Things I Know I Know

...because the people and what they think don't seem to matter much right now.

But Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has a post about how we got where we are with respect to the UN and Iraq and war. Maybe, he says, we all thought we were talking about different things:

France, Russia and most of the rest of the countries on the Security Council thought they were signing on to a juiced-up version of inspections, basically like what we had until the old system broke down in 1998. That would mean a relatively open-ended process in which inspectors went into Iraq and searched around at will. If they found stuff it would be destroyed. If they obstructed the inspections, then the UN might sanction forcing the issue by authorizing an attack.

You might say that this is a lily-livered approach, or bad policy. But I think it's clearly what they thought were signing on to.

We, and perhaps also the Brits (but I have my doubts), had a very different idea. Our idea is (and possibly was then too) that Saddam had to make the positive decision to come forward and hand over what we accused him of having or that was it.

The problem is, it's not what we said:

The problem for the United States is that we pretty clearly went on the record validating this other interpretation. Here's what America's UN Representative John Negroponte said at the UN on the day the resolution passed ...

There's no 'automaticity' and this is a two-stage process, and in that regard we have met the principal concerns that have been expressed for the resolution. Whatever violation there is, or is judged to exist, will be dealt with in the council, and the council will have an opportunity to consider the matter before any other action is taken.

What he was saying there was that 1441 was not self-enforcing. Its language and what counted as an infraction was to be decided by the Security Council. This was the price we paid for getting for getting the unanimous vote.
What this means pretty clearly is that we cannot claim that Resolution 1441 gives us any basis for doing what we're about to do. The White House has sort of had it both ways on this -- on the one hand saying we're bagging the UN process and on the other saying 1441 gives us sanction. Clearly, it doesn't give us sanction since at the very least the expressed understanding of 1441 at the time was that only the Security Council could judge when 1441 had been be violated.

Brad DeLong says this:

To tell your allies that your word as a nation is not good--that agreements won't mean what you said they meant if you find it convenient to pretend otherwise--is extremely dangerous. It changes international relations from a search for mutual benefit into a struggle for power, and may have very bad implications for the long run.

It's this kind of thing that bothers me the most. There's so much lying going on. And the people who want war anyway seem determined to ignore it. To them, it doesn't seem to matter why we're going to war, whether our reasons are good, whether we have reasons that make sense to anyone who was raised on US history and the Constitution. What matters is that there be war. And that's not the way we were raised. It's not what we were taught. And it's not only confusing (if there are good reasons, lay them out for me without lying, without yelling and without calling names), it's disheartening.