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

To: JohnM who wrote (71675)	2/5/2003 11:46:30 PM
From: paul_philp	Respond to of 281500

JohnM, These were some big name people who had oppossed the war in the past coming out in support of the president. They were more than supportive, they were enuthusiastic in their support. The fact that some of the used-to-be-VIP pundits are withdrawing their questioning sends a message and removes a source of doubt. I have been saying all along that Bush wasn't selling the case against Iraq. Powell sold it today. Eagleberger said: Bush went to congress, then delivered his best speech ever at the UN, then went to the UNSC and got a 15-0 vote, gave inspections 3 months, then sent Powell back to the UNSC and has built a coalition of over 25 countries. The president is acting prudently, reasonably and multi-laterally. Eagleberger would now support War without UNSC approval and it would mean the end of the UN if it happened. Big, big tsunami sentiment change. The debate will now be about the war vs. aggressive containment and I expect that to get no gas. Paul

To: JohnM who wrote (71675)	2/6/2003 12:04:29 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

And we won't know about the depth until some inevitable bad news comes rolling back from Iraq. News bad enough to test the depth. I think any initial "Bad News" will be greeted by anger and resolve on the part of this country. If this happens, I think you will get some "I told you so" in '04. I think you are thinking of what happened during the Vietnam war, you forgetting how long a period of time this happened over. If you are thinking of increased terrorist activity during or after the Iraq invasion, I think it will work to favor the Admin. "Hey, here's proof these guys were out to get us!"

To: JohnM who wrote (71675)	2/6/2003 12:07:19 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

Too many folk still think this will be Grenada heavy. God, I hope not! If you read the details, Grenada was a tactical disaster that the Military got away with. People don't expect this to be a cake walk, although I think it will be.

To: JohnM who wrote (71675)	2/6/2003 4:12:58 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Ahhh, "There's Something about Mary." McGrory "Jumped the Boomstick" today, John. For the reasons you cited. She is a liberal as you are. Perhaps it will bring you to the sticking point too. I can always dream, can't I? washingtonpost.com I'm Persuaded By Mary McGrory Thursday, February 6, 2003; Page A37 I don't know how the United Nations felt about Colin Powell's "J'accuse" speech against Saddam Hussein. I can only say that he persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince. I'm not exactly a pacifist. Vietnam came close to making me one, but no one of the World War II generation can say war is never justified. I have resisted the push to war against Iraq because I thought George W. Bush was trying to pick a fight for all the wrong reasons -- big oil, the far right -- against the wrong enemy. The people who were pushing hardest are not people whose banner I could follow. I find our commander in chief a flighty thinker. The drumbeaters didn't inspire my confidence. All of them, despite their clamorous anticommunism, declined to wear the uniform for Vietnam, and some of them had the nerve, when the fighting was finally over, to write pieces for their neocon journals about how sorry they were to have missed the camaraderie of the foxhole and the firing line. Richard Perle, a lead tenor in the war chorus, was the right hand of the late Henry Jackson, a hawk of hawks on defense issues. Gene McCarthy once remarked of Jackson, as a presidential candidate, "If he's elected, you will never see the sun -- the sky will be black with planes." Among people I know, nobody was for the war. All of us were clinging tightly to the toga of Colin Powell. We, like the rest of the world, trusted him. We read Bob Woodward's "Bush at War" with admiration and gratitude for our stalwart secretary of state. We wished Powell would oppose the war, because it seemed like such a huge and misdirected overreaction to a bully who got on the nerves of our touchy Texas president. But resistance of any kind at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was a boon to peaceniks. Powell patiently and humbly waited for his chance to convince the president that he couldn't have a shootout with Saddam Hussein and ride off into the sunset of world approval. When the protest crowds came to Washington, full of scorn for the commander in chief and his Cabinet cohorts, they made an exception of Colin Powell. Powellites had a bad moment when he lost his cool with the French ambassador to the United Nations. The French invited him to a seminar on terrorism, but when he got there he received an antiwar blast from Dominique de Villepin. State Department and White House spinners put it out that the secretary was "livid" and "humiliated," and soon the buzz was that Powell, in his rage, had gone pro-war. I was told to remember that Powell was above all "a good soldier" and, once a decision was made, would salute. Was it appalling that a man of Powell's stature would be small enough to think that because he had lost face, thousands might lose their lives? I knew it was bigger than that. But on Iraq, the president has been generous in sharing his personal feelings. Yet the key to Powell's sterner line came from an unexpected source: the long-suffering chief of what Bush chose to call "the so-called inspectors": Hans Blix. In a progress report on Jan. 21, Blix castigated Hussein for having "no genuine acceptance of the demand to disarm" and for "a failure to demonstrate active cooperation with inspection." Of course, Bush chose Powell to make the case before the United Nations. He has no one else who so commands the country's respect -- or the world's. Powell took his seat in the United Nations and put his shoulder to the wheel. He was to talk for almost an hour and a half. His voice was strong and unwavering. He made his case without histrionics of any kind, with no verbal embellishments. He aired his tapes of conversations between Iraqi army officers who might well be supposed to be concealing toxic materials or enterprises. He talked of the mobile factories concealed in trains and trucks that move along roads and rails while manufacturing biological agents. I was struck by their ingenuity and the insistence on manufacturing agents that cause diseases such as gangrene, plague, cholera, camelpox and hemorrhagic fever. Would Saddam Hussein use them? He already has, against his own people and Iranians. He has produced four tons of deadly VX: "A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes." The cumulative effect was stunning. I was reminded of the day long ago when John Dean, a White House toady, unloaded on Richard Nixon and you could see the dismay written on Republican faces that knew impeachment was inevitable. I wasn't so sure about the al Qaeda connection. But I had heard enough to know that Saddam Hussein, with his stockpiles of nerve gas and death-dealing chemicals, is more of a menace than I had thought. I'm not ready for war yet. But Colin Powell has convinced me that it might be the only way to stop a fiend, and that if we do go, there is reason.

