Bush's triumph
Pfaff, William
WILLIAM PFAFF BUSH'S TRIUMPH It may not last long Statements by both President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell in early April made it clear that the United States does not...
...A move out of dollars by Asian or European investors would contribute to making it impossible for the Bush government to continue to run its enormous budget deficit...
...Even the Vietnam War was conceived and waged as a counter to communism's revolutionary threat to world order...
...Washington says that as the United States and Britain waged and won the war (with a little help from their Australian and Polish friends), they will also manage the peace...
...Its use of its power has never been contested by the democratic nations because they saw the United States as essentially pacific in intentions and a defender of international law and order...
...The UN, a Pentagon official says, will have no role "in constructing a democratic Iraq...
...military forces transit rights during the war, and Belgium is now expected to revoke the automatic transit rights accorded years ago to the United States in a secret treaty...
...gross national product could result...
...Unilateralism and preemptive war are said to be necessary measures to defend the United States and to establish and maintain a democratic international order, which the UN cannot or will not do...
...The same methods may be used again in the developing controversy over a UN role in Iraq and over the contribution of the international aid community to war reconstruction...
...The government of George W. Bush has made it American security policy to prevent any other nation from attempting to equal the United States in military strength...
...Thus France, Russia, Germany, Belgium, and China used diplomatic methods to isolate the United States on Iraq...
...Otherwise some kind of deal will have to be struck with the members of the self-proclaimed "peace camp" in the Security Council, and with the European Union, the principal potential international source of reconstruction aid...
...WILLIAM PFAFF BUSH'S TRIUMPH It may not last long Statements by both President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell in early April made it clear that the United States does not intend to give the United Nations a political role of any consequence in postwar Iraq...
...The United States has been the most powerful country in the world since very early in the twentieth century...
...Turkey and Austria refused U.S...
...bases and transit privileges are vulnerable in many countries...
...By renouncing America's traditional foreign policy and adopting one of global military domination, the Bush administration has made a fundamental change in the international balance...
...This confronts the United States with a problem the Bush administration is unwilling to acknowledge...
...This is unprecedented...
...It seems not to understand that this has been to its own potential disadvantage and to the American nation's future risk...
...These measures are not military but diplomatic and economic, which are more relevant, and to which Washington is more vulnerable...
...2003 Tribune Media Services International...
...The Bush administration would prefer to have the international community pay for reconstruction and have other countries' forces do the peacekeeping...
...However, postwar Iraq is not that simple...
...Pape notes that the European Union is now a more powerful economic and trading power than the United States and argues that if there were a concerted effort to require oil suppliers to bill in euros rather than dollars, this reversal would undermine the position of the dollar as a reserve currency...
...The intellectual as well as political position of the administration and its supporters is that the United States, as sole superpower, legitimately defends international order because the UN has defaulted on this responsibility, having never in the past enforced its resolutions demanding Saddam Hussein's disarmament...
...It severely restricts the occupier's right to make use of the occupied country's resources...
...It seems proud to have done so...
...It inevitably has produced a fundamental change in how other nations see the United States...
...No one is going to stop Washington from doing what it pleases in Iraq, but if it goes against international law it will have to pay and stay...
...From World War I to the Gulf War, American foreign interventions were intended to restore peace and legality...
...He says that it broke the rule "that democracies do not wage preventive wars" by doing what no other democratic state has done in the more than two hundred years of the American nation's existence...
...It has forced other democracies to rethink their own positions, causing some of them to resort to certain classic countermeasures against a government newly perceived as a potential threat...
...The Iraq intervention, a unilaterally decided preventive war, destroyed "the reputation the United States has enjoyed for so long as a benevolent power," to quote Robert A. Pape of the University of Chicago, writing in the Boston Globe...
...The Fourth Geneva Convention imposes on the military occupier full responsibility for the well-being of the civil population...
...Pape estimates that a fall of 1 percent or more in U.S...
Vol. 130 • April 2003 • No. 8
