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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (46991)	9/25/2002 11:56:58 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Fareed Zakaria concurs with a damning indictment of Europe's business as usual: The Lonesome Doves of Europe The European powers must now decide whether they truly want multilateralism to work—or simply be a cover for politics (and business) as usual Sept. 30 issue — Two events have set the course of the Iraq crisis so far: President George W. Bush’s speech to the United Nations and Iraq’s letter apparently allowing the weapons inspectors back in. The third will take place on Tuesday, when Tony Blair addresses the British Parliament and releases his Iraq dossier. WASHINGTON AND LONDON have delayed all movement toward a new U.N. resolution until the speech is delivered. They believe it will create new momentum for action just as Bush’s speech did two weeks ago. Blair’s speech is important because he speaks not simply as a Briton, but as a European. For many months now Europe has been asking whether the United States would handle Iraq unilaterally or through the United Nations. The ball is now in Europe’s court. How will it handle Iraq? The record is not encouraging. For the past 10 years France and Russia have turned the United Nations into a stage from which to pursue naked self-interest. They have used multilateralism as a way to further unilateral policies. The dust from the gulf war had not settled when the French government began a quiet but persistent campaign to gut the sanctions against Iraq, turn inspections into a charade and send signals to Saddam Hussein that Paris was ready to do business with him again. “Decades from now, when all the documents are available, someone is going to write an eye-opening book about France’s collusion with Saddam Hussein in the 1990s,” says Kenneth Pollack, who worked at the CIA and the NSC during those years. The Russians have also been more interested in cozying up to Iraq than disarming it. There are more than 200 Russian companies in Iraq, doing deals that total at least $4 billion. Moscow has been Iraq’s most dependable ally in the Security Council, routinely endorsing its objections about sanctions and inspections. It helped sabotage the most recent efforts to create “smart sanctions,” which would have dropped broader economic barriers in favor of targeted ones against Saddam’s regime. Moscow also led the charge against the appointment of Rolf Ekeus as the chief weapons inspector in January 2000, a campaign that is worth recalling. After Russia and France had vetoed about 25 names, Kofi Annan decided to put forward someone whose qualifications he thought were unimpeachable. Ekeus had headed up the original inspections team to Iraq after the gulf war. In that role, he had been patient but clever, finding more Iraqi weapons programs than any expert had imagined. Russia, joined by France and China, vetoed the appointment. And then there is Germany, which cannot even claim the rationale of national interest for its bizarre actions. Pandering to public opinion, Gerhard Schroder has broken with 50 years of tradition and publicly denounced American foreign policy. He has encouraged an atmosphere of anti-Americanism in his country, which hit its lowest note when his Justice minister compared President Bush to Hitler. Schroder is opposed to an attack on Iraq, even if the United Nations authorizes it. He must think Saddam is harmless, except that his own chief of intelligence, August Hanning, told The New Yorker last year, “It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years.” Oh, well, no need to worry about it, then. Not all of Europe’s leaders are this shortsighted. Speaking to a small group of American journalists, Czech President Vaclav Havel warned against making concessions to aggressive dictators, as Britain and France did in the 1930s. “It is necessary to take action against deadly evil, even using force if that is needed,” he said. “Leaving the United States alone in this might be immensely dangerous.” Dangerous for Europe more than the United States. Europe’s major powers have been insistent that the United States work more often through multilateral institutions for broad goals. In the past the Bush administration has been far too reluctant to do so. But now Europe has to decide whether it truly wants multilateralism to work—or simply be a cover for politics as usual. If France and Russia seek a world in which nations act purely on the basis of interest and power, they will get it. In it, America will do just fine. As the president’s recent national-security-strategy document makes clear, it will remain the “hyperpower.” But as France and Russia might have noticed, they’re not very powerful anymore. They have seats on the United Nations Security Council only because they won the last great war 50 years ago. (I use the word “won” loosely when speaking of France.) Unless they act responsibly, they are now in danger of losing the next one. msnbc.com

