After reading Bush's UN speech, I realized what was really at stake with regard to Iraq. By not forcing Saddam to fulfill what he agreed to do by the terms of surrender ending the Gulf War, the United Nations will be nothing more than a 21st century League of Nations. Its resolutions would be de facto null and void.
Bush has now committed the United States to taking on Iraq for the sake of the UN's legitimacy and that of the international order it represents. This is ironic, for here we have a president whose political party looks at the UN as a useless and wasteful socialist gab fest to now be willing to shed American blood to save its future. But the irony doesn't end there. Bush's critics, in the name of the UN and the multilateralism it represents, have accused him of "unilateralism"! So we have the possibility of America having to act alone in order to defend the international order while the rest of the world in a multilateral effort does nothing.
Irony aside, I realize now that Bush is right about Iraq, and he is taking the right approach. And I now see the true connection to the war on terrorism: Saddam and bin Laden, like Hitler and Stalin before them, are equal threats to the world order, regardless of whether they have anything to do with each other. They are an axis of evil by default. I feel as if we are back in the 1930's, staring at the "high noon of aggression" as Paul Johnson called it in his book Modern Times. Only this time it isn't Baldwin, Chamberlain, Roosevelt, Blum, and Daladier facing Hitler and Stalin; it's someone who like Winston Churchill knows what do and why it needs to get done.
We have allowed this dance with Saddam to go on for 12 years. Let's stop the music, and let slip the dogs of war. Anonymous