Most of us here would agree with you that it is "not up to the President of the United States to decide what is right or wrong." And in fact that is not our system. He does not get to decide that by himself. Although the administration made some early noises that the President could decide this by himself, that was widely interpreted here as a way to get the Congress to debate and vote on the issue. It is in fact extremely unlikely that any President would launch any sort of war without Congressional approval. I understand why Europeans might not be comfortable with this, but as a practical matter a vote by almost any group of 535 reasonably sophisticated sane people from either Europe or the U.S. is likely to arrive at roughly the same decision where we are talking about these "values" issues like right/wrong, freedom/despotism etc. In particular, such a system acts as a brake on the possibility that one individual has "gone over the edge," no matter what position he holds. It is simply not true that George Bush can decide on his own to commit the U.S. military to war, or that he alone can decide what is right or wrong. I realize that this cannot be entirely satisfying to Europeans, and so you offer up the UN as a better brake on human excess than the U.S. Congress. The United Nations sounds like it ought to work in the abstract, but in the real world it turns out to reflect not the views of "humanity," but of "governments," and many of those governments are dictatorships that do not reflect your values or ours. How comfortable are you that an organization that would put Libya at the head of its Human Rights efforts reflects your values? Why should such people have veto power over anyone's actions? The UN has become a place where dictators and thugs go to be treated with respect by people who should spit on them instead. There is also the issue that not everyone's motives are pure here. Just as you cannot believe that this is all about "freedom" and "good vs evil," we cannot believe that French opposition is not tied into the oil contracts that TotalFinaElf has in Iraq. They would happily leave a brutal dictator in place, WMD's or not, dead Americans or not, if the money keeps coming in from Iraq's oil fields. We also suspect that the sheer viciousness of the opposition, to the point of threatening the very existence of the UN and NATO, can only be caused by a desire to cover up what they have been doing in Iraq... like selling Saddam Hussein equipment and materials for WMD's. We do not know that, but it looks like we will find out. If we do find "Made in France" labels on nuclear processing equipment in Saddam Hussein's bunkers, how "moral" will France's anti-war stand appear then? You ask why George Bush should be allowed to decide this by himself. Why should Jacques Chirac? |
Thank you for taking the time to write that. I think it is important that we "ordinary citizens" communicate in this way while our various politicians posture on the world stage.