The mythical French veto

The letter Economist editor Clive Crook wrote to Brad DeLong makes use of a ploy that, while a familiar tactic of wingnut hacks, is particularly dismaying coming from an intelligent conservative:

He sought allies throughout for the war in Iraq, and built the biggest coalition he could. France and Germany withheld their support for the war, and undermined the effort to put pressure on Saddam Hussein, at a time when they too knew that the sanctions regime was collapsing and they too believed that Saddam had WMD.

This happens to be (in and of itself) a strong argument, which is why you hear it so often. If the Iraq war was generally supported by American allies but opposed by Germany and France, it would indeed by silly to criticize Bush for unilateralism. In my judgment, the Iraq war would not have been in the interests of the United States even so, but this particular critique of Bush would be wrong. And, obviously, if a war is in the national interest France and/or Germany should not be given veto authority. (And while France happened to be right about the Iraq war, I have no illusions that this was necessarily for the right reasons.)

The problem, of course, is that in the particular contexts of both the Iraq war and the presidential campaign this argument happens to be utter horseshit. First of all, in terms of the Iraq war France wasn’t the exception; it was the rule. Canada and Mexico, who Bush could not compel to support the Iraq war, are much more representative examples of countries that didn’t go along than France and Germany. The idea that Bush effectively but together a broad, effective coalition but was thwarted by a couple of cynical outliers is, while extremely effective rhetoric, also an outright lie. Second, there is no evidence whatsoever that Kerry believes that individual countries should have a “veto” over American foreign policy, despite the fact that this belief is often attributed to him. He simply argues that multilateralism is in the American national interest, a seemingly banal observation that was nonetheless often rejected by Bush apologists as he failed to put together a significant coalition priori to the Gulf War.

If Crook’s open-mindedness about Bush rests on this foundation, DeLong’s evaluation of his mental state seems quite accurate.