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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: Win Smith who wrote (69444)1/28/2003 10:27:54 AM
From: carranza2  Read Replies (1) of 281500
 
And the question that Germany and France have pressed remains: If Saddam Hussein's power is contained by the presence of inspectors and the troops massing on his border, what is the urgency of toppling him now?

Easy to say for the French and the Germans. When are they going to use their money and their troops to do the containing? The French are positively drooling at the prospect of getting TotalFina into the Iraqi oil fields. Don't expect them to contribute to any containment effort.

"The pressure on Saddam is fine, and we want to keep it up," one senior German official said today by telephone from Berlin.

LOL!

Did he say "we"?

The Bush critics miss a point--is there any assurance that the Europeans and the UN would have acted any differently even if Bush had undertaken a substantial diplomatic effort to get them on board? I grant you that the "we will not allow any country to surpass our military power" speech was a mistake. Yet, does it matter?

Present a cogent argument supporting the notion that better diplomacy would have lead to a different result in relations with the Europeans and I'll eat my hat. The French and German interests were clearly visible and their response was therefore highly predictable.
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