Better Late than Never

"IS U.S. PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH, THE FATHER OF THE NEW INTERNATIONALISM?" by JEFFREY LAURENTI: 10/8/2007 (MaximsNews.com, U.N.)

"Is U.S. President George Bush now ushering in a new wave of multilateralism? Who woulda thunk it? Yet the evidence is accumulating that the American public, the Washington policy elites more reluctantly, and the Bush administration itself—most reluctantly of all—are rediscovering the indispensability of the global frameworks pioneered by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. President Bush, of course, had famously consigned the United Nations to irrelevance when its members refused to authorize his war against Iraq. He adamantly barred the United Nations from leading Iraq’s reconstruction after the triumph of American arms.

Yet this week the United States has asked the Security Council to approve a major new U.N. presence in Baghdad to help untie Iraq’s political knots and pull the country back from the abyss.

The president had much earlier come around to embrace the United Nations’ unique responsibility for dealing with Darfur."

Comment: But it would have been better still if the Bush administration had seen the value in the United Nations in 2001! JAD