Diplomacy: His Lonely March

The most solemn moments for an army preparing to wage war come right before it begins. For weeks now, the 250,000 soldiers positioned on Iraq's borders have been winding down their rehearsals, armed and ready to invade, waiting only for President Bush to declare that the diplomatic clock has run out. It appears they won't be waiting much longer. At the White House last Thursday night, Bush looked and sounded like a Commander in Chief who has already made up his mind. "It makes no sense to allow this issue to continue on and on," he said, surely signaling the start of the final march toward war. The next day, at a meeting of the U.N. Security Council, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw introduced an amendment to last month's U.S.-British resolution--the measure declaring that Iraq had missed its last chance to disarm--that appoints an hour for the Iraqi leader's reckoning. The amended resolution would give Saddam until March 17 to comply with the entire 12-year panoply of Security Council resolutions against him, which would require that he hand over any banned weapons he possesses and provide a full accounting for the ones he claims he has destroyed. Unless Saddam meets those demands by the deadline, U.S. and British forces will, within days of the 17th, invade Iraq. In other words, only a miracle--a complete change of heart, a coup, a journey to exile--can stop a war now.

So war it shall be, even though the U.S. still doesn't know who will be on its side. Administration officials ended last week planning to force a vote on the second U.N. resolution, even without commitments of votes from nine of the 15 Security Council members, the number needed for the second resolution to pass. France and Russia have the authority to veto, and both vowed to "block" the Security Council from sanctioning the use of force, even if the U.S. lines up the votes needed to approve it. Administration officials are betting that neither country would risk such an outright challenge to American will, knowing that the U.S. will go ahead with an invasion anyway. But even if a second resolution squeaks through, the cause of multilateral unity will have been badly tarnished. In the minds of many U.S. officials, the failure of the U.N. to agree on an approach for dealing with Iraq has compromised its relevance as a body the U.S. can turn to for help in fighting security threats. The fact that the U.S. has been forced to scramble for the barest of majorities in the Security Council while still courting the danger of a veto has also been a sobering lesson in the limits of American power. No matter how the vote turns out, the Administration's push for war and its failure to satisfy the world's objections to it mean that American troops are about to fight, and die, in a war that major U.S. allies do not endorse.