Technicality of Mass Distraction -

Josh "Joshua Micah" Marsall is spinning the Dean "Screw the UN" letter.

Those who think the media and the left give Dean a walk on this issue because they're reflexively anti-Bush are wrong, says Marshall. Oh, no, not even close to Anti-American, nossir:

It's because the US has begun playing by very different rules in the last three years. It has moved from being a dominant power which most often works through a sort of informal consensus to one that increasingly seeks to act through dictation.

Josh - or shall I call you "Joshua Micah"? - you're splitting enough hairs to make the blond guy on "Queer Eye" jealous.

The difference between USA '98 and USA '03 isn't the lack of "informal consensus" - we had 30-plus nations on our side before we went into Iraq, and many more now that we've won it.

The difference is the venue - and, more important, the lack of acquiescence from France, Germany and Russia, nations with vested interests in keeping Hussein in power.

We've become impatient with the minimal restraints on our power created by our participation in various international institutions and agreements -- ones which actually serve to magnify our power.

So impatient were we, we left an ary sitting in the desert for four extra months while we "impatiently" "dictated" to the UN that we wanted a resolution that we never got.

In short, the issue is not so much whether you get sign off from the UN or NATO on every particular thing you do. It's a question of the totality of one's approach to allies and the rest of the nation's of the world. By that measure, the whole situation in the Balkans and the current one in Iraq could scarcely be more different.

Right. Because in the Balkans, the Germans and Russians didn't know where Milosevic had buried the bodies.

Actually, Josh has a small point - the situations were very different. Iraq was a vital national interest. Serbia was not.

This is a big issue and one that deserves more discussion. It's also worth noting that getting our key European allies on board in the Balkans did play a big role in the long-term success of those operations -- and the diplomatic isolation which eventually played a key role in Milosevic's fall.

As it should have! Kosovo was, and should have been, a European concern!

And perhaps Dean has himself made too much of a fetish out of the word 'unilateralism' without fleshing out the critique more fully. But basically this issue with Dean and 'unilateral' action in Bosnia just strikes me as more silly word-game gotcha. Nothing more than that.

That Dean was "gotcha'd" doesn't make it silly.

And it is more than that. Dean and his supporters will "dictate" (Marshall's word) to the UN when it suits them - but when a Republican president, after months of begging the UN to the detriment of US interests, acts without the approval of the UN on a matter of direct importance to the nation, they'll...well, look for silly word-game gotchas.

Like Marshall's post.

Posted by Mitch at January 15, 2004 07:21 AM