Guess why they're not afraid of fighting

Jonathan Rauch has an interesting article over at Reason, in which he argues that Bush 43, like Bush 41 before him, is doing the UN a favor. He writes:

George W. Bush may not share his father's instinctive sympathy with the United Nations and other international bodies. But he seems to realize, as his father did in 1990, that international bodies charged with defending the peace (the League of Nations, the United Nations) become positive threats to peace if their hollow pronouncements become the skirts for ambitious dictators to hide behind. So the younger Bush has, in effect, offered to put American power at the U.N.'s service, not just for America's sake, but to save the U.N. from a dangerous impotence.

I fully agree that organizations such as the UN need to maintain their credibility if they are to be protectors of, rather than threats to peace. And therein lies the rub. Perhaps I blinked and missed something, but last time I checked the UN had already become a hollow, empty husk which the moral authority of a Neville Chamberlain. The UN has been nothing but a platform for tin-pot third-world dictators who use our money to attack (verbally, if not physically) the United States, and would like nothing better than to see Israel wiped off the map (you know, like, Zionism is Racism and all that. Remember Durban?). The UN has long ago lost any moral authority it may have had (and that's arguable in the first place). The UN is not worth saving. It is beyond repair. It's been braindead for a long time, and now the physical carcass is beginning to rot and smell. From a pragmatic, short-term point of view, this is not the right time to cremate the UN just yet, but getting rid of it in the medium term is necessary.

There's another thing in Rauch's article that caught my eye:

Interestingly, U.N. approval matters greatly to European public opinion, but whether the operation would cause "many" or only "a few" Western casualties matters hardly at all. Europeans are not afraid of fighting; they are afraid of American unilateralism.

Of course they don't care about Western casualties! The fighting would be done by Americans and the British, with not a single European in sight. That's why they don't care.