Volume 50, Number 6 · April 10, 2003
Americans Abroad
By Michael Ignatieff
Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World after September 11
by Thomas L. Friedman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 383 pp., $26.00
Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World
by Jedediah Purdy
Knopf, 337 pp., $24.00
The debate on the war with Iraq has become a global referendum on American power. The Bush administration wanted to call the attention of the world to the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein's defiance of UN resolutions only to discover that the world was far more worried about the dangers posed by American use of force. The US threat to use force made inspections work in the first place, but now that inspections are finally yielding tangible results, most of the Security Council wants them to continue. Peaceful disarmament of the regime is only possible if a credible threat of force remains in place. But since the French, Russians, Germans, and Chinese are reluctant to authorize force, Saddam may believe that he can cheat even more intrusive inspections and get away with it. Unless, that is, he is certain the Americans and British would act unilaterally, without UN approval. So if they genuinely want disarmament and not regime change, there may be some logic in the American and British threat to use force unilaterally, since this is the threat that makes inspections work. But that logic has not won over the Council or the world. Nobody but the British and American governments think it is worth going to war over this issue, either now or in the future. The great coalition created by September 11 has collapsed.
Review, 3048 words
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