Bush trashes the United Nations - Cover Story - George W. Bush

Progressive, The, April, 2003 by Matthew Rothschild

Even for U.S. security, the approach is counterproductive. "It will cause an international backlash, generate more suicide bombings, lead to more religious and political extremism, and possibly cause a fundamentalist takeover in Pakistan or Egypt," says Falk. "It could be a geopolitical disaster."

Such a disaster is what impelled the career foreign service officer John Brady Kiesling, who was serving in the U.S. embassy in Greece, to resign from the State Department on January 27. "The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests," he wrote in his resignation letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell. "Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security."

The flexing of sheer brute force that so typifies the Bush policy gives terrorists and other nonstate actors the message that the superpower cannot be restrained by traditional, legal channels but only by "asymmetrical" and extralegal means. Ratner at the Center for Constitutional Rights says the Bush approach, "in terms of our security and safety, is fatal." He worries the United States will alienate its allies in the war on terrorism, and that "by not using international law and peaceful methods, it will bring about a huge radicalization in parts of the world that are going to terrorize us further."

Ratner says the United Nations may never be the same again. "Like F. Scott Fitzgerald after his nervous breakdown, who said he was like a plate that was glued back together and was no good for serving dinner on but useful only for snacks, the U.N. will be used for noncontroversial issues, but when it comes to the use of force, it will be a cracked plate," Ratner says.

The final cost of this policy is internal. "It could destroy democracy at home," Falk argues. "The rising tide of opposition here and abroad will play into fearmongering and an expansion, of government control over citizen rights. There is a kind of proto-fascist dimension to the current set of circumstances." Falk says he usually is loath to throw the term "fascism" around. "But you have this crackdown, coupled with a consolidation of military power and a messianic view that the United States is the bearer of a benevolent future that justifies exterminating those who stand in the way," he explains. "You have the convergence of religious evangelicals in the White House with geopolitical fundamentalists like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. We have never had this mixture of religious and secular extremists so close to the core of governmental power."

Given the U.S. manipulation of the United Nations, there may be some progressive people who wonder why we should even bother with it. But not bothering would be a mistake.