THE outrageous double standard the “world community” applies to Iraq just reached a new height of hypocrisy.
In a statement worthy of the French diplomat he apparently aspires to become, World Bank President James Wolfensohn concluded his meeting with the Iraqi Governing Council with the disdainful remark that “a constitution and an elected government would constitute a recognized government, but what do we do in the meantime?”
Whoaaa there, Daddy Warbucks! Hold the sauterne and the foie gras!
I don’t recall that Saddam’s regime was elected. Or that it governed by a constitution. Yet that terror-state was recognized as legitimate by the world’s diplomats and international bankers. Every slithering, interest-bearing one of them.
And now Iraq’s interim Governing Council doesn’t deserve the level of recognition accorded Saddam Hussein?
Saddam seized power in a coup, slaughtered his opponents, started successive wars of aggression, pursued weapons of mass destruction and never held a single honest election. But he was just fine with foreign ministries, the United Nations and world financial institutions.
Yet Iraq’s representative Governing Council lacks legitimacy as it seeks to build democracy? And Iraq doesn’t qualify for reconstruction loans?
This is a double standard of such a disgraceful magnitude that the only appropriate adjective is “European.”
Has Wolfensohn been smoking Gauloises?
How on earth have we reached the point where Saddam’s murderous regime was defended as legitimate and sovereign by so many governments, exciting the Europeans to their greatest outlay of energy since 1940 as they attempted to prevent America and Britain from infringing on Saddam’s right to butcher his own people?
I’ll tell you how: The one shining truth (well, tarnished, actually) that I learned working in Washington and visiting foreign capitals was simply this: Nobody stops to think.
Sounds incredible. But it’s true. As Wolfensohn just demonstrated.
Nowhere is the power of “traditional wisdom” so great as among diplomats and their familiars in international institutions. They just accept that the way things have been done in the past is the way they should be done in the future.
Tyrants are fine, but deposing tyrants is bad. Police states are acceptable, as long as they honor their contracts, but recognition of the popular will is beneath discussion. Human rights matter, of course, but only if Americans can be blamed for violating them. Middle Eastern dictators are simply expressing their native culture when they torture, rape and massacre.
Part of this nonsense is lingering elitism, the conviction that well-educated, “informed” diplomats are meant to run the world on behalf of we poor fools who work for a living and never got a grad degree from Harvard. But an even greater negative force is the vicious European legacy of inaction and non-intervention in the affairs of “sovereign states,” no matter how awfully they’re ruled.
The Europeans watched indifferently as Hitler rose among them. They curried Stalin’s favor. They looked away from Auschwitz and the Gulag, from Russian tanks in Budapest and Prague, and from the thousands of Bosnian Muslims that Dutch troops handed over to Serb executioners at Srebrenica.
President Bush took an enormous step forward when he broke with Old Europe and did the right thing in Iraq. He deposed a bloody dictator, freeing 25 million people. The Eurotrash in Brussels will never forgive him.
But neither should we forgive Europeans for their centuries of deadly diplomatic sins. We cannot allow their prejudices to creep back into our policies. We must continue to lead, to cast off Europe’s insidious, paralyzing legacies. We must never again succumb to a diplomatic system that gave the globe so many dysfunctional borders, phony laws, corrupt practices and ready excuses.
We must insist that Iraq’s Governing Council is, for now, the legitimate voice of the Iraqi people. No bargaining. No consultations. Let Europe drown its sorrows in a sea of unsold Bordeaux.
And whenever we hear such utter nonsense from anyone as we heard this week from the thoughtless James Wolfensohn, we need to publicly expose the hypocrisy of all those diplomats and fellow travelers who roam the globe so comfortably, touring the world’s miseries in bespoke suits and executive jets, sipping bottled water over the dying.
If our own feckless diplomats hope to regain any stature, within our government or abroad, they should begin by pointing out the indecency of a global system that recognizes the regime of a Saddam (or Bashar Assad, or Kim Jong Il or the Saudi royal family) as legitimate, while denying recognition to people struggling to rebuild in the wake of decades of diplomatically sanctioned tyranny.
Our president needs to finish what we have begun, no matter the burden we ourselves must bear. We’re Americans. We can handle it.
And Wolfensohn needs to think before he speaks again.
Retired Army officer Ralph Peters is the author of “Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World.”
