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America's power will bring its own counter-revolution
(Adrian Hamilton, The Independent, 7 March 2003)
However the frantic last rounds of diplomacy work out – a second resolution or an American invasion of Iraq without it – there are going to be a terrible lot of pieces of international relations to pick up. . . . In so far as that majority is expressing a resistance to the unilateral exercise of American power, this must have its effect on the way that multilateral organisations, especially the regional associations such as the Arab League and the European Union, develop over the coming years. . . . The Bush administration has said – and it means it – that failure to support America will result in the marginalisation of the United Nations in US eyes. But then it has to be asked whether the Security Council structure, with its inner council of nuclear-power permanent members and rotating countries without the power of veto, makes much sense in the post-Cold War world. If it doesn't support America, it is castigated as irrelevant. If it does, then it is treated by Washington as little more than a rubber stamp for its policies. . . . The UN will survive because there is no global alternative for a mass of specific problems from refugees to policies on water sharing, and because it is useful as a means of legitimising actions and picking up the pieces after the event. . . . America is the only hyperpower, but it is not a power, still less under President Bush, that wishes to run the world so much as to bestride it. . . . The Iraqi crisis has posed, with a terrible clarity, the problem of power in the world. But in putting the United States so obviously at odds with most of the rest of the globe, it may yet bring its own counter-revolution.

posted by LoZo 11:40 AM