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

To: michael97123 who wrote (84139)	3/20/2003 10:26:04 AM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 281500

I've read Timothy Garton Ash's piece now twice, once over breakfast and the prior time it was posted to the thread. As always, thought provocative. He misses one point and that's the drag of the familiar, the traditional, the old tried and true ways of doing things. I expect rather profound efforts in the next months, perhaps years, to treat the Iraq disagreement as no more than that, and thus to put much effort into building bridges to keep the UN and NATO going. Not rebuilding because the patchers don't think it needs rebuilding. It just needs to go back to previous levels of contention. That may work. That path depends on the fate of the Bush Iraqi invasion both in the short and longer terms (say a year down the road), on the diplomatic skills of the Bush folk (one should, obviously, not be sanguine here, Powell is well beyond good but Rumseld, deliberately or accidentally undermines him at every point), on whether Blair survives in Britain (and we won't know there for some time--the first time the Labor backbenchers can test him on some domestic issue they will ask for a vote of confidence and they now have a very articulate leader in Robin Cook), and on the degree to which the French and Germans are interested in bracketing this disagreement. Or defining it as the kinds of heated disagremeents good friends and allies often have. As for the Blair way, as Ash paints it, that takes more of the crystal ball projections than I'm capable of. And Blair seems to think so as well. But the part of the point that has Britian and France and Germany as genuine partners, allies, of the US, that won't happen under this US administration. Only with another one.