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Seeds of War

Sensible people on both sides of the Iraq issue want enduring peace. They differ entirely on how to achieve it. More to the point, rather than "peace", what is needed is a process of peaceful problem resolution and the resolve to enforce it.

Yes, this is an unnecessary war, but who has made it happen? However anxious some may wish to paint the current administration as having a desire to go to war, look elsewhere for why it feels obliged to pursue it.

At the United Nations, an unseemly dance over Iraq has lasted twelve years. Clearly, the UN has not yet a reliable process for peaceful problem resolution.

United Nations inspectors should never have had to look for weapons violations. Their job should have been to oversee and verify the destruction of weapons Iraq brought to the UN's attention. That should have been plain enough to the French and Germans. Likewise, it should also have been plain enough to France and Germany that if they wished to make war unnecessary, early on they should have signed on to giving Iraq a close, fixed deadline with which to comply.

War is a nasty place to be. In war, there is no guarantee the "good guys" will win. Sometimes in war it is hard to tell who the good guys are because innocents always get killed.

If this is going to be the last clean-up of this kind, then the United Nations had best determine to reclaim its purpose and its resolve. Member states are going to have to be willing to send in the UN‚s international police when appropriate. And nations who do not agree to abide by peaceful problem resolution must discover the world is resolved to deal with their potential threats. We do not relish sending our children to war. But neither do we relish a world whose civility, sense of community, and shared future have been treated with such disdain.

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