After president's U.N. speech, there's need for compromise

If President Bush's address Tuesday to the United Nations was meant to be the last word in formulating a global response to the reconstruction of Iraq, the United States is in for a long, lonely haul.
The speech generally played well to U.S. audiences, but the diplomats from every continent sitting in front of the president were obviously less than enthralled.
The last time President Bush spoke to the assemblage, he attempted to make the case for invading Iraq, hinging the argument on the danger Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction posed to the rest of the world. There was no talk Tuesday of such weapons, which have not be found.
Instead, the president appealed for international support of an orderly transition to a democratic government in Iraq, unquestionably a noble goal. Unspoken was the president's hope for as many as 15,000 peacekeeping troops assigned to Iraq by United Nations members and commitments of billions of dollars in aid in rebuilding Iraq.
Carrying the load
Even if the president were to get such commitments -- which is highly unlikely -- the United States would still be carrying the bulk of the load, with some 130,0000 troops now in Iraq, projected call-ups of thousands of additional reserve soldiers and a two year commitment of $150 billion in U.S. money to rebuild Iraq and continue the war against terrorism in Afghanistan.
The president's problem is that he never acknowledged in his address to the United Nations that the United States may have been wrong to invade Iraq over the objections of a strong majority of that body. Instead, he justified the invasion on its favorable result, the removal of Saddam Hussein, a man who was unquestionably an evil tyrant.
It should come as no surprise, that other nations are uncomfortable with the United States taking a position that it can unilaterally invade countries that have leaders who fit the U.S. definition of tyrants or threats to peace.
Break with tradition
Frankly, it should be unsettling, as well, to the American people that this administration has adopted a policy of pre-emptive strikes against other nations. As we pointed out before the invasion of Iraq, this is a nation that had to be dragged into World War I and World War II. Invading Iraq was uncharacteristic behavior for the nation and unexpected behavior from President Bush, who campaigned on a far more isolationist platform than his opponent.
We also warned that Iraq was a nation of deep religious and tribal divisions that, once Saddam Hussein was removed from office, would not be easy to govern. That turns out to be an understatement.
The American people supported the president's military action, believing that it was necessary to remove the threat of weapons of mass destruction and confident that victory would be relatively quick. They were also laboring under an assumption -- which the administration encouraged at the time -- that Saddam Hussein was implicated in the attacks on the United States of Sept. 11, 2001.
Had they been told then that there was no evidence linking Saddam to 9/11, and that hundreds of thousands of American troops would have to remain in Iraq for years at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, we doubt that support for going to war would have been as high as it was.
Nonetheless, Saddam Hussein has been toppled, Iraq has more potential today for being a democratic nation than it ever would have under Saddam, and the United Nations, especially members of the Security Council, would be wise to reach an accommodation with the United States for rebuilding Iraq.
Having said it more than once, France's Jacques Chirac should stifle any more impulses to say I told you so, and should recognize that working with the United States to rebuild Iraq is a far better alternative than walking away.