War in the Ruins of Diplomacy

The morning after US President George W. Bush issued an ultimatum for Saddam Hussein and his family to leave Iraq or face war, this editorial in The New York Times argues that the Bush administration has brought the US to the brink of war with Iraq by its own failings. It says that the US "now stands at a decisive turning point, not just in regard to the Iraq crisis, but in how it means to define its role in the post-cold-war world. President Bush's father and then Bill Clinton worked hard to infuse that role with America's traditions of idealism, internationalism and multilateralism. Under George W. Bush, however, Washington has charted a very different course. Allies have been devalued and military force overvalued." Ultimately, the editorial concludes, the White House must shoulder the blame for taking the US to war at this time, a result of the Bush administration's "shifting goals and rationales, its increasingly arbitrary timetables, its distaste for diplomatic give and take, its public arm-twisting and its failure to convince most of the world of any imminent danger." – YaleGlobal