The ongoing debate over confronting Iraq on its repeated violations of United Nations resolutions is being conducted dishonestly by European champions of "multilateralism." The nations of Europe and their sycophants around the world accuse the United States of taking a "unilateral stance," of abandoning multilateral decision-making and seeking to impose its will on the world. What these critics fail to acknowledge is that the United States is doing what nation-states have always been expected to do: pursue their own policies, in their own self-interest.

The nations of Europe, the mouthpieces of multilateralism, flare indignant when the United States declares that she will not be "handcuffed" by the United Nations, in the words of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Why? Because they believe the United States, and all states, ought to be handcuffed by the United Nations. In a world which contains only one superpower — which is so much more powerful than the rest of the world that the French are inventing new terms like "hyperpower" —weaker states have no other avenue to power than through international bodies.

Such bodies as the United Nations allow enhanced influence by weak states and diminished influence by more powerful ones by demanding rightfully that all states engage one another civilly, for the common solution to international problems.

Such bodies are great things. The United Nations is a great thing. Remember, though, that the United States not only played the pivotal role in creating it, but that she entered the United Nations willingly, at a time when it was obvious that America was a power of incredible proportions. The United States' continuing participation in the United Nations is a mark of her dedication to the community of nations.

However, Europeans and other weaker states have used the United Nations to project a world order which calls for the continual weakening of great states in an effort to exert influence not only over matters of purely communal interest, but also of individual self-interest.

Read the Declaration of Independence: Legitimate nation-states exist to protect the liberties and well-being of their people. That is the primary, insoluble purpose of their existence. In matters of individual self-defense, nation-states exert their sovereign authority to act. Nation-states pursue their own policies, and when those policies are declared by legitimately elected governors and found by those legislators to be valid in their own right, they are not subject to approval by international bodies. At least, not in a community of nation-states.

Champions of multilateralism — Europeans — seek an end to the nation-state. They seek a community of dependent states — dependent on the majority of votes of a body which, while worthwhile, counts as members the likes of Syria and Iraq. The United States will not, cannot, submit its sovereign responsibility of self-preservation to this tyrannical rabble. We are a nation-state.

Padraic H. McDermott

junior

Morrissey Manor

Oct. 31

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