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# Posted 10:51 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

MY OLD BOSS ON THE WARPATH: Before heading to Oxford, I worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, or CEIP for short.

My thesis advisor in college used to make fun of CEIP's name. "'International Peace', huh? They're a little behind schedule on that one, aren't they?" And, in fact, CEIP has quite a history, at least in the pre-WWII of taking some terribly naive stances on world politics.

Now, before I say what I'm going to say next, I'd like to point out that all of the Junior Fellows at Carnegie, including myself, were afraid of nothing more than the president of Carnegie, Jessica T. Mathews. Thus, when it came time to put on the annual Christmas comedy show, most of us were hesitant to say anything about Jessica. But in the end, she seemed to take it all pretty well.

Hopefully, Jessica will demostrate the same merciful attitude toward what I am about say, which is this: Her op-ed in today's Post sets a new standard for incoherence and naivete.

To my knowledge, Jessica is the first person to have argued that the US shouldn't enforce 1441 even though Iraq is obviously in material breach. Huh?

But at the same time, she says that inspections should go on for another year, even though there is no reason to believe Saddam will cooperate. Huh?

The reason for going to all this trouble is because the "aim of U.S. policy must be to put the onus on each of the permanent members of the Security Council, in particular, to place its complete commitment behind the intent of Resolution 1441 to disarm Iraq."

Uh-huh. So the purpose of US foreign policy should be to get the rest of the Security Council behind a resolution that has no chance of accomplishing anything.

Based on my experience at Carnegie, I'd have to say that what's really going on here is a spectacular demonstration of verbal acrobatics designed to provide some sort of justification for not doing anything to offend Europe. This is pathological multilateralism.

If even Jessica Mathews knows that Saddam is in material breach but Jacques Chirac won't acknowledge it, then what is multilateralism worth?

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