Letter to America

The tragedy of 9/11 inflicted on the American body politic a pain that will not ease and aroused an anger not easily appeased. The world grieved with America, understood its pain, shared its anger and generally supported the ensuing "war on terrorism." The sympathy and goodwill is in danger of being dissipated. Outsiders had hoped that the tragedy of 9/11 would lead America to rediscover the virtues of multilateralism. The opposite happened instead: Washington felt liberated from the need to make any concessions to multilateralism.

This produced a mini-crisis last July with regard to the International Criminal Court. The tension and contradiction between unilateralism and multilateralism have come to a head again over Iraq. The Bush address to the General Assembly in September was less an American concession to UN multilateralism than a demand for international capitulation in the face of the US threat to go to war.

This is justified by the charge of Iraq's pursuit of nuclear weapons. How do we justify the paradox of the state with the most powerful arsenal of one type of WMD (nuclear weapons) threatening to use force to stop others from acquiring any one of the three types of WMD?

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