Bush's bait-and-switch. (Insider Report).

"Before getting elected ... George W. Bush's team said it would pursue a unilateral foreign policy," noted British attorney Jon Holbrook in the February 25th edition of the on-line journal Spiked Politics. "But once it was elected, the Bush presidency found it difficult to put this go-it-alone Americanism into practice." Critics of the Bush administration's supposed unilateralist tendencies underestimate "Bush's newfound enthusiasm for the international community," contends Holbrook.

Indeed, "Bush's willingness to walk the UN route is in stark contrast to the approach adopted by previous U.S. presidents," Holbrook continues. "During the Cold War, it would have been unthinkable that America would have found it necessary to obtain UN authority for its many military interventions.... Today, America and the Western world face no power that is remotely comparable to that of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. Saddam's Iraq has as much in common with Krushchev's Soviet Union as a sand dune has with a mountain. Yet the Bush administration, week after week, humbles itself by seeking UN authorization for military action against Iraq."

Holbrook asserts, "By putting UN authorization to the fore of their campaign against Iraq, the US and UK governments are highlighting an important shift in international relations" -- specifically, a shift away from the "law of nations," as alluded to in the Constitution, to the concept of UN-dominated "international law."

"In the early days of international relations, writers like St. Augustine and Grotius developed the idea that the use of force by states was governed by the Just War doctrine," Holbrook observes. While it is often difficult to decide when a war is just, "a coalition from Bush and Blair through to many in the peace movement has come up with a simple solution: A war is just if the UN Security Council says so."