Powell changed his rhetoric because the duplicitous French stabbed him in the back.
weeklystandard.com
First, France does not, in fact, seek the disarmament of Iraq or even the elimination of Saddam Hussein's programs for producing weapons of mass destruction. M. de Villepin declared at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council last Monday, "Already we know for a fact that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs are being largely blocked, even frozen." The French government thereby acknowledged that Saddam Hussein does indeed have such programs--but according to M. de Villepin France does not consider it necessary for Iraq to do away with them.
Second, it is now clear that the government of France does not, in fact, support implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, which it helped negotiate this past November. That resolution stated that Iraq was being given "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations," obligations that Iraq had agreed to under the terms of the cease-fire ending the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and that it has failed to fulfill for the last dozen years. That resolution also declared that if Iraq failed to comply, it would face "serious consequences," understood by all Security Council members to mean war. Now France has declared that it will not insist on Iraqi compliance or on "serious consequences" for its failure to comply. As M. de Villepin told the Security Council this past Monday, "nothing justifies envisaging military action." Nothing. |
