Washington ? The United Nations is not the U.S. Department of State. The United Nations does not control U.S. foreign policy. But this is precisely what happened when President George Bush listened to Secretary of State Colin Powell and allowed the United Nations to dictate what is and what is not in the interest of U.S. security regarding the matter of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Now, the mistake must be unraveled.

In late September, we wrote President George W. Bush had set the bar too low for Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, in merely requiring that he let inspectors back into his country to check up on Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. “This has left the president to fall back on his original plan, which is to state that Saddam Hussein is a menace to world peace, the United Nations is irrelevant, and America will act according to its own self interest. … If he launches the attack now, world opinion will claim he did not give peace a chance. If he plays Saddam’s game and waits for inspectors to be rebuffed, the situation will have become muddled with claims and counter claims.”

A month later, we wrote: “it is one thing to keep the United Nations going as a forum for nations to air their differences and even for them to come together by unanimous consent to solve international health problems. It is a very different thing to subordinate national foreign policy to United Nations dictates as we now appear to be doing.”

Regrettably, these predictions have come to pass. The inspectors have not turned up any evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and President Bush and his administration have been left to advance other arguments for invading Iraq. It sounds like quibbling, when, in fact, it is simply a reiteration of original U.S. foreign policy. It is a foreign policy that never should have been subordinated to U.N. dictates.

And even the reiteration of policy has been watered down. Previously, the president called for a regime change in Iraq, whereas now he is calling for Iraqi disarmament. Granted, demanding that Saddam Hussein disarm is tantamount to demanding that he step down. The problem is that once having sought U.N. approval for a U.S. foreign policy initiative, it is now virtually impossible to turn around and claim that the United States is going to act unilaterally on the same issue.

Not only will this create a worldwide outcry, American citizens who were sold on the U.N. approval idea will also register their objections. They will say the president is a hawk bent on war regardless of the circumstances. And that is how he and his administration are appearing.

This leaves the president only three choices: He can go it alone and face foreign and domestic condemnation; he can bide his time and wend his way through the U.N.’s labyrinthine process; or, if the inspectors finally prove the existence of weapons of mass destruction, but the United Nations wavers, he can build a case against both Iraq and the United Nations and continue as originally planned.

In the final analysis, Saddam Hussein is either a threat to regional and world peace, and a threat to U.S. oil supplies, or he is not. We believed he was a threat in 1990-91, and we believe he a threat today. Saddam Hussein must go.

Prediction: It was a mistake to subordinate the U.S. foreign policy toward Iraq to U.N. dictates. That mistake will be unraveled, but at a significant cost in world opinion.