Krauthammer Warns "One Worlders” Curb U.S. Efforts to Protect Itself

Krauthammer Warns "One Worlders” Curb U.S. Efforts to Protect Itself

Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Friday, Sept. 6, 2002

WASHINGTON – The winner of this year’s "Mightiest Pen” award has condemned "one worlders.” In fact, says Charles Krauthammer, President Bush’s "distinctive” unilateralist go-it-alone-if-necessary foreign policy in general - and with respect to Iraq in particular - is justifiable. Krauthammer, however, believes the chief executive’s two immediate predecessors have made it difficult for the commander in chief to exercise America’s "self-evident right to resist evil.”

Accepting the coveted award Thursday from the Center for Security Policy (CSP), Krauthammer warned against "easy one worldism” that eight years of the Clinton administration’s foreign policy permeated into U.S. foreign policy. But the journalist also said President Bush’s father set "a costly and dangerous precedent” in seeking United Nations approval in the effort to get Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991 BEFORE first going to the U.S. Senate.

With a top official of the present Bush administration also featured on the program, Krauthammer delivered a scathing denunciation of "liberal internationalists” who, he said, have tried to impede this nation’s ability to do what is right. The respected writer whose column appears in more than 100 newspapers across the nation, recalled that four out of five Democrats voted against giving the senior President Bush the go-ahead, and noted some of the few Democrats who did vote yes were persuaded to do so by the approval or permission of "the international community.”

"That puzzles me,” he said. "By what logic are the Chinese, Russians and the French [who sit on the U.N. Security Council] the arbiters of international morality? It was beyond me then, and it is beyond me now.”

That precedent - amplified in spades by President Clinton - has put the current President Bush in the position where he believes he needs world approval to go after Saddam Hussein, albeit with the sensible caveat that this country will act in its own interests with or without that approval, the CNP audience was reminded.

Should that in fact be a procedure in President Bush’s current crisis in Iraq?

"In principle, no. As a practical matter, yes,” Krauthammer said. "That practical policy has dominated our international thinking over the past ten years,” he complained, adding it is widely considered normal that the United States cannot act in its own interests without the green light "from this or that U.N. Security Council resolution.”

That mentality went into eclipse briefly after 9-11, but once again the rhetoric on Capitol Hill and elsewhere has revived it.

Krauthammer cited Bill Clinton - president of "the most powerful nation on earth” at one time pausing in the middle of a foreign policy speech, "stressing international approval over the best interests of the United States.”

"By what logic do we turn to Moscow or Paris rather than the American peoples’ elected members of Congress?” he wanted to know.

This is not an argument against consultation. We have "a moral obligation” to consult if in doing so, "it might assist our own purposes.” But we should do it with the understanding that protecting the safety and best interests of Americans is our number one responsibility, something which in Krauthammer’s opinion the U.S. Senate failed to do several years ago, when it ratified "that ridiculous Chemical Weapons Treaty, even though it was unenforceable.”

He cited an instance several years ago when the Swedes scolded Finland and demanded to know the reason for the latter’s refusal to go along with the Land Mines Treaty. A top Finnish official at the time replied dryly, "Because Finland is their [its critics’] land mine.”

By the same token, the United States "is much of the world’s land mine,” the award-winning columnist claimed, noting - to cite one example - that it won’t be Swedes or French on the front line if another war breaks out in Korea.

A letter from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was read to the gathering. The secretary praised Krauthammer’s wisdom in the foreign policy field.

Defense Under Secretary Dov S. Zakheim, who was present for the luncheon, praised the writer for his strong sense of "what is right and what is not.”

Zakheim allowed as how whether to subscribe to the mostly left-wing Washington Post, Krauthammer’s home paper, was "an issue” in his household, but that the columnist’s writing "justifies the subscription.”

He also drew praise from Rep. Christopher Cox, R.-Calif., best known for his chairmanship of a special congressional committee which in 1998 investigated the Chinagate scandal and its implications for U.S. security.

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