The Axis Of Irony

When George W. Bush assumed office in January 2001, many in his administration believed that the U.S. was aGulliver who had given the Lilliputians the ropes to tie him down. Theirs was a new, more assertive, lessconsensual brand of internationalism. American foreign and defense policies would be rooted in the preeminenceof American power and the willingness of the president to use that power to advance U.S. interests, unfetteredby international agreements or institutions.

The new team in Washington relished the chance to show that it would have nothing to do with treaties thatit deemed outmoded or that crimped American freedom of action. It had little use for alliances andinternational bodies. The United Nations and even NATO were more indulged than respected, more managed thanutilized. Nor was the administration interested in following through - and improving - on diplomaticinitiatives it had inherited from its predecessors in the Middle East and the Korean peninsula. There was somedistaste for the very enterprise of diplomacy, which by definition entails compromise, and that was no longerto be the name of the game.

The stark horror of September 11 provided an almost ideal opportunity for the U.S. to demonstrate what itcould do to its enemies with a combination of military prowess and political will. It also heightenedtolerance abroad for a robust, purposeful, and devastating exertion of American power. A combination ofinternational sympathy, outrage and solidarity muted, for the time being, complaints that Bush was a cowboy incharge of a rogue superpower. Instead, as a number of editorials in Europe and Asia commented at the time, thePresident suddenly had the look of a brave and righteous sheriff, like the Gary Cooper figure in High Noon.

In that movie, the townspeople cower behind closed curtains and locked doors while the sheriff squares offagainst the villains on a dusty street. The war in Afghanistan, however, departed from the Hollywood script.Largely at the instigation of Secretary of State Colin Powell - who had until then been a rather lonely andbattered figure, outnumbered and outflanked by the unilateralists in the administration - the U.S. tookseveral weeks to assemble a broad-based coalition, so that when the showdown with the Taliban and al-Qaedacame, the scene had more the look of a sheriff and a posse driving the bad guys out of town.

Then came the Iraq sequel. Even before Osama bin-Laden went to the top of America's Most Wanted list,President Bush had his sights fixed on Saddam Hussein. That was why the administration pivoted quickly fromthe war it waged a year ago in Afghanistan to the war it is preparing to wage soon in Iraq. It hoped to applythe energy generated by U.S.-induced regime change in Kabul to accomplishing the same objective in Baghdad. Ithad trouble, however, transferring international support for its handling of September 11 to its campaign tooust Saddam.

In the late summer, there seemed to be a growing determination, personified and articulated byVice-President Cheney, to dispense with the UN and do whatever it took, with whoever would join an ad hoccoalition, to bring down Saddam. President Bush kept that option open when he went to the UN on September 12.He warned the UN that it risked becoming irrelevant and going the way of the League of Nations.

But, in a strategy designed largely by Powell, Bush said he would prefer working through the SecurityCouncil and using a tough new resolution as the instrument for forcing Saddam to disarm or, if Saddam refuses,as the basis for military action.

The tactic worked. The Security Council unanimously passed a resolution with teeth.

That's the first of the ironies that critics of the administration's mindset and mode of operation mustrecognize: Bush's ultimatum - his threat to act independently of the UN - may actually have saved the bodyfrom precisely the irrelevance that he warned against.

But there's a second irony: having won something close to the resolution he wanted, Bush may now be all butlocked in to a UN framework for dealing with Iraq. He will no doubt reiterate that the U.S. has all theauthority it needs to pull the trigger on Saddam. Indeed, he must keep reminding the UN of his determination,or the UN will slip back into playing a cat-and-mouse game with Saddam in which the mouse wins.

Still, having brought the Security Council this far and having put the new inspection regime in place, Bushis likely to stay with that process. Not only is he vested in it, but to break ranks with the UN would costhim international legitimacy, the participation of many states both in the conduct of the war and the keepingof the troubled peace that will follow, and U.S. domestic support as well (since the polls show that mostAmericans want a U.S.-led but UN-authorized action).

So on the issue of Iraq, at least - the one that the administration came into office determined to solveonce and for all - Bush has become a multilateralist, even a traditionalist in his preference for workingthrough international bodies in dealing with the villains of this world.

That leads to the third and final irony: Bush may well end up dealing with Iraq in a fashion that is quiteconsistent with the way his predecessor, Bill Clinton, dealt with similar threats to international peace.

The past dozen years, since the end of the Cold War, reveal a pattern in the way that three Americanpresidents have made their country's power the driving force behind interventions on behalf of theinternational community.

The first President Bush did that in the 1991 Gulf War. He used his personal rapport with Mikhail Gorbachevto keep the Soviet Union, then in its dying days, from casting a veto in the Security Council.  TheClinton administration was marked by a series of conflicts, different in many respects but all with the commondenominator that the U.S. took the lead in threatening and applying force. In each of these conflicts, withthe U.S. in the lead, the UN and other global or regional bodies provided the cover of internationalparticipation in the military operation and in the nation-building that followed: the invasion of Haiti in1994, which expelled a military junta and restored a democratically elected president; the use of air strikesagainst the Serbs in Bosnia in 1995, which forced them to the negotiating table; and the bombing of Serbia in1999, which ended ethnic cleansing and established a NATO-enforced, UN-supervised protectorate in Kosovo - andwhich also led to the end of Slobodan Milosevic's dictatorship and to his current trial for war crimes in TheHague.

Thus, the Bush administration, for all its initial determination to repudiate anything and everythingClintonian, is now poised to deal with Saddam Hussein in a similar fashion, whether dealing with him meansmerely disarming him or - the unmistakable preference - decapitating him.

Back in the early months of the Bush administration, it was often said that what distinguished the newpresident's approach to the world from his predecessor's (and, for that matter, from his father's) was thatthose earlier occupants of the White House operated on the slogan: together if possible, alone if necessary,while with George W. Bush, it's the other way around.

Iraq may play out as a disproof of that conventional wisdom and as a reminder that there remains a highdegree of continuity in American foreign policy - stretching from Bush to Clinton to Bush.

If so, that will come as a relief to much of the rest of the world, and it will increase the chances thatothers will follow the American lead in the future.