The Political Interest Banish the Q Word

By Michael Kramer

So the U.N. is squeamish about protecting Iraq's Kurds from Saddam Hussein's vengeance. So what else is new? When has the U.N. ever risked insulting a country's leader by moving unilaterally to protect the lives and welfare of the people? Never, that's when.

"Ah, you see," explained a U.N. official last week as he gleefully paraphrased George Bush, "what goes on inside Iraq is an internal matter. Technically, under international law, the Kurds aren't refugees at all. They are displaced persons."

The lesson here is an old one: There are always enough legalisms to justify inaction. The converse, of course, is also true -- and the more so in this case. For without significantly torturing their plain meaning, the existing Security Council resolutions constraining Baghdad can easily be interpreted as sanctioning the U.N. relief of the allied forces now occupying a slice of northern Iraq three times the size of Rhode Island.

Obviously afraid that just such a reading might stick, Javier Perez de Cuellar, the U.N. Secretary-General, has played a neat card: he asked Saddam for permission to police a part of his country. That Perez de Cuellar received the disastrous and predictable answer to a question he should never have asked testifies either to the U.N.'s underlying unwillingness to do what is right, or to Perez de Cuellar's fecklessness.

In any event, George Bush has made the humanitarian task more difficult by cloaking the U.S. mission in self-defeating rhetoric. Stung by those who say he ended the gulf war too soon (which is arguable) and that he moved to aid the hapless Kurds too late after inciting them to overthrow Saddam (which isn't), the President is now bothered about the prospect of U.S. troops getting "bogged down" in a "further military" involvement, a "permanent presence" -- a "quagmire."

Few words are as loaded as the Q word. Historically linked to Vietnam and defeat, quagmire connotes a limitless undertaking that corrodes a nation's confidence and well-being. Before the gulf war, Bush was at pains to say, "There's not going to be any long drawn-out agony of Vietnam." Why he now appears to be the last American still haunted by the Vietnam analogy is baffling. Besides the self-evident -- America's Kurdish-aid mission bears * little if any resemblance to anything the U.S. undertook in Vietnam -- it is Bush himself who has trumpeted America's gulf triumph as having finally "kicked" the Vietnam syndrome. Perhaps the President's pique reflects nothing more than frustration: fashioning a new world order is more easily said than done, as Bush is currently discovering in his attempts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.

How tempting to say "The hell with it," to walk away. It is certainly past time for others to help police the periphery. If the U.N. won't play, then surely the allies should agree to remain there until the Kurds feel safe. Germany and Japan should play a role, if only a financial one. British forces, particularly, should stay behind. It was Prime Minister John Major who first drew a distinction between observing a studied neutrality as between, say, Moscow and Vilnius, and seeing to it that Saddam is prohibited from murdering millions of his own citizens.

Complaining has its uses, but Bush's anger is better directed at the U.N. than at a goblin only the President perceives. If nothing works, if in the end the U.S. must stand alone, then so be it. No matter how unfair, unilateralism is sometimes a superpower's lot.