Bush and the UN.

According to public perception, President George W. Bush is a unilateralist who will not allow the United Nations to compromise our national sovereignty. If he determines that we must go to war to defend our best interests, then we will go to war, regardless of what the UN or any foreign nation thinks. Senator John Kerry, by contrast, is perceived as an internationalist who wants the U.S. to conform to the collective dictates of the world community through the UN.

But the reality is very different from the perception--at least so far as George W. Bush is concerned. In truth, both Bush and Kerry support UN empowerment. Moreover, Bush's Iraq policy, to the extent that it is viewed as a failure, is actually eroding public support for his supposed go-it-alone foreign policy while strengthening support for Kerry's internationalist agenda.

When President Bush criticizes the UN for failing to enforce its resolutions and risking irrelevancy, he is not saying that the UN role should be diminished, but that it should be expanded. Consider these questions he posed in his September 12, 2002 address to the UN General Assembly regarding Security Council resolutions requiting Iraq to disarm: "Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" The president did not answer these questions by saying that the UN should become irrelevant, or that its resolutions should be ignored. Sounding every bit as liberal as Kerry, the supposedly conservative Bush said: "We want the United Nations to be effective, and respectful, and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced."

In fact, Mr. Bush so strongly favored enforcing UN resolutions that he said he would commit U.S. troops for that purpose. On November 8, 2002, the day the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1441 calling for Iraq to disarm per earlier Security Council resolutions, President Bush stated: "America will be making only one determination: is Iraq meeting the terms of the Security Council resolution or not? ... If Iraq fails to fully comply, the United States and other nations will disarm Saddam Hussein."

When the president determined that Saddam Hussein did not meet the Security Council's terms, he decided to send our troops into yet another foreign war as part of a "coalition of the willing." As Mr. Bush explained much later, in last January's State of the Union address: "[C]ombat forces of the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Poland and other countries enforced the demands of the United Nations...." As we all know, U.S. forces were sent in without an explicit go-ahead from the Security Council, but this supposed unilateralism did not make President Bush anti-UN; it did indicate that he was more determined than the UN Security Council to enforce UN demands.

However, reality aside, the public perception was (and still is) that Mr. Bush had acted unilaterally mid had little use for the UN. To liberals he is a "cowboy" who risked world peace by acting outside the UN. To conservatives he is a courageous patriot who refused to allow our national security to be jeopardized by UN obstructionism. Moreover, both liberals and conservatives believed that the president's supposed unilateral action undermined UN relevancy--their only difference of opinion being whether or not that was a good thing.

Yet, ironically, the way in which our Iraq policy has progressed has actually made the UN more relevant. Because our Iraq policy is perceived as unilateralist, its unraveling--from the growing cost in lives and treasure to failure to find weapons of mass destruction--is being blamed on American unilateralism. And the alternative being offered is UN multilateralism.

Already the supposedly ostracized UN is being offered a major role in Iraqi nation-building. The U.S., on the other hand, will have to learn the hard lesson of what can go wrong when we try to "go it alone" as opposed to working together with all other responsible members of the global community through the UN. Or so the internationalists will say.

The Iraq quagmire could conceivably cause voters to dump Bush for Kerry. But should that happen, the change would be more style than substance. But what else is new? For decades, both Republican and Democrat presidents, their administrations laden with Council on Foreign Relations members, have worked to empower the UN at the cost of their own nation's sovereignty. As Mr. Bush approvingly noted in London last November 19: "Like 11 presidents before me, I believe in the international institutions and alliances that America helped to form and helps to lead." Kerry, if elected, would surely continue that shameful tradition.

But despite the Hobson's choice between Kerry and Bush, there is still realistic hope that the UN will be made irrelevant and that American soldiers will never again be sent to war to enforce UN resolutions. Fortunately, in our system of government, the president is not a king and the Congress is more powerful than the president. All legislative powers reside in Congress, and only Congress may declare war. But Congress will not restore good government--and, if necessary, rein in an out-of-control president--unless enough Americans apply informed pressure on Congress to do just that.