LONDON, 12 February 2003 — The international community is now so badly fractured over Iraq that it is difficult to see how it can be patched together again. Yet patched together it must be if NATO, the transAtlantic alliance and the United Nations itself are not to be broken apart.
This is the very last position that any of the participants, US President Bush, British Premier Tony Blair or French President Chirac, would have wanted at this time. There is in Chirac’s use of NATO to block American moves a sense of being driven from position to position to an extent he never really intended; just as there is in Donald Rumsfeld’s bitter denunciations of Germany and France a feeling of a US government that has underestimated the opposition to its plans among its allies and is uncertain how to cope with them.
Whatever the cause or the blame, however, the fact is that the West has been deeply divided over the question of invading Iraq, and has been shown to be so, including of course in the eyes of Saddam Hussein himself. For the first time in its history, three members of NATO — France, Germany and Belgium — have actually vetoed a proposal before the council. Turkey will still get its Patriot missiles, of course, if need be through bilateral assistance. But the symbolic importance of that vote cannot be gainsayed. Nor can the sight of a German and an American senior minister trading insults over the weekend. Germany has until now been America’s staunchest ally in Europe.
If this kind of division is repeated on Friday in the United Nations when Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, reports back to the Security Council, then the fissures of NATO will be repeated tenfold. Already politicians, including the right-wing in Washington, are talking of this being proof that NATO has become irrelevant to the modern world, an alliance to which the US need not pay regard in the future. It is only short step before the same is said about the UN.
That must not be allowed to happen. Unity is essential not just to keep the pressure on Saddam to disarm but to develop the cooperation essential for coping with the conflicts and the threats likely in the future. The first step should be for all the parties in the dispute to pull back and allow time to regroup. Hans Blix reports on Friday, and it should be possible to give further time for the inspectors to continue their work and push Saddam Hussein to the sticking point without removing the pressure upon him. A second resolution setting a new deadline, or simply the agreement on a deadline, should suffice.
The vital point is that it should be unanimous, and be seen to be so. Whether the deadline is weeks or months away has to be secondary to that. Longer term, there may well be a case for reviewing the future of NATO and the procedures of the UN Security Council. Neither would seem to be an effective means of balancing competing interests and submerging disparate sovereignties now that the Cold War is over and conflicts are no longer frozen in Cold War confrontation. But to break either institution on this particular wheel would be madness. France cannot want this, nor can the United States.
There are real differences on the two sides of the Atlantic about invading Iraq, not least among the voters, and they should not be disguised. But there is no real difference on the central issue of fighting terror and reducing the threat to world peace from states with weapons of mass destruction. On that consensus the international community needs to reform and re-establish its unity. (The Independent)