A rchive Date
[ 17-03-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/1819072
NATO could be more crucial than U.N. ties
By DAN RATHER
March 14, 2003, 3:40PM
A New York Times / CBS News poll shows that a bare majority of the sampling group - 51 percent - answered "yes" to this question: "Has President Bush tried hard enough at diplomacy with Iraq?" The number is interesting, but the question itself might be more so, raising its own questions, such as: What is diplomacy? Diplomacy toward whom?
With Bush working the phones and the United Nations abuzz with debate, diplomacy has been the word of the week. My dictionary defines this word as "the art or practice of conducting international relations, as in negotiating alliances, treaties, and agreements." Generally, though, when people talk about last-ditch diplomacy on the eve of war, they mean diplomacy aimed at averting war. This has not exactly been the aim of recent U.S. diplomacy.
It is hard to say what, if anything, is going on behind the scenes. But publicly, at least, the United States is not conducting any direct diplomacy with the Iraqi government. With U.N. Resolution 1441 spelling out the conditions for Iraqi compliance in stark terms, Bush sees no need for this.
Besides, that's what the United Nations is for: to provide diplomatic channels, even for potential combatants. And it is toward fellow member states of the U.N. Security Council that the United States has directed the lion's share of its diplomacy.
The president and his advisers have repeatedly stated that they see unity as the best way to show Saddam Hussein that the world means business. But with the U.S. position spelled out so clearly, "lobbying" might be a more accurate word for American efforts than diplomacy.
Diplomacy will be necessary, though: in the near term if the United States is to salvage anything from the second-resolution debacle, and in the long term to fix the rift in the United Nations.
Is too much being made of the potential damage to the United Nations resulting from a split on Iraq? Perhaps. Commentators everywhere are lining up to declare that the United Nations risks being broken beyond repair, but it should be remembered that other wars have gone ahead without U.N. approval, and the organization has endured.
For the United States and its Western allies, NATO has evolved into an organization for conducting military actions multilaterally when U.N. sanction is missing. It is in here where a split over Iraq might have more far-reaching implications. The United Nations will always be a place of divergent opinion, but the U.S.-designed North Atlantic alliance is where this nation has for years found its closest friends and partners. With both war and nation-building now very much on the agenda, repairing the divides within NATO would seem to be a worthwhile goal.
There's a lot of diplomacy going on, but it isn't likely to stop war. The question is, will it preserve unity between the United States and its allies?
Rather is anchor of CBS Evening News and a native Texan.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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