If they happened to watch the morning TV news on April 221, 2005, the Iranians are no doubt wondering how to pull in the welcome mat; a dozen car bombings, internecine murder among the Iraqi religious sects and the downing of a U.S. troop transport helicopter with no survivors would seem sufficient for anyone to want to cancel any similar party.

             It would seem advisable for Feith to have had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he said:.

             Despite the preeminent position of the United States in the world, we are not all-powerful. We don"t have the luxury of restricting our cooperation in national security affairs exclusively to states with political arrangements of which we approve, any more than Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill could afford to be overly delicate about the nature of Stalin"s regime (Feith 2005). .

             Roosevelt and Churchill lived and worked at the end of that simpler, pre-global world. And they did not have available a world body, the United Nations, to mitigate government excesses and foster world peace. Supporters of U.S. unilateralism would point out that the United Nations did exist in the 1990s, when NATO and the United States took action against Serbia; intervention occurred there without U.N. sanction. But one has to wonder: was that because the United Nations would not act, or could not act? Or was it at least partially due to the short shrift the United Nations customarily receives from the United States? True, the U.S. is the U.N."s biggest financial supporter. But once having made the donation, the U.S. seems to think it has done all it needs to do for what it seems to regard as a quaint and venerable international charity, membership in which lends a certain cachet, or at least legitimizes a nation in the global community.

             In fact, there are some voices in favor of closer ties between the U.S. and the United Nations, and closer adherence by the United States to the demands of international law.