September 30, 2002, U.S. Edition

The Lonesome Doves of Europe
By Fareed Zakaria

Two events have set the course of the Iraq crisis so far: President George W. Bush's speech to the United Nations and Iraq's letter apparently allowing the weapons inspectors back in. The third will take place on Tuesday, when Tony Blair addresses the British Parliament and releases his Iraq dossier. Washington and London have delayed all movement toward a new U.N. resolution until the speech is delivered. They believe it will create new momentum for action just as Bush's speech did two weeks ago.

Blair's speech is important because he speaks not simply as a Briton, but as a European. For many months now Europe has been asking whether the United States would handle Iraq unilaterally or through the United Nations. The ball is now in Europe's court. How will it handle Iraq?

The record is not encouraging. For the past 10 years France and Russia have turned the United Nations into a stage from which to pursue naked self-interest. They have used multilateralism as a way to further unilateral policies. The dust from the gulf war had not settled when the French government began a quiet but persistent campaign to gut the sanctions against Iraq, turn inspections into a charade and send signals to Saddam Hussein that Paris was ready to do business with him again. "Decades from now, when all the documents are available, someone is going to write an eye-opening book about France's collusion with Saddam Hussein in the 1990s," says Kenneth Pollack, who worked at the CIA and the NSC during those years.

The Russians have also been more interested in cozying up to Iraq than disarming it. There are more than 200 Russian companies in Iraq, doing deals that total at least $4 billion. Moscow has been Iraq's most dependable ally in the Security Council, routinely endorsing its objections about sanctions and inspections. It helped sabotage the most recent efforts to create "smart sanctions," which would have dropped broader economic barriers in favor of targeted ones against Saddam's regime.

Moscow also led the charge against the appointment of Rolf Ekeus as the chief weapons inspector in January 2000, a campaign that is worth recalling. After Russia and France had vetoed about 25 names, Kofi Annan decided to put forward someone whose qualifications he thought were unimpeachable. Ekeus had headed up the original inspections team to Iraq after the gulf war. In that role, he had been patient but clever, finding more Iraqi weapons programs than any expert had imagined. Russia, joined by France and China, vetoed the appointment.

And then there is Germany, which cannot even claim the rationale of national interest for its bizarre actions. Pandering to public opinion, Gerhard Schroder has broken with 50 years of tradition and publicly denounced American foreign policy. He has encouraged an atmosphere of anti-Americanism in his country, which hit its lowest note when his Justice minister compared President Bush to Hitler. Schroder is opposed to an attack on Iraq, even if the United Nations authorizes it. He must think Saddam is harmless, except that his own chief of intelligence, August Hanning, told The New Yorker last year, "It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years." Oh, well, no need to worry about it, then.

Not all of Europe's leaders are this shortsighted. Speaking to a small group of American journalists, Czech President Vaclav Havel warned against making concessions to aggressive dictators, as Britain and France did in the 1930s. "It is necessary to take action against deadly evil, even using force if that is needed," he said. "Leaving the United States alone in this might be immensely dangerous."

Dangerous for Europe more than the United States. Europe's major powers have been insistent that the United States work more often through multilateral institutions for broad goals. In the past the Bush administration has been far too reluctant to do so. But now Europe has to decide whether it truly wants multilateralism to work--or simply be a cover for politics as usual.

If France and Russia seek a world in which nations act purely on the basis of interest and power, they will get it. In it, America will do just fine. As the president's recent national-security-strategy document makes clear, it will remain the "hyperpower." But as France and Russia might have noticed, they're not very powerful anymore. They have seats on the United Nations Security Council only because they won the last great war 50 years ago. (I use the word "won" loosely when speaking of France.) Unless they act responsibly, they are now in danger of losing the next one.