GUARDIANS OF CONSCIENCE

February 15, 2003 - A grim faced Colin Powell told the United States Security Council, “We are facing a difficult situation. More inspectors — sorry, it's not the answer,” He was reacting to the remarks of Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin of France who declared, “"In this temple of the United Nations, we are the guardians of an ideal, the guardians of conscience. This onerous responsibility and immense honor we have must lead us to give priority to disarmament through peace." General Powell’s exasperated retort unintentionally implicitly posed the question that the Bush Administration has not got the courage to answer without euphemism. If the answer is not disarmament through peace then what, exactly, is the answer? The world knows the answer to General Powell’s unanswered question; or at least the answer that George W. Bush and the aged armchair warriors of his administration are obsessed on providing no matter what the facts on Iraqi ground prove to be.

The Bush Administration answer which General Powell was detailed to bring back from the United Nations is as well known on the American street as it is in the chambers of power in Paris and Berlin; Moscow and Beijing. In the first 48 hours 800 cruise missiles and 3000 smart bombs will fall on the 5 million men, women and children of the Iraqi capitol. In the words of one administration spokesman, “There won’t be a safe place in Baghdad.” What is the justification for this act of mass destruction the Bush administration proposes to commit? Regime change? Iraqi disarmament? How does the conscience of a compassionate conservative answer that question? How does a conservative of conscience justify the death of an Iraqi shopkeeper, a child waiting to go to school, worshipers prostrated in prayer to their God? Surely it is not the demand that the death of 3000 from 60 of the world’s nations be paid by the blood of 5 million who had nothing at all to do with that heinous crime? Must terror be repaid by terrorizing the innocent?

Then there is the conundrum posed by the disconnect between the words declaimed by the Bush Administration to justify their war and their actions in preparing to wage it. They claim that the war is justified by their certain knowledge that Iraq is in possession of chemical, biological and radiological weapons of mass destruction. They have assured that Iraq and the world understands that war is a certainty and only the timetable is as yet undecided. Yet America and Britain have concentrated the young men and women who are expected to fight this war within easy range of those very weapons while their rhetoric raises the rationale for the Iraqis to act in their own preemptive defense.

There are Guardians of Conscience left in the world. The question is whether the Bush Administration will defy them and make of our country a pariah among nations.