When Colin Powell demonstrated to the United Nations that Iraq conceals its weapons of mass destruction, deceives inspectors, and collaborates with Al Qaeda, I was reminded of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
After his military entered Palestinian territories where suicidal bombers originated their attacks against Israel, Sharon presented the Bush administration with numerous documents obtained from Arafat’s headquarters detailing his support of anti-Israel terrorists. And just as Bush dismissed Sharon’s documented proof of this fact, the UN dismisses Powell’s proof that Saddam Hussein threatens the United States.
Curiously, these evasions of both the Bush administration and the UN come from the same corrupt premise.
That Hussein is an aggressive, anti-American dictator possessing biological and chemical weapons, and that Arafat has murdered thousands of Israelis, are facts established long ago. There is no reason to further “prove” these facts to anyone. Moreover, the latest in a long line of UN attempts to inspect Iraq has only delayed America’s war against terrorists seething to destroy it, and the UN call for a Palestinian state is simply a ploy to better serve Arafat’s crusade to destroy Israel.
Yet the US and Israel still feel they must prove their cases to the world. Why?
First, as leader of the free world, Bush has no moral certainty in America’s right to independently defend itself against its would-be destroyers. Secondly, he evades that Palestinian and Al Qaeda terrorism derive from the same source: militant Islamic fundamentalism. Instead of acknowledging that the US and Israel face a common enemy they both must destroy, Bush cowers before “world opinion” — as embodied by the UN.
That the UN is a corrupt organization is nakedly evident. Its Commission on Human Rights is chaired by Libya, a terrorist regime, and the US, the premier upholder of individual rights, was kicked off the commission by other dictatorial nations. Further, the two nations slated to head the UN’s Disarmament Conference later this year are Iraq and Iran. It’s no wonder then that an organization which so strikingly dismisses distinctions between the essential natures of nations draws a moral equivalency between Israel, a free nation, and the Palestinian Authority, a dictatorial terrorist regime.
When Israel rolled its tanks and army into Palestinian territories in self-defense against terrorist bombers, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said, ”The whole world is demanding that Israel withdraw. I don’t think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong.”
One of Israel’s friends, the Bush administration, cowers before Annan’s corrupt premise that reality’s facts are subordinate to (alleged) “world opinion,” no matter how irrational it is. Bush’s actions reveal that he shares, at least implicitly, the UN opinion that Israel is a rouge state, when, in reality, its military actions are self-defense. For example, Bush vowed to end states that sponsor terrorism, but because he sanctions the UN opinion that Palestinians have a “right” to the land Israel “occupies,” he too calls for a Palestinian state — that is, a terrorist dictatorship where no rights would exist. He also bars Israel from his coalition against terrorist regimes such as the Taliban and Iraq, but welcomes terrorist-backing states like Saudi Arabia.
Consequently, Bush doesn’t assert the fact that the US, not the world, was attacked on Sept. 11, the culmination of two decades of worldwide Islamic terrorism against Americans. He doesn’t act with urgency on America’s right to operate independently in initiating self-defensive strikes against terrorist states. Instead, he sends Powell to re-prove the case against Iraq, only so that terrorist nations such as Syria can vote on how the US is allowed to conduct its own foreign policy.
As it waits on events while dangers gather, the Bush administration now faces the same evasive stonewalling by UN-member France that it displayed to Sharon when he sought to eliminate Arafat. The UN standard of consensus-equals-truth underlies these evasions.
So despite the actual facts that Hussein collaborates with Al Qaeda, has attacked neighboring nations, slaughtered his own citizens with chemical weapons he still possesses, and that the supplier for the anthrax attacks in America after 9/11 remains unknown, Bush continues to put the opinion of anti-American states above acting independently on these ominous realities.
Bush and Sharon must take a lesson on how to act against terrorist states from Israel when it destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981. In planning this preemptive strike, Israel properly sought no world opinion. Instead, it acted independently on the facts — the nature of an aggressive, dictatorial regime hostile toward it — and on its rational self-interest: survival.
