Winning the Battle, Losing the War

The Democratic Leadership Council shows how Bush's successive blunders are steadily eroding international support for action against Iraq. Here's a sample:

"To a remarkable extent, the President and his advisors have made American dominance, not Iraqi defiance, of the world community the key concern for many people who would never defend Saddam Hussein. This devolution has taken awhile, but the steady undermining of U.S. credibility began practically the moment George W. Bush took office, with the unilateral decisions to reject the Kyoto Protocol, the Comprehensive Test Treaty, and international criminal court jurisdiction over American citizens. It continued with the Administration's announcement of steel import quotas, which abandoned American leadership of trade liberalization efforts for transparently crass domestic political reasons.

After 9/11, the United States was the object of an enormous and almost universal wave of sympathy and solidarity from around the world. The President quickly dissipated this mood with his "Axis of Evil" speech, soon buttressed by official announcement of a new foreign policy doctrine that claims for the United States a historically unique right to choose and preemptively defuse threats to national, regional or global security.

Under pressure from Congressional Democrats and his own Secretary of State, the President changed course last fall and went to Congress for a use-of-force resolution, and to the United Nations for a resolution demanding Iraqi compliance with earlier U.N. calls for its disarmament. He got both, the former with considerable Democratic support, and the latter on a unanimous Security Council vote.

As though it regretted this multilateral step, the Administration then spent several months preparing for a military campaign and issuing belligerent statements that made it clear any U.N. authority for action against Iraq was strictly optional. Until Secretary Powell's powerful testimony to the Security Council last month, the Administration consistently made U.S. security concerns about Iraq, not Saddam's defiance of the international community, the crux of its case for war."