To: JohnM who wrote (71675)	2/6/2003 10:00:23 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Will's summation line echoes my feelings, John. Also, he isn't very nice about the French. :>) washingtonpost.com Disregarding the Deniers By George F. Will Thursday, February 6, 2003; Page A37 In estimating the impact of Colin Powell's U.N. presentation on persons who believe that there is no justification for a military response to Iraq's behavior, remember the human capacity for willful suspension of disbelief. Remember this: People determined to believe that a vast conspiracy assassinated President Kennedy believe that the absence of evidence of the conspiracy proves the vastness and cleverness of the conspiracy. People committed to a particular conclusion will get to it and will stay there. So the facts that Powell deployed, and the pattern they form, will not persuade people determined to be unpersuaded. But Powell's presentation, its power enhanced by his avoidance of histrionics, will change all minds open to evidence. Thus it will justify disregarding the presumptively close-minded people who persist in denying . . . what? What are people denying who still deny the need for force? That Iraq has weapons of mass destruction? Or that Iraq is resisting the inspections? No, they are denying only that force is needed. They say an enhanced presence of inspectors will paralyze Iraq's weapons programs. Speaking, as we are, primarily of the French government, its oleaginous foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, addressed the Security Council after Powell. After some initial circumlocutions, the opacity of which could not conceal their offensiveness, de Villepin may have begun exercising the skill France has often honed since 1870 -- that of retreating, this time into incoherence. After dismissing Powell's photographs and voice intercepts as "information, indications, questions, which deserve further exploration," de Villepin declared: "It will be up to the inspectors to assess the facts as is stated in Resolution 1441." Such cheek. De Villepin put Powell through torturous word-by-word negotiation of 1441 and knows that it does not contain what he, de Villepin, now purports to find in it. It does not vest in Hans Blix's minions the sovereign power to declare for the United Nations whether Iraq is in material breach. Perhaps de Villepin's statement lost some clarity in translation. More likely, it was incoherent because his position is. He said "the disarmament of Iraq" is "a clear objective which we cannot compromise." He said inspections require Iraq's "active cooperation." Then, although Powell's evidence was still fresh in the minds of the Security Council members, de Villepin said "this cooperation still contains some gray areas." Gray, indeed. Three paragraphs after saying the inspections "are working," de Villepin said the inspectors have encountered "real difficulties." Three paragraphs later, insincerity producing stammering, he said, "Our evidence suggests -- the evidence suggests that there are significant stocks -- there is the possible possession of significant stocks of anthrax and botulism toxins and the possible -- possibly a production capacity today." But in the next paragraph he said, so what? "The absence of long-range delivery systems reduces the potential threat of these weapons" -- as though ballistic missiles are necessary. Concluding with cascading billows of fog about "a collective demarche of responsibility by the international community," de Villepin proposed using "some unused space in Resolution 1441" by "decisive reinforcement" of the inspections, tripling the number of inspectors (to all of 300 for an uncooperative nation the size of California) and opening regional offices. In a flourish that defies satire, de Villepin called for Iraq to pass "legislation" prohibiting itself from manufacturing prohibited weapons. De Villepin having deflated the French reputation for deft diplomacy, we are left with the stark fact that Iraq is demonstrating contempt for U.N. Resolution 1441 and for the United Nations itself. If the United Nations' supine response is to prolong the inspection charade in a futile attempt to stymie U.S. force, the United Nations will demonstrate contempt for 1441 and hence for its own pretense of moral authority and practical utility. It is probable that President Bush decided at least a year ago that U.S. force would be necessary, and would be used, for regime change in Iraq, with or without U.N. approval. The United Nations was warned by the president in last month's State of the Union address: "The course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others." But the president would find it more difficult to wage preemptive war without the coloration of international legality, which the United Nations supposedly incarnates. So an irony stands out: It would be more difficult for the president to wage war against Iraq if the United Nations did not exist. But if the United Nations, having passed 1441, now refuses to authorize war, the United Nations will essentially cease to exist. There is the outline of a satisfactory outcome: Saddam Hussein removed, the United Nations reduced.