The UN has failed. Let's try the UN.

Timothy Garton Ash makes some good points and some serious errors regarding the nuclear showdown with Iran in an editorial in The Guardian. His best point he makes with the first line, but not quite in the sense one might hope at first. He asks: "So who are the cheese-eating surrender monkeys now?" He goes on....

Jacques Chirac of France says rogue states fit the French doctrine for a response using its nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, the Bush administration goes softly-softly on an Iranian revolutionary regime that is setting out to go nuclear. So now it seems that it's the French who are from Mars and the Americans who are from Venus. What a difference four years make. Four years and a bloody nose in Iraq.

But before you whip out the binoculars for a rare sighting of the endangered Bold European Hawk, keep reading. Ash's idea of decisive action lives up only to --er -- being an idea. (And not a new one at that.)

You quickly get the feeling that something might be awry when, in his very next paragraph, he says that Bush once "arbitrarily hitched together Iraq, Iran and North Korea in an 'axis of evil'." Arbitrary? When someone immediately confesses such myopia in the current war shortly after slamming Bush, the hoped-for "don't go wobbly" speech has already morphed into a "Bush is wobbly, so let's encourage him" attack on our war effort from the left.

Before he tries to sell his snake oil, though, Ash has some news our leaders ought to take seriously: Israel might not do our dirty work for us. In a way, I'm glad he makes this point since we shouldn't permit our national security to depend upon another state anyway.

Israel has few planes capable of operating effectively at that distance. There are so many possible sites where the mullahs might be hiding their nuclear kit. After the first few strikes you would have lost any element of surprise. Thereafter you would have to take out Iranian air defences before continuing the bombing - a major undertaking. And Iran could retaliate, not least by encouraging Hizbullah to carry out terrorist reprisals against Israel. Since Israeli commanders say what they really fear most from Iran is not the Tehran government possessing a nuclear bomb (they have their own to deter it with) but the unleashing of Hizbullah, these strikes could produce precisely the effect they were intended to avoid.

Ash intends to cause America to consider his prescription with this warning. But even he admits that the United States would have a better chance of success than Israel anyway, even if he couches such success in pessimistic terms, just like leftists did before we invaded Afghanistan. And Iraq.

Before I go on, let me point out that Hezbollah is a ticking time bomb. It will go off sooner or later and Israel is only fooling itself if it decides to walk on eggshells to avoid setting it off.

Ash makes a similar warning against American military action.

However, that technical success would come at a huge price. Given the wide distribution of potential nuclear sites, far beyond the well-known ones at Isfahan and Natanz, it's almost certain there would be collateral damage: in plain English, the killing of innocent civilians. This would produce a wave of patriotic solidarity with the theocratic regime in Iran, even among those young Iranians who are fiercely critical of the mullahs, and another tidal wave of reaction around the world, especially among Muslims. Small wonder that Washington is not keen on it.

Innocent civilians? What? The ones not working to undermine the regime over there? And if our taking out of nuclear sites causes them to feel "a wave of patriotic solidarity with the theocratic regime in Iran", then they really aren't so innocent, are they? In any case, their leaders, in forcing us to bomb their country, are the ones who deserve the blame, not America.

Warnings against the killing of innocents and the "threat" of inflaming the Moslems. This is the same old song and dance we were hearing before Afghanistan. And Iraq.

Only this time, there is a twist. A United Nations official has admitted that his own agency is unable to handle the problem our Bold European Hawk wants to delegate to it!

The head of the IAEA, the Nobel peace-prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, said in Davos: " The present system for preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons is at an end, is bankrupt." The nuclear non-proliferation treaty is not adequate to the task and is often honoured only in the breach. The most telling charge against established nuclear powers such as the US and Britain is that of double standards: why is there one rule for you and another for the rest? More acutely still: why is there one rule for Iran but quite another for Israel and India? To say "Oh, that's because they are responsible democracies" raises the question, "Who decides which states are responsible democracies?" And anyway, Pakistan isn't. [bold added]

And so we see that no sooner than the UN admits it cannot stop nuclear proliferation, Ash takes up the role of apologist. He sees the whole problem as "double standards"! And Ash gets even more incredible. He might as well say, "The UN is bankrupt. Invest in the UN."

So whatever we do about Iran, what we need is a new international system for the supervision and inspection of nuclear capacities in every country in the world. It should be explicit, consistent and administered by the nearest thing we have to a world arbiter, the United Nations. In order for it to be credible, established nuclear powers such as Britain and the US will have to submit themselves to the same regime of supervision and inspection as everyone else.

So there you have it. The problem with the IAEA isn't really that Iran is flouting it, but that the United States and Britain are not undergoing the very inspections that Iran is refusing to allow! So once again, when we should be moving militarily against an Islamist enemy, we get the leftist anti-war trifecta: "innocents" will die, we will "inflame" the Moslems, and it's all America's fault anyway.

What is Iran's role in all this? Apparently, according to Ash, it's the innocent victim! Otherwise, shouldn't Ash be calling for Iran to submit to inspections, rather than the United States and Britain?

Diplomacy fails as a panacea in general (and the United Nations in particular) precisely because some nations are more "responsible" (read: civilized) than others. Only civilized countries can be expected to honor treaties and other obligations. The problem is not a double standard, but the abandonment of standards. Wars occur because at least one side does not accept civilized standards of behavior. Evading the fact that some countries are uncivilized is to open up the civilized countries to their betrayals. This is what we have seen time and time again at the United Nations, and this is why we should leave it. The problem of war, which the UN was supposed to solve, isn't caused by countries like the United Staes and Britain, but by countries like Iran and Iraq.

The only way to guarantee a safe world is for the civilized countries to be so overwhelmingly powerful -- and willing to use that power at times like this -- that rogue states like Iran will not dare to cross them. This is precisely the opposite effect from what Ash's proposal would achieve, which would compromise American and British military secrets while still not being honored by the likes of Iran. Pretending Iran is civilized will not make it so.

So who are the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys"? Ash is one, and thanks to Bush's timid SOTU Address, he thinks he has found a dining companion.

-- CAV