enough.

In Rome, too, there was enthusiastic praise for Annan’s diplomacy, but strangely enough, Chirac’s crucial role went unrecognized. An undersecretary at the Farnesina patiently explained that it was Prime Minister Romano Prodi’s meeting with Boris Yeltsin earlier this month that had achieved the great victory for peace. When the agreement with Saddam Hussein was published, the whole world would see that it faithfully “reflected the key points of the Prodi-Yeltsin communique.” Oddly enough, that communique had attracted no notice at all outside Italy, not even a passing comment from the State Department, even though it amounted to a frontal attack on U.S. policy.

Tony Blair is not worried about Continental posturing. British diplomats do not risk demotion for having failed to book Kofi Annan for tea. French diplomacy, the British explain, has been reduced to charade: No longer able to achieve anything of substance, the highest aim of the French is to sustain the illusion that France is influential.

Blair is not worried because he knows that it was his leadership that actually determined the outcome for Annan.

Having taken away from the Tories their entire domestic policy, the Labor prime minister set out to usurp their very last role as the upholders of martial virtues, always ready for a bit of the rough stuff. Sending first one aircraft carrier and then a second to the Gulf, along with Tornado fighter-bombers to Kuwait and Bahrain, Blair did not merely go along with U.S. policy but actually encouraged a wavering Clinton to be firm with Iraq in spite of the Monica crisis. It was a very deliberate replay of Thatcher-Bush in August 1990, when the Iron Lady insisted that Kuwait must be liberated while Bush was originally inclined to leave inter-Arab quarrels to the Arabs themselves.

So this is what foreign policy has become in Europe. Foreign ministries established to ruthlessly pursue national interests large and small are now in the business of making it seem that they still matter. Heads of government who certainly have serious problems to confront in domestic policy and a genuine role to play in European affairs react to international crises that they cannot influence by pretending that their telephone calls and meetings and communiques are of consequence. Once upon a time, it was the Italians who were accused of sacrificing substance for the sake of a bella figura. Now everybody does it.

The U.N. provides the stage, script, props and audience for these theatrical simulations of Great Power politics. It has a secretary general who can be met in order to produce portraits of the head of government as world statesman. It has a great number of “special envoys” who are more than willing to be wined and dined in every capital that pretends to matter. It has a Security Council that gives bit players a turn alongside the main actors. And when there is a conflict that nobody wants to stop because intervention would require actual fighting, the U.N. can send in its toy soldiers to make it seem as if the world is doing something.

Countries that might be effective if they were willing to pay the price of combat instead loan their soldiers out to stand around uselessly in baby-blue U.N. helmets, even in the midst of massacres.

Most of the time, these simulations of power politics are just tiresome comedies. In Yugoslavia, they caused a protracted tragedy, as impotent “special envoys,” feeble peace conferences and lots of toy soldiers only served to obscure the stark necessity of using force to stop aggression.

This time around in Iraq, the result is neither comedy nor tragedy but mere procedure. Although all the permanent members of the Security Council have voted for resolutions that require Iraq to open all its territory without exception to unrestricted inspections, it is the United States that is determined to force Saddam Hussein to obey. Accordingly, the U.S. dispatched an expeditionary force of modest dimensions to the Gulf. It was prepared to carry out a limited bombing campaign, which could perhaps destroy some of the suspect installations and could certainly punish the regime by attacking its command centers.

The Clinton administration’s foreign policy team of Albright, Berger and Cohen stood ready to attack, but the president was having his doubts. American public opinion was far from enthusiastic, a tiny minority being opposed to force while a sizable majority would support an all-out offensive only to destroy the Iraqi regime once and for all.

In that context, Clinton was very willing to have Kofi Annan go to Baghdad. There was a catch, however: The U.N. impresario could not actually negotiate. All he could do was to reiterate the Security Council resolutions calling for unrestricted inspections of weapons facilities in Iraq. If Saddam Hussein persisted in denying access, he would be bombed. That is the message that Kofi Annan brought to Baghdad; a postman could have done the same thing.

By then, a hard edge had emerged even in soft Clinton. While indifferent to the chatter in Paris or the boasts in Baghdad, he has made it clear that if there is any further Iraqi interference with the inspectors, the United States will move without further warnings and without consulting time-wasting allies. Next time, if there is one, the postman will be a cruise missile.