by JAMES TARANTO
Monday, March 17, 2003 1:35 P.M. EST

You Don't Say

I. "Little Reason to Hope Saddam Will Disarm, Bush Says"--headline, Associated Press, March 16

II. "U.N.'s Blix Says War Looks Likely"--headline, Reuters, March 17

III. "U.S. Plan Sees G.I.'s Invading Iraq as More Arrive"--headline, New York Times, March 16

IV. "Iraq's Air Defense Is Focused Around Baghdad"--headline, New York Times, March 17

Saddam Shows Some Flexibility
"Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said on Sunday Iraq was ready to fight the United States anywhere in the world," Reuters reports. Anywhere, huh? Sounds good--we'll take Iraq.

Jacques in the Box
Last week, and then into the weekend, we heard a lot of carping about the "failure" of U.S. diplomacy vis-à-vis Iraq. "U.S. Missteps Led to Failed Diplomacy" reads a typical headline from yesterday's Washington Post. The usually sensible (on this topic) Post editorial page opined yesterday that the answer to diplomacy's failure was . . . more diplomacy:

We have argued that the United States would do well to agree to a delay if it seemed likely to lead to greater international support, including most of the countries on the Security Council. . . . With more diplomatic suppleness, more flexibility on timing and less arrogant tactics and rhetoric, the administration might have won the backing of long-standing friends such as Turkey, Mexico and Chile.

And have we ever won a war without the support of Chile?

Now that diplomacy has run its course--the allies announced this morning that in the face of French intransigence they have withdrawn the proposed 18th U.N. resolution--the point is rather moot. But before the second draft of history gets written, we'd like to weigh in with an alternative view: Last week was a diplomatic triumph for the U.S. and especially for Britain.

To understand why, we need to begin by acknowledging that there never was any chance of passing an 18th U.N. Security Council resolution. France's vote in favor of Resolution 1441, it now seems clear, was an act of bad faith, an effort to buy time for Paris's ally Saddam Hussein. For a long time we thought France would come around at the last minute because rendering the U.N. irrelevant would hurt Paris more than anyone else. At some point, though, Jacques Chirac had so committed himself to his obstructionist position (which is very popular among French voters) that there was no backing down. The French likely miscalculated, too, thinking President Bush was bluffing or that allied resolve would falter. (How do you say "misunderestimate" in French?)

At some point, then, it became inevitable that the U.S. and its allies would liberate Iraq and it would do so without an 18th U.N. resolution. So what was all the diplomatic fuss about? Why did America and France alike lavish such attention on utterly irrelevant nations like Cameroon, Guinea and (sorry, Washington Post) Chile? A Washington Post piece from Saturday explains that "although a veto would doom the resolution to failure, its sponsors thought they could achieve a 'moral victory' by winning over at least five of the remaining six members"--meaning that the resolution would have the nine votes required for passage, even though it didn't pass.

Would the support of Angola, Mexico and Pakistan really have rendered the liberation of Iraq more moral? Of course not. But that's not the point. In an incisive essay on Thursday, Steven Den Beste explained the stakes:

What the struggle really has been about is who's going to be blamed for destroying the UN, and who will politically dominate the EU. The French are trying to set us up for killing the UN. They want both the US and UK to take the blame. That's because the French are trying to create the European Union as a diplomatic and economic power opposed to the US, which is sufficiently big to actually represent a "counterweight" to the US, because they fear our currently-unmatched economic and political and military power.

Cowardly France was trying to hide behind the skirts of Cameroon and Guinea. Had a Security Council resolution failed to garner the requisite nine votes, France's veto would not have been decisive. Paris could even abstain from such a vote. Jacques Chirac gave away the game in an interview with CNN and CBS's Christiane Amanpour:

Amanpour: Do you not think that your repeated vow to veto has emboldened Saddam Hussein?

Chirac: I don't not think so, no. It really isn't a topical issue. It isn't a question in the news, really. You will notice that there isn't today a majority in the Security Council supporting. There just isn't one. So veto isn't an issue, because there is no majority to start war.

The trouble for Chirac is that he was trying to weasel out of a definitive commitment he made less than a week earlier. As the Independent reported on Tuesday, Chirac made clear that France would use its veto in the event that an 18th resolution commanded majority support on the Security Council. Then, on Thursday, Britain put forward a new proposal for a disarmament timetable, which the French immediately rejected--before Iraq did. Here's Den Beste's prescient analysis:

We can now pull a switcheroo on the French. Instead of holding a vote, having it be badly defeated, and letting the French be able to claim that they did not veto because there was overwhelming opposition, we can now decide to not bring it to a vote after all, because of the clear fact that France would not permit it to pass, thus putting the French in the position of having sole responsibility for the lack of UNSC approval for the war we're going to fight anyway.

