On the Right

National Review, April 21, 2003 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

What Mr. Bush

Left Out

NEW YORK, MARCH 18

The finality of the long -- seemingly endless -- period of indecision, fractured alliances, ambivalent allies, and fruitless diplomacy had an unusual touch. The president flew two thirds of the way across the Atlantic to meet with the leaders of the diminished ranks of our allies. The trip doesn't take much more air time than a flight to Denver, but there was operatic grace in seeking out a remote island, one of an archipelago as beautiful as any on earth, and touching down with the prime ministers of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal, where the language spoken is foreign, and where an Atlantic U.S. Air Force base serves as a promontory of U.S. vigilance for the world Columbus left, to discover the new world. The mother country of the Azores endured a left-wing coup in 1974. A few years later, the governor of the islands disclosed, with not much discretion, that if the military continued power in Portugal, the Azores would declare their loyalty to Lisbon ended, and make out for themselves. The Azores had been a colony for about 500 years.

Before the colonizers settled down to being a metropolitan district of Portugal, they were fought for, and dominated intermittently, by the Spanish. When they went to war in those days, the missions were outspoken. The rulers wished for glory, foreign possessions, and wealth.

Nothing of the kind preoccupied Mr. Bush in the missions he described on Monday night. Lenin preached to faithful Marxist ears that colonialism was the chief and vital enterprise of the bourgeois world, motivating policy and life. Revisionists have carefully argued, in recent years, that the overhead of colonialism often exceeded its fruits, challenging a central postulate of Marx-Lenin. It is not widely held that we are moving against Iraq for material reasons, and it is plain that our motives are hardly material, unless one classifies as a material motive the determination to safeguard one's freedom and security.

President Bush spoke directly, using the personal pronoun, to the people whose country he would invade. The military campaign "will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you. As our coalition takes away their power we will deliver the food and medicine you need. We will tear down the apparatus of terror."

And then? "We will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free." And at the close, "Unlike Saddam Hussein, we believe the Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty. And when the dictator has departed, they can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation."

Mr. Bush would have done better to speak more modestly about expectations. Sitting down on vast oil reserves does not bring prosperity or freedom, as we are quickly reminded merely by citing Venezuela, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia. What Mr. Bush proposes to do is to unseat Saddam Hussein and to eliminate his investments in aggressive weaponry. We can devoutly hope that internecine tribal antagonisms will be subsumed in the fresh air of a despot removed, and that the restoration of freedom will be productive. But these concomitant developments can't be either foreseen by the United States, or implemented by us. What Mr. Bush can accomplish is the removal of a regime and its infrastructure. The Iraqi people will have to take it from there.

Who/What To Be Mad At

NEW YORK, MARCH 21

As we pause, waiting to discover whether Saddam is dead or alive, attention passes to the United Nations. We begin by asking: Who are we mad at?

Forget the French. They were obstructionist and they went further than merely to declare themselves opposed to confrontation. Even though they knew weeks ago that the United States had decided to proceed with military action, the French solicited redundant support, notably from Russia and China, which didn't add to the power they already had as veto-equipped members of the Security Council. French focus went from blocking the U.S. through the veto to blocking the U.S. from the goal of achieving majority approval. To end up out-bargaining the U.S. for the vote of Cameroon or Chile was after all redundant, inasmuch as the veto was promised. The French effort accomplished only the mobilization of supplementary votes on the other side.

The question to ask now is how to think through the future of the U.N., which hangs to a considerable extent on the future of U.S. participation in it.

The United States could call for a convention to reconsider the distribution of veto power. We could reasonably hold that by standards of population and/or wealth, Germany and India should be elevated to veto power. If we thought geographical distribution now critical, we might consider Brazil or Argentina, assuming they could scratch up the money to pay dues. And, if we went in that direction, Indonesia would certainly court a vote.

Or, the U.S. could go in an entirely different direction, advocating not the enlargement of veto powers, but the elimination of the veto. We will never have a clearer demonstration of the veto's negative influence than we have just had. It may be that without taking specific action to go for a constitutional convention, we might proceed on the assumption that, for all intents and purposes, the constitution has been amended. Nobody is going to feel bound by a Security Council veto in years visibly ahead. The Queen of England has the constitutional right to the "royal veto" of an act of Parliament (La reine s'avisera).The Crown has not exercised that veto since 1708, so why bother to take the power from her? The constitution of the U.N. can be held to have been amended by the action of the French, and will go unused, in atrophy.