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STEPHEN SCHLESINGER is a MaximsNews Columnist and Senior Editor. Bio.	See also Stephen Schlesinger's U.N. HISTORY LECTURE,  VIDEO:     STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: BUSH's STRANGE U.N. RAMBLE (MaximsNews.com, U.N.)

UNITED NATIONS - / www.MaximsNews.com@ U.N./ - 04 October 2004 -- President Bush’s torturous journey over his three years in office from the implacable scold of the United Nations to earnest supplicant of that body to a spurned suitor and finally to a renewed player, continues apace. 

Just over the past five weeks, his inconsistencies are once again on display. 

On the one hand, the president acts as the enthusiastic Yale cheerleader of yore, as he did at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly on September 21^st and in the first presidential debate last week. 

On the other hand, he and his cohorts at the Republican Convention just a few weeks earlier savaged the organization as avenging angels of the hardline right-wing.

Thus last week President Bush in his debate with Senator John Kerry regaled Americans with his efforts to get the U.N. to help the U.S. in Iraq: 

“We support the U.N. effort there. They pulled out after Sergio de Mello got killed. But they’re now back in helping with elections.” 

And he told the assembled representatives from 190 nations at the U.N.’s Fall session that the world faced a time of “tremendous opportunity.” 

In a singularly upbeat manner, he asked the international community to stand by “the world’s newest democracies,” citing Iraq sovereignty and the Afghan elections next month as evidence of a new liberalization in the Muslim world. 

He promised that the U.S. government would help the United Nations apply its ideals to the “great issues of our time,” proposing, for example, a Global Peace Operations Initiative to be formed by the G-8 nations to supply 75,000 more U.N. peacekeepers around the globe as well as a Democracy Fund to help underwrite democratic development around the world. 

He urged that the member-states of the U.N. not “grow weary in our duties or waver in meeting them.”

With all of this flair and burnished rhetoric, however, Bush skimmed over his own deep-set problems with the U.N. 

He did not cite the charge he made two years ago that the U.N. would go the way of the League of Nations into “irrelevance” if it dared not support his policy on Saddam Hussein. 

He did not mention his decision thereafter to defy the Security Council by invading Iraq without the Council’s prior authorization – an act that violated international law and undermined the entire concept of “collective security” embodied in the U.N. Charter. 

He did not note that he later found no WMDs in Iraq. 

Nor did he concede to the fact that Afghanistan is today under siege by a revived Taliban or that Iraq is sliding into chaos due to a spreading and intensifying insurgency. 

Finally, he did not talk about how he chose to steer America on an unilateral path upending traditional U.S. reliance on containment and deterrence.

Even on the presidential campaign trail, though, Bush sounds cheerful about the U.N.

Oblivious to his checkered history with the body, he recently – as of Friday, September 24^th – told an audience in Bangor, Maine, concerning his Iraqi U.N. policy: 

“I gave a speech to the United Nations. 

"They looked at the same intelligence I had looked at. 

"They remembered the same history we remembered. 

"And they voted, 15 to nothing, to say to Saddam Hussein: disclose, disarm, or face serious consequences.”  

No admission passed his lips that the U.N. might have later rejected his request to invade Iraq. 

Bush never even reacted to Secretary General Kofi Annan’s recent accusation that the Iraqi war was “illegal.”

Then, of course, there is the other Bush approach. 

This emerged in all its fury at the Republican Convention at the end of August. 

There speaker after speaker vowed that the U.S. under George Bush would never seek a permission slip from the United Nations to attack another country or crush another terrorist cell. 

California Governor Arnold Schwatrzenegger drew a roar of applause with his line that “if you believe this country, not the United Nations, is the best hope for democracy, then you are a Republican.” 

George Bush himself said in his acceptance speech in an implicit rebuke to the actions of the U.N.’s Security Council over Iraq: 

“I will never relent in defending America – whatever it takes.”

Admittedly most new presidents since the U.N.’s inception have expressed some skepticism about the real value of the organization. 

A few have come into office ready to circumvent it while others have argued that it should not be taken seriously anyway as it does not display genuine leadership. 

Most, in any case, have demanded reforms at the U.N. 

Still almost every American president at some point eventually comes round to the realization that the U.N. represents one more quiver – a moral one at that – in this country’s arsenal of diplomatic weapons that can be used to rally the entire globe behind a U.S. position. 

Harry Truman found that out in the Korean War; Eisenhower in the Suez crisis; and Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

That both of America’s leading political parties have employed the U.N. for their security goals is not that surprising. 

The U.N., after all, came into being in 1945 as a result of a bipartisan coalition of Republicans and Democrats, including notable figures from both parties like Nelson Rockefeller, John Foster Dulles, Averill Harriman and Adlai Stevenson, who conceived of the assembly and fought for its establishment at the conference in San Francisco. 

The presidents of the time, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and even the Republican opponent to each of them respectively in the 1944 and 1948 presidential elections, Thomas Dewey, all backed the U.N.’s creation.

George Bush, however, may be the first president since the end of the Second World War who has demonstrated more than skepticism – but a breathtaking incoherence in his attitude toward the United Nations. 

He apparently has come to believe that he can both solicit the U.N. and bash it at the same time – and that this pays off for him well politically. 

But his approach actually threatens to undermine the organization in the eyes of the American public. 

It has already fueled the U.N.--phobia that even now darkens the discussion of the U.N. during the presidential election. 

Though hardly the first candidate to have employed the U.N. as a foil as well as a crutch -- Bob Dole did one thing as Senate Majority Leader and another in his 1996 race against Clinton where he deliberately mispronounced then U.N. Secretary-General Boutrous Boutrous Ghali’s name -- Bush is surely the first candidate who has played the U.N. card both as a virtue and a vice and pretended that there are no contradictions in his game. 

Labels: United Nations, U.N., 

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