The Chronicle on Iraq

When I read the editorials in the San Francisco Chronicle I often get the urge to bang my head against the floor. Why does the paper only hire editorial writers who seem to have learned everything they know about international politics from a yoga teacher in a Marin County hot tub?

Here is Tuesday's editorial. Read it and marvel.

Alienating allies on the way to war

a more accurate headline would have been "France and Germany -- Alienating allies on the way to appeasement"

IF THE IRAQI leadership is at all rational,

Stop right there. If the Iraqi leadership were at all rational, they would not, for example, be playing chicken with the Fifth Fleet and the 101st Airborne.

it can still head off a devastating U.S. military attack

the only way Saddam could do that, at this point, would be to swallow his own ricin

by demonstrating conclusively to the world that it has disarmed, or is doing so without another moment's delay.

Nobody in their right mind will believe that Iraq has disarmed completely, let alone disarmed permanently. The only people who would accept Saddam's assurances at this point are the raging clueless and those who want Saddam to stay in power.

Such a credible showing of Baghdad's acceptable behavior can be achieved with the aid of newly agreed-to U-2 surveillance flights, and greatly augmented U.N. inspection teams prying unimpeded into every suspected trove of illegal weaponry. Gone would be the deception and delaying tactics long practiced by Saddam Hussein and condemned by U.N. inspectors as well as President Bush.

right. Saddam will suddenly take a Dale Carnegie Course and cease being a lying son of a bitch.

Is such a resolution too much to be hoped for,

yes

given the suspicions and irreconcilable aims on both sides? Perhaps.

Given Saddam's long track record, we are not dealing with "suspicion"

Only modest expectations were aroused by the top inspectors' expression of optimism on an urgent weekend visit to Baghdad, where they were given more Iraqi documents about purportedly abandoned nuclear, chemical and biological efforts and heard assurances of more cooperation.

Just enough documents to encourage the most credulous of fools to rush to their typewriters to bang out editorials in Saddam's defense

In its seeming haste for war,

haste? this has been dragging out for years

the Bush administration is engaged in a potentially damaging dispute with some of its most important NATO allies,

Allies? You mean the disturbingly self-interested and militarily weak fair weather friends like France, Germany and (ha! ha!) Belgium (?!)

and with Russia, over how to proceed in disarming Hussein.

Here's a quiz question: Why does Saddam have to be disarmed in the first place? Is it because he was armed by (a) France, (b) Germany (c) Russia (d) all of the above

France, Germany and Russia have joined in a call for strengthened and extended U.N. inspections to avert war and promote a diplomatic resolution with Baghdad.

There may be several reasons for this, some possibilities are: (a) they want Saddam to stay in power so they can keep doing business with him (b) they know we're going to do this anyway, and they're glad that we are, they just want us to do all the dirty work and take all the heat for being the bad guy

France and Russia both have veto power in the U.N. Security Council,

and all that proves is that the composition of the Security Council is 56 years out of date

where the administration hopes for passage of a second resolution authorizing military action

the administration might hope for a resolution, but they're not going to wait for another one

against an unrepentant Iraq.

repentance is not the issue. Being a threat to civilization is the issue

These longtime allies

Russia is not a "longtime" ally, unless you were a member of the Communist Party USA.

want to make sure the United States makes a sincere effort to exhaust alternatives to war,

been there, done that

such as more rigorous inspections, a reasonable

says who?

posture shared by many Americans.

a shrinking minority

Belgium, Germany and France further embarrassed Bush by blocking NATO planning to protect Turkey from Iraqi attack in the event of war.

more to the point they embarassed themselves and have acted, ahem, unilaterally to abrogate their obligations under a treaty

Turkey borders Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, which could be a second front in an assault on Baghdad. U.S. Special Forces are already on the ground there.

God bless 'em.

The Bush administration must attend seriously to the strain in the Atlantic alliance, which was aggravated by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's offensive dismissal of the "old Europe."

In fact, the strain in the alliance is attributable to the rapidly downward-swirling Gerhard Schroeder, whose colleagues compared George Bush unfavorably to Adolf Hitler and Augustus Caesar

The United States, even as the lone superpower, needs these old democratic friends in a world where the war against terrorism is far from won and may or may not not have much to do with the threat of Hussein's arsenal.

We do need our friends in Germany, but we and the Germans alike need Gerhard Schroeder like we need an extra hole in the head

Almost a week after Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the U. N. Security Council of our government's case against Hussein, ambiguities remain in the record about Iraq's real intentions.

The only "ambiguities" are along the following lines: can they produce nuclear weapons in 2 years or 3? Would they put ricin in the drinking water or in restaurants? Which American or European city will be hit first?

The chief inspectors will make an updated report Friday about Iraqi cooperation,

"Tales of Iraqi Co-operation" That sounds like one of those old "books that were never written" jokes, like "Spots on the Great Wall of China, by Hoo Flung Poo"

and that could bend further Security Council deliberation in the direction of more diplomacy -- or toward the use of force.

For some reason it doesn't seem to matter how grim the inspectors reports are, but Russia, France and the San Francisco Chronicle always seem to demand another go at inspections

This is a moment for the United States to be persuading its allies, not alienating them.

Anybody who isn't already persuaded is unpersuadable, and also has some serious explaining of their own to do.

What's most interesting and pathetic, really, about the Chronicle editorial is the way that it instinctively blames Bush for the rift in NATO. What masquerades as internationalism is merely the naive provincialism and fashionable anti-Bush mentality of the Bay Area liberal. If anybody at the Chronicle actually bothered to read, say, the German press, they might understand how badly Gerhard Schroeder is being criticized on all sides at home for alienating his supposed allies (e.g. us). Read this op-ed ("Bismarck must be spinning in his grave at Germany's blunder") written by Josef Joffe, editor of the leading German weekly Die Zeit. And lest you suspect that his is his own form of reflexive criticism of the home team, read both the Joffe piece and the Chronicle piece and decide for yourself which one displays the most insight into trans-Atlantic affairs as well as the most common sense.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at February 13, 2003 07:00 AM