accompanied by Belgium today. Is there any doubt why Americans' Opinions of France Drop to New Low according to a recent Gallup poll. American's favorable/unfavorable rating of France has dropped 37% in the last year. Germany's rating has dropped 22 percent.

First, they're destroying the credibility of the UNSC by letting Saddam use yet another resolution as so much toilet paper. Now, they're undermining NATO. Can the EU be far behind? How many European nations have signed on in support of Bush, 18? As Andrew Sullivan wrote here:

Let me suggest a reason. Powell's fury and determination is not because he has doubts about the United Nations, but because he believes in it. He wants the body to work. He's not naive enough to believe that a body that can place Libya as the chair of a human rights commission has a moral center. And he's not stupid enough to hold that power-politics don't play a critical role in making the U.N. effective. But he does believe that the U.N. is the worst way of organizing international relations - except for all the others. He sees a real value in having world affairs channeled through a genuinely international prism. And he sees universal values - peace, human rights, disarmament, the prevention of genocide - as best enforced through collective rather than unilateral endeavors.



And that's why Powell is now pro-war. Resolution 1441 was not a resolution passed by the U.S. Congress. It was passed unanimously by the United Nations Security Council. Unanimously. After twelve years of delay, obfuscation and intermittent avoidance of the problem, the U.N. demanded immediate, active and complete cooperation by Saddam in his disarmament and threatened severe consequences if he did not. Again, that's not my interpretation. It's the simple meaning of 1441, a resolution which Powell had a vital hand in drafting. He drafted it because he believed that the U.N. is the place to resolve such disputes and ameliorate such crises.

Not a single member of the Security Council agrees that Saddam has done anything like enough to comply with the U.N.'s demands. The chief arms inspector, Hans Blix, himself has confirmed this. Powell's evidence confirms something far worse: an active attempt by Saddam's regime to foil the inspections. Not a single member of the U.N. has provided any evidence that Powell's presentation was inaccurate or false. None has openly disputed anything in it. 1441 is unequivocal about what should be done in that event.

The critical fact about the next two weeks is therefore not whether an international coalition of the U.S. and dozens of other free countries will disarm Saddam. The question is whether the United Nations can survive as a credible international institution. Powell's passion - and Blair's - is as much about rescuing the U.N. as it is about protecting Western citizens from Saddam's nerve gas, anthrax and botulism. If a U.N. unanimously-mandated war is prosecuted against the opposition of a majority of Security Council members, the institution will effectively be an oxymoron. It will be demanding that its own resolutions not be enforced. It will be a joke.

To say, as the French have said, that the response to a deliberate attempt to foil inspectors should be to send more inspectors to be foiled is absurd on its face. No one has a credible argument that doubling or tripling the number of inspectors will make the slightest difference. Finding such arms in a country the size of Iraq is like finding a contact lens in a football stadium. Without Iraqi willingness to tell us where these arms are, we might as well stay home. Moreover, to keep this farce going amounts not just to impotence, but to a flagrant attack on the U.N. itself.

1441, supported by France, put the entire onus for disarmament on Saddam not the inspectors. How can 1441 be enforced by insisting upon the opposite? The French position cannot be explained because Saddam has altered course. Even with a quarter of million allied troops breathing down his neck and a last last last chance offered him by the U.N., Saddam is still shunting mobile chemical and bio weapons factories around the country; and hoodwinking inspectors. What chance is there that if the U.N. now essentially interprets 1441 as a piece of magical realist fiction, Saddam will feel more pressure to comply? Zero. On the contrary, he will rightly take the climbdown as an incentive to maintain his current strategy of Potemkin cooperation.

Any sincere multilateralist knows this. The choice now is not between war and peace. It is between a credible 21st Century multilateralism and a return to pure Great Power unilateralism. Ironically, the British and Americans and East Europeans are the multilateralists in this instance; while the French and Germans and Chinese and Russians insist on wrecking the credibility of the U.N. To put it in terms that the Old Europeans might understand, the French and the Germans are the cowboys in international relations right now, treating U.N. resolutions as so many fictions to be dispensed with when they seem to wound national pride, or worse, might actually empower the United States.