I recently had a debate on The Charlie Rose Show with, among others, Professor Harold Koh. The subject was regime change in Iraq and the related question of intervention in its favor. (If the name Harold Koh is unfamiliar to you, it is because he was President Clinton's undersecretary for human rights.) In the course of the exchanges between us, he must have pronounced the words "multilateral" or "multilateralism" several dozen times. Whoever taught him these terms did a thorough job. He could fit them into any sentence at any time. If he will allow me to summarize his view (and the transcript would bear me out here), Professor Koh had nothing much against regime change or indeed against intervention, so long as it was brought about in a "multilateral" manner.
One could have stooped, of course, and been "partisan." The Clinton administration, served by Koh, allowed itself to bomb Sudan without demanding inspections, without resorting to the United Nations, without consulting Congress, and without even telling several of the Joint Chiefs. The same administration bombed Baghdad from the day that the impeachment trial of the president began until the day that the trial was over, again without troubling to pass any of the above tests. In another episode, Madeleine Albright was instructed to veto a Czech motion calling for strengthening U.N. forces in Rwanda to "pre-empt" the genocidal plan prepared by Rwanda's racist government. [snip]
[snip]Tautology lurks here. In October, I went to speak at a meeting at the Labor Party conference in Blackpool, England. Tony Blair had carried the day in the plenary session, but many delegates were muttering darkly about the "unilateral" or "go-it-alone" attitude of the United States. I suggested that, if this was indeed the problem, the solution was ready at hand. Simply support the U.S. position against the Iraqi or Russian or French one and—presto—the U.S. position would no longer be "unilateral." I was promptly made aware of what I already knew—that the true objection to the policy has little to do with its "unilateral" character.
The supporters of German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder were the next to make the same mistake. Of course, they said, something must be done about Iraq. But how can America expect to do this without European support? A good question, but posed by people who would not stay for the answer. The most dada version of the dilemma was stated by Sen. Tom Daschle, who for weeks appeared to say that if only more people would endorse the president's policy, why then, he might be induced to support it himself! But in the meanwhile, he could only frown upon anything "unilateral." [snip]Slate