The Homeowner’s Association
The Sainted Wife’s parents gave her a birthday party Saturday night. More about that later, I suppose. What struck me at the time was that I had no idea how old she was. I still don’t. I mean, I could work it out if I wanted to. I know when she was born, so it’s just a matter of arithmetic. It’s just not knowledge that I retain. What I keep is my head is the method by which to obtain that knowledge, when needed, and for some reason my psyche considers that to be enough. Other than Ngnat, I’m in that same situation with every single one of my relatives. I can tell you how old they are, but only after going through the requisite mental computation, and only then if I know the the year they were born.
That’s bad enough, but it gets worse. As of this moment, I don’t know exactly how old I am. Late thirties is all I can tell you without going through the computation, and I’ve so far managed to prevent that particular thought process from completing, which is a lot like trying to prevent myself from thinking about elephants when told not to.
DON’T THINK ABOUT ELEPHANTS!
See? That’s actually not a fair comparison, as picturing an pachyderm in ones mind is pretty much an automatic reaction on being told not to think of one. It’s much easier to prevent the imagination of a sequence of events involving an elephant, as if you were told not to think about an elephant turning over the jeep of a National Geographic documentary filmmaker, then beating him to death with a camera tripod before stripping his flayed corpse of its clothes, draping the bloody rags over his tusks and trumpeting in triumph.
It’s much easier to interrupt a process than a reaction, as Congress and the U.N. know all too well.
For the processes of diplomacy or politics to work, all of the involved parties have to agree to participate until the process reaches the end it is designed to produce, whether that is the disarming of Iraq or the appointment of a judicial nominee to a federal court. The problem is that it has become increasingly common for one or more of the participants to decide that the result of a particular series is unacceptable, that sand should be thrown into the gears somehow, regardless of the fact that this might hurt the saboteur himself in the long run.
The French brandishing of a possible Security Council veto on Iraq, and the Democratic filibuster on the Estrada nomination are both illustrations of such a decision. The difference between the two is that while the administration is legally bound to remain in the process with the Estrada nomination, it is not on Iraq. A violation of the rules governing the domestic political process can result in a premature loss of power. Ask Nixon, if you need an example. A violation of the accepted rules regarding the international diplomatic process just pisses people off, not that the Bush administration has done so, yet.
Despite the protests and editorials about a unilateral approach, the Bush administration has done exactly what the United Sates has done more often than not since the end of World War II, which is to seek the approval of the United Nations before acting. If we act without such approval, it will be the last step taken, not the first.
Domestically, the federal judiciary nominations process has been stymied for years, as each party takes turns doing all it can to sink the nominations of the party in power, as if the current balance of power was going to become the permanent state of affairs. When it comes to the federal judiciary, both Republicans and Democrats prefer the short term success of defeating or delaying the other’s appointees to the long range functioning of the judiciary, which is what the process is supposed to ensure. The current idea that “we have to block all of their nominees because they blocked all of ours” only erodes the power and efficiency of the judicial branch.
The Republicans and Democrats, because of this cynical manipulation of the nomination process, have taught Americans not to trust the judiciary in the least, which is why so many find it not only easy to castigate and deride the Supreme Court’s 2000 election decision, but to question the motives and loyalty of the justices themselves. *
In the end, the domestic process will go on because delaying it for too long has consequences. Even if some of them are largely theoretical, there are enough real negative consequences to keep both parties somewhat honest. There are no such consequences on as far as the U.N. is concerned, which is why no country, whether it be France or the United States, is under any real compunction to play by the rules, though they are perfectly content to point out to their domestic audiences how the other guy is subverting the will of the United Nations, either by refusing to enforce decisions(The United States on France), or by subverting their intent (France on the United States). All of that is basically rhetoric; it is much easier to gauge how much a particular country has bought into in the diplomatic process on Iraq by its actions.
What consequences there are, say for ignoring 12 year of resolutions demanding that one destroy one’s weapons of mass destruction, come about not because of France or Germany or Russia or China, but because of the United States and Britain. The U.S. is not only the U.N.’s host and main financier, but the primary enforcer, which makes the United States the guarantor of the primary international diplomatic process. The main beneficiary of this support has been the rest of the world, especially Europe, which has been at peace since the United States assumed that role. The Unites States has been the Atlas holding up the United Nations for more than 40 years. To describe the U.S. as contemptuous of that body doesn’t even rise to the level of an insult. It’s just stupid; empty rhetoric served up to the politically ignorant by the politically frustrated.
What does it say about the current state of affairs when the guarantor of the United Nations is about to abandon it as unworkable on the major question of the day? It’s not because the process is about to produce a result that the Bush Administration doesn’t care for, but because the process is supposed to disarm Iraq, and a rejection of the American/British/Spanish resolution would, if adhered to by the Bush and Blair administrations, produce exactly the opposite result. The United States is going to participate in the process until it decides the time has come to ignore the process, because doing so illumines the fact that others are bent on subverting it.
