NATO Relents

After a month in which NATO flirted with making itself irrelevant, the bureaucrats at NATO used a bit of tricky parliamentary procedure to exclude France from the debate, and thus forced to stand alone, Germany and Belgium relented and allowed the alliance to do its job, and defend Turkey.

I had earlier blogged the seriousness of the situation, and those stalwarts of the Atlantic Alliance must have heard me, or otherwise realized that if they could not defend a member nation, they were totally without purpose or relevance. Now that NATO is saved from the scrap heap of history, the European Union and the United Nations need to address the fact that, if they intend to remain as important participants in the debate, they need to do more than air out their anti-American ideas.

These days even Kofi Annan and the European Union are making the right noises urging Iraq to comply with U.N. disarmament resolutions and warning that arms inspections cannot continue indefinitely without Baghdad's cooperation. While there is little hope that Saddam will ever comply with Security Council Resolution 1441, there is hope that the international bodies are moving to the point where they might stand aside and allow the coalition of the willing do what must be done to free the Iraqi people and defuse their threat over peace and security for the rest of the people of the world.