To: greenspirit who wrote (46991)	9/26/2002 4:26:36 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi all; A critique of Arnold Beichman's simplistic article: (#reply-18036759 ) Re: "When the Soviet satellites rose in rebellion in 1953, 1956, and 1968 against the Kremlin tyrants, the bordering West European democracies did nothing." (a) I guess a global thermonuclear war would have been an attractive alternative plan of action to this idiot. (b) Or maybe taking on the USSR despite the fact that they had recently made mincemeat out of a German military pretty much the size of NATO and were now much larger had some appeal. Peace along the Iron Curtain was due to the fact that neither side had sufficient strength to decisively defeat the other. Re: "The United States is now the victim that the European Union (EU) would like to toss off the sled." This is silly. The US isn't on any sled. Hell, the US isn't even in the same half of the world as Iraq. The US is just trying to stick its nose into other people's business. Re: "We are virtually alone in our determination to go to war against the Iraqi dictatorship. So was Britain in 1940 when Winston Churchill took over the reins of a tottering nation. The difference today is that the United States is not tottering." What a rewrite of history. In mid 1940 France (and Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and of course Poland) had already allied itself with Britain and got defeated. I wonder what the Australians, Greeks, Canadians or Yugoslavians would have to say about Britain going it alone. And the truth of the matter is that the US began supplying Britain with arms in November 1939. Then Lend Lease removed the necessity of paying cash in March 1941. Here's the differences with the current situation: (a) Germany was an important world power in 1940, and had been one for nearly a century. Iraq is an unimportant shitty little country and has been that way almost continuously since Hammurabi, most of 4000 years. Germany was a world class threat, eventually capable of conquering most of Europe. Iraq barely made it through a puny war with Iran, and was mostly a threat to their even tinier and less important neighbor Kuwait, (who weren't even a world power back in Hammurabi's time). Furthermore, that was then, now Iraq is indisputably weaker. WW1 and WW2 was about defending weak little countries like Poland or Serbia from major powers like Germany or Austria. Bush #43's war is about the United States, indisputably a major power, attacking and conquering, without provocation, a weak little country. In 1992, the world's sympathies were with Kuwait and Bush #41 had plenty of help going in. Does anyone really have to guess why the world's sympathies are now with Iraq? The fact is that humans tend to root for the underdog. In 1992, Kuwait was the underdog and people cheered the US for saving it. Now Iraq is the underdog, and the US is booed. This is basic, simple human nature, and it will have effects on our diplomatic position with other nations. (b) The countries that fought Germany were its neighbors. Iraq's neighbors, by contrast, are at least publicly against the new war. (c) Germany started the war by attacking an independent country, Poland, on September 1, 1939. This was after Britain and France had guaranteed the Polish borders so Germany knew what was going to happen to it. France and Britain declared war that same day (or within a very short time, I don't recall). The author wants to compare that very active situation to a case where the US has already gotten Iraq out of Kuwait, but now, 11 very long years later, wants to go in and cream a country that is now, by the words of the very same US administration, weaker than it was back then. (d) The sympathies of most of the world were with Britain defending Poland (and then itself). Germany was dropping bombs all over Britain, but Iraq has done nothing to the US whatsoever. Unless the administration recognizes the inevitable effects on US diplomacy, they risk forcing the US into an isolationism that is exactly what I've been hoping for. Now that the USSR is gone we should dissolve NATO, and until China shows itself to be expansionist (rather than disagreeable), we should remove our troops from the various places in Asia where their primary entertainment sometimes seems to be rape, which causes anti-American feelings among the locals. If they want our boys to be over there, where they tend to be treated as a sort of dangerous second class citizen, then their government should be begging the US to keep them. We should never be asking foreign nations to accept our troops. We should pull them out of any place that isn't damned ecstatic to have them there, and maybe is also willing to pay for them. -- Carl