Who's in Charge Here, Anyway?

By Charles Krauthammer

When the smoke--well, the fog of diplomacy--cleared, Saddam Hussein emerged whole from last week's confrontation with the U.S., ready to live and cheat again. For that he can thank Kofi Annan. Three times the U.N. Secretary-General insinuated himself into the showdown. By the time he was done, he had saved Saddam from the most serious attack on his regime since the Gulf War.

First, Annan sent a letter that offered Saddam not just an out but a win: a nice reward--broad hints of accelerating the move to lift the economic embargo of Iraq--if Saddam would just act nice. Saddam responded with his "Swiss cheese" letter, a disingenuous, heavily hedged show of compliance with U.N. demands that was, in fact, a prescription for more Iraqi "cheat and retreat" on weapons inspections. Nonetheless, the very transmittal of that letter, as yet unparsed, was enough to prompt President Clinton to recall his bombers in midflight.

Then, while the U.S. remained "poised to strike" if the holes in the cheese were not filled, Annan fatally undermined the U.S. position when his personal representative in Baghdad pronounced the letter unconditional Iraqi acceptance of U.N. terms.

It was nothing of the sort. But once the U.N. said so, Iraq's Big Power friends (Russia, China and France) and brother Arab states, which just days before had blamed the military showdown squarely on Saddam, could hardly say anything less.

Thus began a cascade of defections from what was a rare unanimous international consensus backing U.S. military action. The U.N. announcement decisively changed the geography of the crisis. It was not Iraq that was isolated anymore but the U.S. The result was preordained: America stood down.

Then, to make U.S. action all the more impossible, a third bit of mischief: as soon as Annan received Saddam's letter, he announced that he would be returning U.N. humanitarian workers to Baghdad within a day. Doing so would effectively end the American threat, however "poised" for action the Administration claimed to be. It is one thing to bomb an enemy capital. It is another to bomb an enemy capital where U.N. humanitarian workers are flitting about doing their good works.

Within six days of the crisis' resolution, its farcicality became obvious when Iraq contemptuously refused to turn over promised documents to the U.N. inspectors. But no matter. The moment had passed. Saddam had his reprieve.

How did it happen? How did the Secretary-General--the head of a toothless bureaucracy that commands no army, wields no power and begs for revenue--come to trump the President of the U.S.? Answer: with help--American help.

After all, during the last such crisis, in February, Madeleine Albright gave her blessing to Annan to go to Baghdad and work out a phony deal that effectively disarmed the weapons inspectors in return for a few months' respite between crises.

How was Annan to know that while February's Clinton--weakened by the Lewinsky scandal, mocked for Wagging the Dog--was desperate for a way out, November's Clinton--vindicated by the elections, triumphant in the fall of Newt, fresh from diplomatic success at Wye Plantation--was this time finally prepared to use force?

Once power is forfeited and the initiative surrendered, they are not easily retrieved. Clinton has made a habit of such forfeiture. Indeed, he has made an art of the externally brokered retreat. He invited Jimmy Carter to extricate him from the Korean crisis of 1994. He invited Sam Nunn and Colin Powell and Carter (again) to pull a rabbit out of a hat in Haiti. In February he invited Annan to engineer the U.S. stand-down over Iraq.

Throughout, Clinton has made a gratuitous grant of power to the U.N. by his incessant pledge of American allegiance to the will of "the international community." The international community, however, is a figment of the liberal imagination. There may be shifting coalitions of interests among nations on particular issues. But community? The term is simply a device for justifying American passivity on the grounds that the President of France or the Secretary-General of the U.N. does not like what the U.S. is doing.

Why should the world's sole superpower, the one that bears the risks and the costs, bend a knee to parties that bear none of the costs, none of the risk and often have contrary interests? Why must American foreign policy be contracted out? It is perfectly fine for an American President to mouth the usual pieties about international consensus and some such. But when he starts believing them, he turns the Oval Office over to Kofi Annan and friends.