The speech marked the culmination of the rupture with the United Nations and with two of America's closest post-war allies ? France and Germany ? that has been building for months. Mr. Bush's speech almost certainly confirmed some of the world's worst fears about George Bush's America: that when the United Nations will not bend to its will, when allies will not go along, Mr. Bush will simply break away and pull the trigger.

...

Mr. Bush's words were, in many ways, drawn straight from the days of World War II ? an era of far clearer challenges and more obvious threats. The president portrayed the Iraqi threat as one so large and so imminent that it challenges America's survival ? an argument his critics were already saying tonight was exaggerated to justify a preventive war.

...

But the rest of the world is unlikely to see the confrontation in such terms, and that will be only the first of many challenges as Mr. Bush turns the doctrine of pre-emption into a war of pre-emption.

In Europe, his message will undoubtedly play into the favorite image of Mr. Bush as gunslinging cowboy.

10:33:59 PM    

Victory in Iraq won't end the world's distrust of the United States because the Bush administration has made it clear, over and over again, that it doesn't play by the rules. Remember: this administration told Europe to take a hike on global warming, told Russia to take a hike on missile defense, told developing countries to take a hike on trade in lifesaving pharmaceuticals, told Mexico to take a hike on immigration, mortally insulted the Turks and pulled out of the International Criminal Court--all in just two years.

9:48:45 PM    

March 18, 2003

War in the Ruins of Diplomacy

America is on its way to war. President Bush has told Saddam Hussein to depart or face attack. For Mr. Hussein, getting rid of weapons of mass destruction is no longer an option. Diplomacy has been dismissed. Arms inspectors, journalists and other civilians have been advised to leave Iraq.

The country now stands at a decisive turning point, not just in regard to the Iraq crisis, but in how it means to define its role in the post-cold-war world. President Bush's father and then Bill Clinton worked hard to infuse that role with America's traditions of idealism, internationalism and multilateralism. Under George W. Bush, however, Washington has charted a very different course. Allies have been devalued and military force overvalued.

Now that logic is playing out in a war waged without the compulsion of necessity, the endorsement of the United Nations or the company of traditional allies. This page has never wavered in the belief that Mr. Hussein must be disarmed. Our problem is with the wrongheaded way this administration has gone about it.

Once the fighting begins, every American will be thinking primarily of the safety of our troops, the success of their mission and the minimization of Iraqi civilian casualties. It will not feel like the right time for complaints about how America got to this point.

Today is the right time. This war crowns a period of terrible diplomatic failure, Washington's worst in at least a generation. The Bush administration now presides over unprecedented American military might. What it risks squandering is not America's power, but an essential part of its glory.

When this administration took office just over two years ago, expectations were different. President Bush was a novice in international affairs, while his father had been a master practitioner. But the new president looked to have assembled an experienced national security team. It included Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, who had helped build the multinational coalition that fought the first Persian Gulf war. Condoleezza Rice had helped manage a peaceful end for Europe's cold war divisions. Donald Rumsfeld brought government and international experience stretching back to the Ford administration. This seasoned team was led by a man who had spoken forcefully as a presidential candidate about the need for the United States to wear its power with humility, to reach out to its allies and not be perceived as a bully.

But this did not turn out to be a team of steady veterans. The hubris and mistakes that contributed to America's current isolation began long before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. From the administration's first days, it turned away from internationalism and the concerns of its European allies by abandoning the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and withdrawing America's signature from the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court. Russia was bluntly told to accept America's withdrawal from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into the territory of the former Soviet Union. In the Middle East, Washington shortsightedly stepped backed from the worsening spiral of violence between Israel and the Palestinians, ignoring the pleas of Arab, Muslim and European countries. If other nations resist American leadership today, part of the reason lies in this unhappy history.

The Atlantic alliance is now more deeply riven than at any time since its creation more than a half-century ago. A promising new era of cooperation with a democratizing Russia has been put at risk. China, whose constructive incorporation into global affairs is crucial to the peace of this century, has been needlessly estranged. Governments across the Muslim world, whose cooperation is so vital to the war against terrorism, are now warily navigating between popular anger and American power.

The American-sponsored Security Council resolution that was withdrawn yesterday had firm support from only four of the council's 15 members and was opposed by major European powers like France, Germany and Russia. Even the few leaders who have stuck with the Bush administration, like Tony Blair of Britain and José María Aznar of Spain, have done so in the face of broad domestic opposition, which has left them and their parties politically damaged.

There is no ignoring the role of Baghdad's game of cooperation without content in this diplomatic debacle. And France, in its zest for standing up to Washington, succeeded mainly in sending all the wrong signals to Baghdad. But Washington's own destructive contributions were enormous: its shifting goals and rationales, its increasingly arbitrary timetables, its distaste for diplomatic give and take, its public arm-twisting and its failure to convince most of the world of any imminent danger.

The result is a war for a legitimate international goal against an execrable tyranny, but one fought almost alone. At a time when America most needs the world to see its actions in the best possible light, they will probably be seen in the worst. This result was neither foreordained nor inevitable.
9:08:31 PM    

Should Mr. Bush unleash the military, it would be the first major application since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of his doctrine of pre-empting threats from rogue nations and terrorist groups with access to unconventional weapons like the chemical and biological agents the United States says Iraq is hiding.

But in reaching this point, he has left behind fractured relationships with allies and partners like France, Germany and Russia, all of which wanted more time for United Nations weapons inspections.

8:46:15 PM    

The United States and Britain appear likely to lead an attack, against the will of Europe's biggest states, without the military help of Turkey, despite deep anxieties among Arab countries and fought to the sound of angry protest throughout much of the world.

...

"In retrospect, the military buildup and the diplomacy were out of sync with each other," said Richard C. Holbrooke, ambassador to the United Nations in the Clinton administration. "The policies were executed in a provocative way that alienated our friends."

3:27:50 AM