[CharacterCounts]

The second time was in the first Gulf War, right after the end of the cold war. The Soviet power still had to be respected, and the process gave us a way to get what we wanted with the Soviets going along.

My take on the author's logic is that the UN restriction placed on the Gulf War resolution created the situation we are in today and we would have been better off ignoring the UN in 1991.

[Defiant]

It is true that UN restrictions on the scope of the First Gulf War were a big factor in why we did not finish the job. Unfortunately, I don't think we could have gone it alone back then, if the Soviets (which they still were then) had opposed us, and the UN allowed us a forum to get them to go along. We did the best we could with the geopolitical realities as they existed.

Fast forward 12 years. Now, we don't give a damn what the Russians say. We have grown massively more powerful, while they have waned tremendously. In fact, if it weren't for their nukes, they would not give us much trouble. Unless we attack them directly, they won't start a war with us. Hell, the states on their border that were in their Warsaw Pact are now part of Nato, and, until they started jacking us around on this Iraq war, there was talk of making the Russians allies, too. (We will eventually need an alliance with Russia to deal with China.) So, it's a much different situation.

Now, since we don't need the Russians, we don't need the "good offices" of the UN to help us put together a coalition to get Saddam.