At his March 6 press conference, President Bush vowed to hold a U.N. vote no matter what. "It's time for people to show their cards, to let the world know where they stand when it comes to Saddam," he said. As the president noted yesterday, he held to the "show their cards" strategy while shifting tactics:

I was the guy that said they ought to vote. And one country voted--at least showed their cards, I believe. It's an old Texas expression, show your cards, when you're playing poker. France showed their cards. After I said what I said, they said they were going to veto anything that held Saddam to account. So cards have been played. And we'll just have to take an assessment after tomorrow to determine what that card meant.

France didn't have to reject the British proposal out of hand; it could easily have said it would take the matter under study, made proposals to water it down, and played for still more time. Instead, in an act of supreme arrogance, Jacques Chirac showed his cards yet again. It's a stroke of luck for the free world, and a stroke of genius on the part of Britain's diplomats.

You Can't Quit, You're Fired!
ArabicNews.com offers this proposal in a hilarious unsigned "analysis" piece:

It is time to kick the USA out of the UN Security Council for starters, or out of the United Nations if need be. The world can do without such bullies and war mongers and international dictators. No more ultimatums to the UN. If you don't like the United Nations, then get out of it; Tomorrow is a good day to announce this. And if the USA does not announce this itself, then the countries of the world should seize the moment and understand what is going on and act.

Landslide Howard
In 1972 the Democrats took a sharp left turn, nominating George McGovern, a far-left antiwar senator, to face Richard Nixon, a Republican president who had barely eked out a victory four years earlier. The result was a GOP landslide; Nixon's 60.7% of the popular vote was the second-best showing of the 20th century, lagging only FDR's 60.8% in 1936.

Is history about to repeat? Who knows, but we'll say this: If we had to place a bet on who'll be the Democratic nominee, and we were getting odds, our money would be on Howard Dean, the fiery former governor of Vermont, who has made opposition to Iraq's liberation a centerpiece of his campaign. With most of the plausible candidates--Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry and John Edwards--having voted in favor of last year's war resolution, Dean seems to have struck a chord with the far-left, Bush-hating wing of his party, which has an outsize influence in the primaries and caucuses.

MSNBC.com reports from Sacramento on California's annual Democratic convention:

Pandemonium erupted with the crowd jumping to its feet as Dean opened his speech by shouting, "What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the president's unilateral intervention in Iraq!"

Edwards, meanwhile, faced "raucous boos and catcalls when he said he supported disarming Saddam Hussein by military force." Kerry was heckled by some guy yelling "No war, John, no war!" And he tried a new tack to weasel out of his pro-war vote, "implying," in MSNBC's words, "that it really wasn't all that significant since Bush already had the authority to use military force without it."

Some left-wingers are already preparing to spin the liberation of Iraq. In LA Weekly, one John Powers frets over the possibility of American success: "It's not impossible that the war will go according to plan: American and British troops will inflict 'acceptable' casualties, the Iraqis will quickly embrace them as liberators, inspectors will find huge caches of hidden biochemical weapons (even if the CIA has to put them there), and faced with all this, the world will view the war in a positive light." In other words, it appears, the far left is preparing to blame the CIA for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

This sort of thing probably will go over well among Howard Dean's backers, but normal Americans aren't going to buy it. MSNBC quotes Democratic strategist Garry South: "You can oppose a war in Iraq, you can support a war in Iraq, you can be ambivalent, but if this party becomes branded again among the electorate as being insufficiently concerned about national defense, it doesn't matter what we have to say about anything else. If we're viewed as the antiwar party . . . we're dead."

Indeed. The Washington Post, reporting from Kuwait, quotes Marine Lt. Gen. James Conway, who has a better sense of America's political pulse than the Dems do:

Conway told his troops not to worry about peace protests at home, pointing to a poll showing that 71 percent of Americans want to get the Iraq situation resolved now. "When we invade Iraq," he added, "that'll go up to 91 percent. And you know how I feel about it? Piss on everybody else."

