LEADER ARTICLE
The Illogic of Unilateral Thinking

"The danger from Saddam Hussein''s arsenal is far more clear than anything we could have foreseen prior to Sept 11. And history will judge harshly any leader or nation that saw this dark cloud and sat by in complacency or indecision." That was president Bush''s national security adviser Condoleezza Rice delivering a lecture on October 1.
Since then, the US position on Iraq has taken a severe knocking, with North Korea gingerly emerging from the nuclear closet and Osama waving his bloody hand in Bali.On the surface, president Bush seems undeterred, and for proof, we need only note his latest declaration that the US will move against Iraq "with or without a UN resolution."
Yet, behind this typical Bushesque cockiness, there could well be some unease about the increasingly impulsive direction of American foreign policy. Look at the utter absurdity of it all. Last year, America''s public enemy number one was Osama, today it is Saddam. Just where is Osama and just why has America''s collective memory forgotten the manic zeal with which Mr Bush pursued him only a year ago, are presumably questions nobody should ask. And then North Korea. Even as the US bristles at Iraq, whose nuclear capability remains far from proven, there is North Korea screaming from the rooftop that it has got the weapons. The ultimate irony is, of course, the use of lethal poisonous gas — possibly the kind of biological weapon Saddam is suspected to possess — by Russia against its own people. How many dragons will Mr Bush slay?
It is clear though that in North Korea, Mr Bush has an adversary that cannot be as easily targeted as Iraq. In a ''catch me if you can'' tone that must surely irk George W, North Korea''s ambassador to the UN, Park Kil Yeon, said last week that if anyone was guilty of violating the NPT first, it was the US: "The act of a nuclear state putting a non-nuclear state on its pre- emptive strike list (an obvious reference to the ''axis of evil'' speech) goes against the philosophy of the NPT."
The North Korean diplomat has a point. North Korea and Iraq are hardly alone in the crimes the US insists they have committed — from possessing weapons of mass destruction to abetting terrorism to flouting the NPT to threatening other nations with aggression. On each count, the US could be judged every bit as guilty as its supposed tormentors.
First, the US not only has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world, it is the only country ever to have used them. Second, it has by now been exhaustively documented that Islamic terrorism owes its birth to the US''s active cultivation of it. Osama and gang were recruited by the US for the Afghan holy war. Bin Laden was a financier of that war and the now notorious Al-Qaida was built by him as early as 1985, and with the full knowledge of the CIA.
Third, at the 1995 Review and Extension Conference of the NPT, the US gave an explicit undertaking that it would protect non-nuclear states from the use and threat of use of nuclear weapons. Today, Mr Bush has unveiled a doctrine of pre-emption that legitimises attacking a country even before it has fully formed into a threat. And there are dark hints that nuclear weapons could be used. This, needless to say, makes complete nonsense of the NPT.
Fourth, while the threat posed by Iraq to the US is only a matter of speculation, the threat to Iraq from the US is very, very real. The US, of course, justifies this as ''self-defence.'' Maybe. But view it from Saddam''s perspective. He is under a ''definite'' threat of attack from a country with a record of aiding terrorism and that has actually used nukes. By Mr Bush''s yardstick, Saddam would be fully within his rights to pre-emptively attack the US — both on grounds of self- defence and for the reason that with its irresponsible past and present actions, the superpower had exposed the entire world to the danger of terrorism.
To be sure, no one will buy these arguments. For, Saddam is a small-time dictator pitted against a massive superpower. However, as is clear from the reaction of North Korea, the more the US strikes a moral pose vis-a-vis terrorism, the more challengers it is likely to acquire. After Iraq and North Korea, it could be another state, or it could be a non-state actor brandishing a dirty bomb.
No wonder pressure is growing on the US to use diplomatic means with Iraq and North Korea. In the case of the latter, the US itself is evasive about military action. Team Bush has made it clear it would not put the two countries on a par. For all his muscle-flexing, Mr Bush evidently knows where he gets off: After all, to attack North Korea would be to offend a host of powerful neighbours — China, Japan and South Korea.
Clearly, America can go only so far with unilateralism. The limitations as regards North Korea are already apparent. Saddam may be differently placed, but world opinion — Russia, France, Germany and now more and more ordinary civilians — is steadily mounting against a US misadventure in Iraq. For its own good, the US would do well not to underestimate this.