Canvassing the Votes to Gain Legitimacy March 13, 2003 By DAVID E. SANGER NY Times
WASHINGTON, March 12 - As President Bush called around the world today with an intensity his father might admire, his aides were arguing behind the scenes over a single question: how many votes does it take to confer an aura of international legitimacy on an attack against Iraq? More votes, it seems, than the president had in hand when his aides emerged tonight from the White House situation room. Over the next day or two, the White House will have to deal with the warnings that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others have expressed in private conversations. President Bush said publicly on Thursday that he would bring the issue to a vote, win or lose, and today White House officials were still insisting that is the case. Mr. Powell, however, according to diplomats who have talked to him, is cautioning that it would be better to scrap the vote entirely than to go to war against the expressed wishes of a majority of the Security Council. "Colin hasn't given up" on the possibility of a victory, said one Arab official involved on the sidelines of the negotiations. "He might have eight tonight, and that would be respectable. With a lot of luck they could get nine, a supervote." But this evening some of those votes seemed iffy at best, and imaginary at worst. If Mr. Bush and his aides cannot persuade and arm-twist wavering members into voting for an ultimatum along the lines the British have proposed, the United States will find itself in a place it has never been before: openly, unashamedly, starting a conflict that the Security Council says cannot be conducted in its name. That never happened during the Korean War, when President Truman won United Nations backing to counter North Korea's invasion of South Korea. To this day the American-led command along the DMZ flies the United Nations flag. During the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy wanted the imprimatur of the Organization of American States before he ordered a naval quarantine on Cuba. He got it. Even during the Kosovo conflict, the Security Council was frozen in place, but President Clinton forced action through NATO, muting charges of American unilateralism. But this is different. Mr. Bush says he is willing to go to war without the cover of any international organization other than the "coalition of the willing" that he is organizing. That is exactly the script that Vice President Dick Cheney warned about last summer when he said it would be worse to lose a vote than to act in the name of enforcing existing United Nations resolutions. But eventually the president decided it was worth the risk, and that looked like a good call in November, when the Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441, calling for Iraq's immediate disarmament. White House officials insist that Mr. Bush - while frustrated and angry at France, Germany, Russia and Mexico - has no regrets. They say he had to test his own thesis that Iraq would decide whether "this is the United Nations or the League of Nations." Now, however, Mr. Bush must decide in the next 36 hours or so whether to attempt a vote. And that decision hinges on how he defines victory, and whether he is deterred by the specter of defeat. "You can see, talking to American diplomats, the tension inside the American administration," said Inocencio F. Arias, the Spanish representative to the United Nations. "You can see they are fighting a battle there. They don't say anything. You can see it in their body language." Veto threats from France and Russia are no longer the chief concern. "That's not the issue," one senior administration official said, as the president cajoled and argued over the phone today with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, among others. "Do you really need nine? Wouldn't eight - an actual majority - suffice?" the official said. "This isn't about the rules of the U.N.," he added. "It's about showing that we are not alone." While Mr. Bush insists that America needs no other nation's permission to act, his actions in the last two days reveal that he would like to claim at least a moral victory. With eight votes, one friend of Mr. Bush's said today, "he could go on television the night of the U.N. vote and say, `We are backed by a majority of the Security Council.' And that would help a lot." Mostly it would help Tony Blair, the British prime minister, who needs a second vote to win approval in Parliament to commit British forces to war. But if it appears that the vote will be lost, Mr. Blair may be in worse shape than before. With that in mind, the hawkish elements of the administration - including Mr. Cheney - are said to favor avoiding a vote if the alternative is defeat. One possibility discussed here today is that the White House, if short of votes, will declare that at the request of its co-sponsors, Britain and Spain, it is withdrawing the resolution. It may not come to that. But the strain of keeping Cameroon, Angola and Guinea on board - countries not usually at the forefront of this administration's diplomacy - was clearly taking its toll. The problem, one official said, is that while the African countries and nations like Pakistan may be willing to commit their votes to President Bush, they want to make sure they are on the winning side. So no one wants publicly to declare to be behind the United States if the resolution is destined for defeat - or likely to be pulled off the United Nations' docket entirely. "This is worse than anything we've ever had to do with Congress," one White House official said. The State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, deliberately mixing his metaphors to underscore the chaos of the day, said at a briefing: "I wouldn't deny that we are making progress, but I don't want to mislead you into thinking that we've got it in the bag. We stay fixated on the rule that you don't count your chickens until the cows come home." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/13/international/middleeast/13STRA.html?ex=10 48563542&ei=1&en=3a3fff908ab9fd6c
