…Krauthammer thinks the UN’s days of significance are nearly over:
Under Resolution 1441, that is a material breach. It is a casus belli. The French got around this inconvenience by changing the meaning of the very resolution they had negotiated just 90 days ago. Things are going swimmingly, they say, because with Blix in country, Iraq is contained. But the resolution says nothing about containment. It demands disarmament.
After the Blix report, France has nowhere to hide. It is the moment of truth for France, and, in a larger sense, for the United Nations. The United Nations is on the verge of demonstrating finally and fatally its moral bankruptcy and its strategic irrelevance: moral bankruptcy, because it will have made a mockery of the very resolution on whose sanctity it insists; strategic irrelevance, because the United States is going to disarm Iraq anyway.
Having proved itself impotent in the Balkan crisis and now again in the Iraq crisis, the United Nations will sink once again into irrelevance. This time it will not recover. And the world will be better off for it.
Of course, there’s no reason Krauthammer and Suellentrop can’t both be right. Just because the UNSC (and France) eventually joins in, doesn’t mean it still matters a hoot.
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