THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO ARRIVES

Editorial de "The New York Times" del 6-3-03

With yesterday's barely veiled French and Russian threat to veto a war resolution, the United Nations Security Council appears to be rapidly approaching a crippling deadlock over Iraq. That would be the worst of all possible outcomes. It would lift the diplomatic pressure on Iraq to disarm and sever the few remaining restraints that have kept the Bush administration from going to war with its motley ad hoc coalition of allies.

The rupture in the Security Council is not just another bump in the road in the showdown with Iraq. It could lead to a serious, possibly fatal, breakdown in the system of collective security that was fashioned in the waning days of World War II, a system that finally seemed to be reaching its potential in the years since the end of the cold war. Whatever comes of the conflict with Iraq, the world will have lost before any fighting begins if the Security Council is ruined as a mechanism for unified international action.

The first casualty is likely to be the effort to use coercive diplomacy to disarm Iraq. The unity of the Security Council last November in backing Resolution 1441 without a dissenting vote, combined with the movement of American forces to the Persian Gulf region, changed the equation with Iraq. Though Saddam Hussein is far from full disarmament, he has given ground in recent months by permitting the return of arms inspectors after a four-year absence and, more recently, by beginning to destroy illegal missiles. With more time and an escalation of pressure, Mr. Hussein might yet buckle.

Given that, it is not surprising that the French and Russians are opposed to a resolution that the United States would certainly take as permission to launch an immediate attack. But the French helped create the current either-or standoff with their intransigence earlier on. After uniting with other nations behind Resolution 1441, the French sank into a position of intransigent opposition that made the current impasse almost inevitable.

With the loss of unity, the hawks in Washington will now be pushing hard to bypass further discussion at the Security Council and move directly to combat. Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will see the impasse as a vindication of their arguments last summer that working with the U.N. would lead only to a diplomatic stalemate and further delay in disarming Iraq.

We see it differently. The French and the Russians are not the only ones who brought us to this point. Mr. Bush and his team laid the groundwork for this mess with their arrogant handling of other nations and dismissive attitude toward international accords. Though they mended their ways to some extent after Sept. 11, and initially tried to work through the Security Council on Iraq, the White House's obvious intention to go to war undermined that effort.

There may be a few days more for diplomacy to play out on Iraq, but it is already clear that the great powers on the Security Council, particularly the United States and France, have brought the United Nations to the brink of just the kind of paralysis and powerlessness that they warned would be so damaging to the world.