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Politics : DON'T START THE WAR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (6867)	2/9/2003 7:38:24 PM
From: Tadsamillionaire	Respond to of 25898

He recalled the failure of U.N. soldiers to protect civilians in the Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, where more than 7,500 were slaughtered in the summer of 1995. story.news.yahoo.com Germany - France and Germany intend to present a proposal to the U.N. Security Council next week to send U.N. soldiers to disarm Iraq, the German defense minister said Sunday. The plan, according to a German newsmagazine, involves reconnaissance missions, the deployment of thousands of U.N. peacekeepers and tripling the number of U.N. weapons inspectors. In Paris, the French government on Sunday denied the existence of a "secret plan" with Germany, saying France had previously proposed increasing the number of arms inspectors. That denial — plus Defense Minister Peter Struck's inability to offer concrete details of the reported plan — created an appearance of disarray in the Franco-German alliance against Washington's hard-line stance on Iraq. The reported plan drew harsh criticism from U.S. officials including Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites), who called it an ineffective ploy by Berlin and Paris to delay military action. Powell, in Washington, bluntly dismissed the proposal. Increasing the number of U.N. inspectors would be "a diversion, not a solution," he said. "The issue is not more inspectors. The issue is compliance on the part of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)," Powell said in a television interview. News of the plan emerged as hundreds of leading government officials and security experts attended a two-day defense conference in Munich, which ended Sunday. Still, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who attended the conference, learned nothing about the reported plan in meetings with both the French and German defense ministers. "Rumsfeld was here for 24 hours meeting with German and French officials and no one told him anything. That was not an auspicious start," a senior U.S. official at the Munich meeting said on condition of anonymity. Addressing the conference, Struck said the starting point for the French-German proposal was a French initiative to increase the number of inspectors in Iraq "in order to give them a better chance to succeed." He said the proposal would be presented to the Security Council on Feb. 14 after chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix reports on the situation in Iraq — and that Germany would consider sending troops as part of a U.N. force. "We are standing shoulder to shoulder with France and we hope that this initiative will be positively received in the Security Council," Struck told German television Sunday. U.S. officials, however, said the plan as reported was problematic because it required Iraqi cooperation with inspectors and assumed that U.N. peacekeepers could be effective in a "difficult environment." "It's a plan as far as we can tell whose purpose is to block U.S. military action and not make meaningful inspections — but we don't know," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. He recalled the failure of U.N. soldiers to protect civilians in the Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, where more than 7,500 were slaughtered in the summer of 1995. But Belgium backed the German-French plans Sunday, saying they were a chance to avoid war. "We are right to stay on the side of the French and Germans because there are still many questions to be posed and answered," Foreign Minister Louis Michel said. Rumsfeld emerged from a 45-minute meeting with Struck on Saturday saying he still knew nothing about the plan, but said inspections could only work if Iraq cooperates.