Bush and the UN.(The Right Perspective)

According to public perception, President George W. Bush is a unilateralist who will not allow the United Nations to compromise our national sovereignty. If he determines that we must go to war to defend our best interests, then we will go to war, regardless of what the UN or any foreign nation thinks. Senator John Kerry, by contrast, is perceived as an internationalist who wants the U.S. to conform to the collective dictates of the world community through the UN.

But the reality is very different from the perception--at least so far as George W. Bush is concerned. In truth, both Bush and Kerry support UN empowerment. Moreover, Bush's Iraq policy, to the extent that it is viewed as a failure, is actually eroding public support for his supposed go-it-alone foreign policy while strengthening support for Kerry's internationalist agenda.

When President Bush criticizes the UN for failing to enforce its resolutions and risking irrelevancy, he is not saying that the UN role should be diminished, but that it should be expanded. Consider these questions he posed in his September 12, 2002 address to the UN General Assembly regarding Security Council resolutions requiting Iraq to disarm: "Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" The president did not answer these questions by saying that the UN should become irrelevant, or that its resolutions should be ignored. Sounding every bit as liberal as Kerry, the supposedly conservative Bush said: "We want the United Nations to be effective, and respectful, and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced."

In fact, Mr. Bush so strongly favored enforcing UN resolutions that he said he would commit U.S. troops for that purpose. On November 8, 2002, the day the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1441 calling for Iraq to disarm per earlier Security Council resolutions, President Bush stated: "America will be making only one determination: is Iraq meeting the terms of the Security Council resolution or not? ... If Iraq fails to fully comply, the United States and other nations will disarm Saddam Hussein."

When the president determined that Saddam Hussein did not meet the Security Council's terms, he decided to send our troops into yet another foreign war as part of a "coalition of the willing." As Mr. Bush explained much later, in last January's State of the Union address: "[C]ombat forces of the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Poland and other countries enforced the demands of the United Nations...." As we all know, U.S. forces were sent in without ...