The United States would have to withdraw its troops, and within a year or two Saddam would have kicked out the weapons inspectors, again. This is not a prediction, it is a pattern. For 12 years the U.S. did little to nothing about Iraq while the U.N. passed resolution after resolution on disarmament, and Saddam ignored them. Only after the Bush administration deployed a huge number of troops did Saddam allow the inspectors access to incomplete information and a minimal number of weapons. The key words in resolution 1441 were immediate and complete disarmament, not limited and drawn out disarmament.
If the Security Council vote goes France’s way, the United Nations would have prevented the United States from carrying out the intentions of….the United Nations.
Due to the very immensity of its nature, the U.S. troop deployment is finite in nature, so if Saddam can outlast it, he can go back to subverting 1441 as soon as they are gone. That’s bad enough. but what is worse is that France, Germany, Russia and China know this as well, and are perfectly happy to bring that result about. They have clearly decided that damaging the United Nations is worth sticking a thumb in the eye of the United States. They will likely regret that decision, sooner and later.
Despite the clear intentions of the Security Council 4, the rest of the world is perfectly happy to blame the current situation on the cowboy Bush. However, while it is perfectly logical to assume most of his administration came into power viewing the UN with a jaundiced eye, there is absolutely no evidence that the United States has ever considered abandoning the process at the United Nations. The bad cop part of the good cop/bad cop routine that Powell and Rumsfeld have been playing is often cited as evidence for the Bush administration’s disregard for international norms, as is the rejection of the Kyoto protocols and withdrawal from the ABM treaty. All are false analogies.
Kyoto was an unenforceable treaty based on suspect science, and not even Clinton thought it had a prayer of ratification. The ABM treaty was a contract between the United States and a nation that no longer exists. Last time I checked, I didn’t see anyone insisting that France stand by its treaty obligations with Austria-Hungary. Rumsfeld’s routine is nothing but hard-ball diplomacy, the administration’s way of spooking other countries into dealing with Colin Powell by pretending that Rumsfeld is the next option.
In reality, as we have seen time and time again, the next option after Colin Powell is Colin Powell with a differently nuanced position. Rumsfeld’s way of the warrior is not going to be unleashed until Bush is convinced that going to the UN will bear no fruit at all, and he won’t be permanently unleashed. Powell is going to step out of the room to get coffee, Rumsfeld is going to whale on the helpless perp for about three minutes, and then Powell is going to be re-introduced. The only question is whether the deal he carries in at that point is the same one he went out with.
This will happen because the reasons the United States had for becoming the main guarantor of the international process are the same as they were back in 1945. At heart, we’re not isolationists, we’re bobos, and we see the world as a great big gated community. We have to deal with Iraq because Saddam keeps starting fires in his backyard, hoping that they’ll burn down the neighbor’s house so he can build there. The problem is, once a fire starts you don’t know what it’s going to do, and there’s a number of houses in his section of the neighborhood that, far from being up to code, are built entirely out of straw. At this level, there are no cops to call, no sheriff to come over to confiscate Saddam’s gasoline and toss him in the hoosegow for thirty days. There’s only the Homeowner’s Association.
What we wanted the UN to do when it was founded was to go around making sure that everyone mowed his lawn, kept his house up, and respected the property rights of his neighbor. What we’ve discovered is that this is not enough, that we also need to make sure that the man of the house isn’t a crazy drunk who beats on the wife and kids at the drop of a hat. Eventually those guys move on to letting the yard go, then start threatening the neighbors.
We’re beginning to realize that this is our own fault, because we let anyone one who mouthed agreement with the neighborhood covenants to join. They didn’t have to be in compliance, they just had to agree that in principle the covenant was a good thing. A country could have the international equivalent of cars up on blocks and a yard covered in kudzu, but if they said the right words they got a key to the pool and invitations to the yearly barbecue.
The United States wants the Homeowners Association make sure everyone plays by the same rules for the benefit of all. It’s a capitalist approach. Surprising, I know. What this means is that eventually the U.S. will realize what every capitalist does at one point or another. There’s no point in throwing good money after bad. Once that happens the pool is going to close, the barbecues will be no more, and nobody is going to come around with bucket and hose next time your neighbor’s bonfire starts throwing sparks at your roof.
Oh, there’ll be a another Homeowner’s Association, but it will have much more exclusive membership requirements. That way the HOA can focus on getting things done, rather than on empty and usually pointless debate.
*The Supreme Court itself has to shoulder some blame for the current state of affairs. The Roe vs Wade decision is the basis for the current state of affairs, as both sides now seek a magic number of justices to either overturn or re-affirm the decision in that case, and it will likely continue until one party decides there is a political advantage in letting the state of the country (in their view) go from bad to worse in order to re-energize their portion of the electorate. My money’s on the Democrats, as the left has already shown a predilection for something along those lines. One prominent meme of the 2000 Nader campaign was built around the idea that electing Bush in 2000 would lead to such to gains for the Greens in 2004. It’s the “things have to get worse before they can get better, because once they worse people will support us, then we’ll make things better” school of political thought.
The only other possibility I see is one where the Supreme Court Justices as a whole ask Congress to get on with it, essentially shaming the Senators into doing their job. It’s also possible that the Supremes could deploy judicial power of the court to try and force Congress to complete the process, but the situation will have to be truly grave, on the order of a Constitutional crisis, before that is even considered.
