Even before Washington launched the post-9-11 assault on Afghanistan, more than a week before President Bush presented his ultimatum to the Taliban junta in a September 20, 2001 address to Congress, the Bush administration had moved to internationalize the U.S. response.

According to a Washington Post account written with the cooperation of top Bush administration personnel, on the day after 9-11, Bush called British Prime Minister Tony Blair to confer about the possibility of assembling an "international coalition" to carry out the military campaign. "The two leaders agreed it was important to first move quickly on the diplomatic front to capitalize on the international outrage about the terrorist attack," reported the Post. "If they got support from NATO and the United Nations, they reasoned, they would have the legal and political framework to permit a military response afterward."

While the Bush administration has never deigned to seek a declaration of war against either Afghanistan or Iraq, it dutifully sought "authorization" from the UN and NATO. Immediately after 9-11, the North Atlantic Council invoked Article V of the NATO charter, describing the Black Tuesday atrocity as an attack on the entire alliance. This was the first time the alliance had ever invoked the collective defense provision in its charter. (Its only previous conflict, the 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia, was not an act of defense or retaliation, and actually installed allies of Osama bin Laden as the government of Kosovo.) The UN Security Council also enacted Resolution 1373, a measure drafted by the Bush administration's UN representative to authorize the "war on terrorism."

Now that the ongoing war in Afghanistan has been eclipsed by Iraq, the pretense that it is a US war, as opposed to one carried out through a UN regional affiliate, has been discarded. As violence and bloodshed expand throughout the Middle East, and events outpace the manpower and resources available to Washington, it's likely that the Bush administration will increasingly work through the UN, insisting that this is necessary in order to share the burdens imposed by its "global democratic revolution."

Follow this link to the complete Associated Press article, "NATO takes over in southern Afghanistan"
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060731/ap_on_re_as/afghanistan

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