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

To: PartyTime who wrote (21558)	3/16/2003 2:23:49 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 25898

The Summit of Isolation Editorial The New York Times March 16, 2003 Three men meeting on an Atlantic island seems an apt symbol for the failure of the Bush administration to draw the world around its Iraq policy. That's not the intended message of President Bush's meeting today in the Azores with Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and José María Aznar of Spain, but it's hard to avoid that impression. In what appears to be the final days before an American invasion of Iraq, Mr. Bush is taking time to consult with two loyal allies and, ostensibly, to decide if any realistic chance remains for a new United Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq. But the underlying diplomatic reality is bleak. Only a little more than four months since a unanimous Security Council backed American demands for disarming Saddam Hussein, Washington's only sure council supporters are Britain, Spain and Bulgaria. President Bush was dealt a bad hand by others. Baghdad refused to provide the active cooperation that alone could have brought inspections to a swift and successful conclusion. France has created enormous problems through its unwillingness to back up inspections with tight deadlines and a credible threat of force. But the Bush administration's erratic and often inept diplomacy has made matters immeasurably worse. By repeatedly switching its goals from disarmament to regime change to broadly transforming the Middle East, and its arguments from weapons to Al Qaeda to human rights, the White House made many countries more worried about America's motives than Iraq's weapons. Public arm-twisting of allies like Turkey and Mexico backfired, as did repeated sniping at Hans Blix, one of the U.N.'s two chief arms inspectors. Just this past week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld damagingly suggested that Washington didn't really need British military help, administration diplomats unhelpfully hedged their support for a British compromise proposal and Secretary of State Colin Powell further undercut London's efforts to win over undecided Security Council members by suggesting that Washington might soon withdraw the pending resolution without a vote. Even now, diplomacy might be resuscitated if the administration made an all-out effort to seek broad consensus around the British concept of disarmament benchmarks and specific, achievable deadlines. Such an effort would require much greater American willingness to negotiate realistic deadlines and credible mechanisms for measuring Iraqi compliance than has yet been evident. Instead, the Bush administration now gives every appearance of going through the motions of diplomacy as a favor to Mr. Blair without really believing in it. By allowing that perception to grow, Mr. Bush finds himself about to embark on an uncertain course of war and nation-building in one of the world's most dangerous and complex regions, with an alliance far too narrow for comfort. nytimes.com

To: PartyTime who wrote (21558)	3/16/2003 2:30:36 AM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 25898

I can't believe you people who think the "Shock and Awe" campaign is going to be targeting the civilian population of Iraq? What our forces will be seeing is an army knowledgeable that their families had suffered the effects from the Shock and Awe campaign, that they might not even have any family left. So revenge could become a factor in any Iraqi response. Does anyone think we plan on carpet-bombing Baghdad? I don't think the Iraqis think this or they'd be leaving the city (they know war is coming). Instead they seem to be staying in their homes.