Within the next few days the German government is expected to call on the European Union to make its support of any military action against Iraq conditional to prior approval by the United Nations’ Security Council.
The idea is not new. All those who don’t want to take a clear position on whether or not Saddam Hussein should be overthrown by force use the trick of referring the decision to the Security Council.
And Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is no exception. Facing a difficult general election later this year he wants to ensure his leftist supporters that he has not become " an American poodle". At the same time, however, he does not have the courage, or perhaps the belief, that Saddam Hussein is a perfectly all-right leader for his own people and a harmless, if not actually useful, element in the region.
The problem with the debate on whether or not Saddam should be removed by force is that we do not have two sides with equal convictions. In a sense, we just have one-and-a-half side in this debate. The one full side is represented by the United States that, now backed by most Iraqi opposition groups, claims that Saddam Hussein represents an "evil" that has to be removed by force.
The "half" side in this debate consists of people like Schroeder who make some disgruntled noises but are not prepared to come out and say, "No, Saddam is not ‘evil’ and that, if he is attacked, we shall rush to his defense." Nor are they prepared to guarantee that Saddam will not, as the Americans claim, acquire weapons of mass destruction that he may then use against the US and its allies.
Translated into plain language the Schroeder position goes something like this: You may be right. Saddam may be an "evil" man. He may be stockpiling deadly weapons that he may use against you and even us. But, still, we think all that has to be decided in the Security Council.
Politics, however, is about taking sides and making choices. In aesthetics, the question is one of choosing between the beautiful and the ugly. In economics the choice is between profit and loss. Ethics is about the choice between good and evil. In politics the choice is between friend and enemy. This, of course, does not mean that you have to go to war against your enemy or try to kill him. Chancellor Schroeder’s "enemy" in the next election is the Christian Socialist Union leader Edmund Stoiber. Schroeder is asking the German voters to take sides, to make a clear choice, and not to sit on the fence.
Let us imagine a different scenario in the case of Iraq.
Imagine that Schroeder calls a special summit of the European Union and asks his peers to decide whether or not George W. Bush is lying when he says that he regards the continuation of Saddam in power in Baghdad as a threat to the United States. If that is established, then Germany and its EU partners would have both the moral and legal duty of standing up to the United States to the point of militarily defending Iraq as a victim of aggression militarily. After all, this was the same principle under which the UN rushed to the defense of Kuwait against Iraqi invasion and occupation in 1990-91.
That, of course, is unlikely to happen. Schroeder belongs to a well-established European political tradition of not taking sides for as long as possible.
Under that tradition, politics consists of making a tasteless soup in which everything is mixed with everything else. This is a politics of choice avoidance in which you have a bit of this and a bit of that and their exact opposites. It is a politics of moral equivalence under which the US and the Soviet Union were regarded as "equally reprehensible" during the Cold War.
This politics of cowardice, however, could have dangerous consequences. It could send the wrong signals to Saddam Hussein, persuading him that all the talk about the Security Council and so on may provide him with an opportunity to wiggle his way out of his obligations under the terms of the cease-fire. He may make him forget that Iraq is still in a state of war with the 57-nation coalition led by the US. There has been no peace treaty, only a cease-fire accord that, if violated, could become null and void.
All the reference to the Security Council may, in the end, prove to be nothing but a trap for Saddam Hussein. This is because none of the members of the council, not even France and Russia that specialize in making pro-Iraq noises, will be prepared to veto an American resolution simply to please Saddam, especially when the Iraqi dictator refuses to meet the minimum of his obligations under the terms of resolutions passed by the council itself.
Schroeder would win our respect if he were to come out and say unequivocally that in this particular moment he takes the side of Saddam Hussein against George W Bush, and that invading Iraq in order to change its regime is both immoral and illegal.
Schroeder knows that he cannot take such a position. He knows that he can never be sure whether or not Saddam Hussein is the threat that the Americans pretend he is. In other words, Schroeder will have many doubts. That is perfectly understandable. But when it comes to politics you must make a choice: and when in doubt it is always wiser to choose your friend. After all that is what friends are for. No?
