Good Morning, Vietnam... and Libya

Yes, it’s morning, after a fashion, at the UN Security Council, where in the latest round of renewal it has just been decided that in 2008 two of the 10 rotating seats will go to two regulars from the roster of World’s Worst Regimes: Vietnam and Libya — whose “election” the U.S. did not oppose.

Presumably the State Department sees this an enticement to such regimes as Iran and North Korea to drop their nuclear programs, a la Libya. Of course, conventional weapons — however dull — have sufficed for most of the killing done over the past century in two world wars, a host of lesser conflicts, and every terrorist attack to date. It’s not just the weapons that are the problem — it’s tyrannical regimes, which rule by force and fear, and export such stuff to poison the world. But the message of U.S. diplomacy these days seems to be that as long as the world’s worst governments are willing to make due with conventional weapons, there won’t be any more impetus from Washington to speed their murderous systems toward “history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies” — unless we are now meant to infer that President Bush when he used that phrase in his Sept. 20, 2001 address to Congress was trying to describe the UN Security Council.