Here's a sure sign of growing Dem desperation: Salon's Charles Taylor has a bitter rant against Ralph Nader voters:

The news in the past few weeks has been showing us tearful separations of reservists and their families. . . . Wouldn't it be great if just one of them didn't have to go, didn't have to separated from their sweethearts or families because all you Nader voters put Bush in office and helped pave the way for the invasion of Iraq? Wouldn't it be great to show America your guts by taking one of these brave soldiers' place, by declaring that you're not willing to let anybody else die for your actions?

Those on the Democratic left had better hurry up and get their licks in against Nader, for he'll no longer be a plausible scapegoat if Howard Dean does end up losing in a McGovern-style landslide.

You Don't Say--V
"California's Democrats Leaning Left"--headline, San Francisco Chronicle, March 17

Ceausescu Watch
"Open acts of defiance by opponents of Saddam Hussein's regime have intensified in the past week, with saboteurs carrying out attacks against Iraq's railway system and protesters openly calling for the overthrow of the Iraqi dictator," London's Telegraph reports:

The most blatant act of sabotage took place 20 miles south of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, where members of the Iraqi opposition blew up a stretch of track on the Mosul-Baghdad railway, causing the derailment of a train.

Here's a reminder of how brutal is the regime Howard Dean and Jacques Chirac are defending:

To set an example, members of Saddam's security forces arrested a civil servant in the al-Hurriyya suburb of Baghdad on suspicion of preparing to leave the country. The official was tied to a pole in the street and passers-by were ordered to watch as his tongue was cut out and he was left to bleed to death.

More trouble for the Iraqi dictator: The Financial Times reports that "Saddam Hussein's most important Kurdish ally has defected to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq." And Britain's Sun tabloid claims that between 20,000 and 30,000 Iraqi soldiers have already deserted.

Journalist or Publicist?
The Iraqi regime has expelled David Filipov, a Boston Globe reporter, for using his satellite phone from his hotel room in violation of Baghdad's restrictions, the Associated Press reports. Filipov was filing a story "that described an Iraqi drone has being held together by Duct tape and bearing the words: 'God is Great.' "

Filipov's editor, Jim Smith, tells the AP: "It was a story that should have been regarded as useful for Iraq in telling its story and responding to allegations that it had a very impressive and dangerous drone."

Filipov's own account includes this detail:

To use their phones, journalists have to pay the press center $100 per day. In addition, print reporters have to pay $30 to $50 per day for a government-appointed minder and another daily fee of unclear purpose of $125 per person. Radio and television crews pay much more.

And here we thought American news organizations considered it unethical to pay sources for stories.

Does Clinton Read the Onion?

"We should ask ourselves what we would want if Iraq was occupying the U.S."--"Ken Franklin, Bus Driver," the Onion, March 12

"We need to be creating a world that we would like to live in when we're not the biggest power on the block."--Bill Clinton, quoted in the New York Daily News, March 14

Does Saddam Read OpinionJournal?

"Who appointed the United States of America the guardian of world peace and the ultimate authority regarding the kinds of government that are and are not acceptable in the 21st century?"--Steven Platzer, OpinionJournal.com reader responses, March 14

"Who appointed America the unjust judge of the world so that it can say if this country has a weapon of a certain range that it should destroy?"--Saddam Hussein, quoted by Reuters, March 16

Terror Advocate Dies in Accident
Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old terrorism advocate from Olympia, Wash., died in a bulldozer accident yesterday. Corrie was at fault in the accident, which occurred when she either stood or crouched in front of an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer in Gaza, the Jerusalem Post reports:

The bulldozers were part of an IDF tunnel- and mine-clearing operation. The Rafah refugee camp borders Egypt, from which Palestinian terrorists smuggle in weapons and explosives. And according to interim peace accords, Israel has the right to operate in and secure the area.

Corrie not only backed anti-Israeli terrorism; she also hated America. An Associated Press photo shows Corrie, her face contorted with hate, burning a "mock U.S. flag" at a pro-Saddam rally last month. (Hat tip: Little Green Footballs.) Reuters reports on a "symbolic funeral" that drew some 1,000 Palestinian Arabs. One of them tells the "news" service: "We fly a U.S. flag today to show our support to all American peace lovers, those like Rachel." If she were still alive, no doubt she'd have burned the flag.

It's a shame that Rachel Corrie died the way she did. It's shameful that she lived the way she did.

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Today on OpinionJournal:

• Review & Outlook: Jacques Chirac gets one last chance.
• Robert Bartley: When America left peace to France, the world erupted in war.
• Peggy Noonan: It's the right time to weigh in on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.