e-Mailbox – Bush bombs at UN

Last week’s Cover Story, “What’s Up with the French? The ‘Not-American Strategy’” began, “We have arrived at a pregnant moment in history.” This past Tuesday, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan warned the General Assembly that the world body has reached “a fork in the road,” an historical juncture at which it must answer “the concerns that make some states feel uniquely vulnerable, since it is those concerns that drive them to take unilateral action.”

Annan hopes to create some kind of “robust and flexible new structure” to accommodate the Americans’ all-purpose wars on terror. Unfortunately, Mr. Annan’s job description is inadequate to the task. The United Nations cannot reach a modus vivendi with Pirates bent on world hegemony, men whose fundamental objective is to obliterate the very notion of international law in order to rule by fiat. At present, however, Annan believes that there is little choice but to go through the motions.

Bush decreed the limits of United Nations involvement in a “transformed” Iraq (“assist in developing a constitution, in training civil servants, and conducting free and fair elections”) and rejected an early transition to Iraqi sovereignty. “This process must unfold according to the needs of Iraqis [as defined by the Anglo-Americans], neither hurried nor delayed by the wishes of other parties,” said Bush, dismissing the French timetable, out of hand. With boorish transparency, Bush inflected his scorn for the French, hectoring that terrorists “should have no friend in this chamber.”