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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
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To: Vitas who wrote (454043)9/7/2003 1:06:00 PM
From: GST  Read Replies (1) of 769670
 
You are confusing multinational with unilateral. No matter how many countries are on the attacking side, an unprovoked attack is unilateral -- one sided. Uni (one) lateral (sided). Unilateral refers to an action, as in "unilateral disarmament". An attack is unilateral if it is one-sided, as in the case of the US attacking Iraq. An attacking coalition does not make it two-sided. The other side is Iraq, and Iraq did nothing to the US or to Britain to invite the attack -- it is a one-sided attack.

You are confusing unilateral with multilateral. Multilateral refers to multi-sided activities -- as in multilateral talks in which many parties are involved, versus bilateral talks in which there are only two parties involved. Unilateral talks would be an oxymoron. You are also confusing unilateral with multinational -- as in a multinational force. A multinational force can make a unilateral attack. It is a stretch to call the US and Britain a multinational force, but even if it is a multinational force, the action was unilateral.

By the way, if the US had attacked via the UN it would not have been unilateral -- not because there are more countries involved, but because there was an actionable cause on the part of Iraq -- failure to prove disarmament as per the terms of the end of hostilities after the gulf war.
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