JOHN SCALZI SAYS “BRING IT ON” where war is concerned, but says that the Bush Administration has been guilty of diplomatic incompetence.

I think it was a mistake to go the Security Council route. But I think that France’s backstabbing surprised almost everyone, not just the Bush Administration. In retrospect, we probably should have recognized that self-aggrandizing yet self-defeating diplomacy is a French hallmark, and that we shouldn’t have believed French promises.

But you have to give Bush credit — though few will — in that he’s bent over backward to try to let the international system demonstrate relevance and competence. And by doing so he has made abundantly plain that the United Nations is a joke, and that France and Germany are not our friends, but (France, especially) our would-be rivals. And there’s value in that.

That said, I wouldn’t have gone to the Security Council at all. And you can bet that neither the United States, nor any other power, is likely to do so ever again.

UPDATE: Daniel Drezner offers a detailed postmortem and concludes:

A better effort would have left France more isolated in the Security Council and given the looming war a greater patina of multilateralism. Make no mistake, however, this ending is not that much different from a best-case scenario.

Yeah. The French made clear — by Chirac saying it — that no evidence whatsoever would change their position. This has given Russia and China cover to posture for the anti-American third-world vote, as has been their habit for decades.