FADG is being reduced to an anti-american propaganda factory.
Kens concept of the thread is the discussion of foreign affairs. By the very nature of people and the USA's predominant political and economic strength, it is not surprising the discussion may reflect on some negative aspects of this presence. He's a big guy though in many respects. He is kinda American I guess -g- I hope he is able to return to the thread, otherwise I would miss him.
Just to throw in a little balance on the routine bashing of the USA, here is Alister Cooks latest column. Enjoy, he's a great story teller -ggg- but also convincing
news.bbc.co.uk
Were we misled into war?
It's not often that I cast around wondering through the day what I might talk about this time.
I dismissed, as least likely to excite any listener, the appalling tumult in Congo and the touted threat to our security which is now said to be posed by Iran.
I'm touched by the death of an actor friend and a charming anecdote about him.
And what about the largest first printing of any work in the history of literature and the consequent enthronement of Harry Potter as the universal, all-time children's literary hero?
Never was such a week for seeking distraction from the continuing anarchy of Iraq.
By Wednesday morning however I woke to the frank admission that what I'd been doing was dreaming up as many odd stories as possible so as to shirk, to evade, avoid, to shun the one looming question already a thunderous sound in Britain, but here only just rising to a general protest.
And it's a question that must be answered. It is this: were we misled into war, by whom and for what motives?
On the eve of the invasion of Iraq more than half the American population thought that it was a terrible but necessary act and that what the administration was saying was, better a short war - we hope short - now than a long war very likely involving nuclear and chemical weapons next year or the year after.
Most moderate supporters of an invasion, in Britain and in this country, in the United Nations and out of it, complained that the very large body of opinion against any war never offered an alternative, except to give up on Saddam or to trust in indefinite inspection from the team of more than 200 members - the United Nations inspectors - who'd been inspecting continuously from 1991 till 98.
The pressing reason for going to war was the dinningly repeated reports, before the Security Council of the United Nations, given by the president to the Congress, by Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld in his press conferences and by Secretary of State Colin Powell wherever he travelled and begged for allies.
The reason was that Saddam Hussein, having flouted for 12 years the Security Council's orders and the truce treaty that he'd signed, was now a clear and present danger to the security of not only his region, most of all to Israel, but to the security of the United States itself - because he was hiding and refusing to destroy weapons of mass destruction and the makings of biochemical weapons that had rained agonised deaths on thousands of Iranians and on his own subjects.
That after 12 years of begging him to come clean, 12 years of time to build up a nuclear capability and enlarge his chemical resources, the time had come to say, no more.
Unlike former President Clinton who'd planned for an Iraqi invasion in 1998, Mr Bush brought it up before the UN Security Council at a time - 57 years after the founding of the United Nations - when the vast majority of the citizens of the world knew practically nothing about the camel through the eye of a needle procedure, whereby the Security Council will ever agree to order military force.
It's called the agreed voting procedure in the Council. Let me briefly, painfully, remind you who agreed to what procedure.
The main declared aim of the United Nations in the very first sentence of its charter is "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war".
The only body of the new league which can do that is the Security Council.
Originally, of the 50 nations that met in San Francisco, 11 of them sat on the Security Council for two-year terms.
The five equal great powers - the victors in the Second World War - were made permanent members of the Council. they were the United States, the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, France and China.
China meant then the China of Chiang Kai-shek. But time, with its crooked stride walks some strange paths and by 1971 Communist China, over the horrendous protests of the United States, became the China on the Security Council.
The agreed voting procedure was that any act of aggression or threat to peace brought up before the Council must have the approving vote of all five of the permanent members before military action could be taken.
From the very earliest meetings of the Council, which I covered in 1945 through 1948, it was obvious every such aggressive act failed almost automatically to get all five votes.
Anything the United Kingdom and the United States were for, the Soviet Union was against. Maybe a hundred times that the Russian, Mr Gromyko, the moment a vote was taken, would snap "nyet" - no - and march out of the Council meeting.
During the second war President Roosevelt expressed to Stalin his vision of a world run by the only two superpowers, who would work so harmoniously together that they would always agree in the Security Council, aggression would be put down and peace would reign around the globe.
Stalin, who spent very little time thinking or talking about the United Nations, thought this vision of eternal peace was a fairy tale.
He it was who prescribed that the permanent five powers should have a veto power in the Council. If that was not to be the agreed procedure, he wouldn't join the United Nations.
So of course we all gave in. He told his foreign minister later that joining the UN could do no harm. It would be a useful propaganda sounding board.
When Mr Bush took his case to the Security Council last autumn there was not a prayer that all five permanent members would vote yes to the Iraqi invasion.
Mr Bush hoped the disapprovers would abstain. But no, the unexpected "nyets" came from Germany and France. they carried the day with their stubborn determination to have the UN inspectors go on and on and on.
I never heard a convincing reason for this, though the New York Times published recently a graph of the four or five nations that manufactured and sold to Iraq biochemical laboratories and equipment. The two main suppliers were Germany 52%, France 21%.
Nothing more was said about this except that during the 1990s Saddam had declared 340 pieces of equipment designed for making chemical weapons.
But the foreign services and intelligence of several nations - mainly American, British, Polish and Spanish, I believe - knew and never made it quite clear enough in the United Nations debates that that amount of equipment by no means constituted Iraq's whole hidden supply. It is the rest that we fail to find.
So rising voices in Congress are now echoing the more strident voices in the House of Commons - We were duped by the CIA and by the British dodgy dossier - or - George Bush fervently wanted war and collected rumours and dubious information to support his thesis of a never-proved relation between Saddam and al-Qaeda, Saddam and Bin Laden.
The accusing theories mushroom and through them pierces the agonised voice of Secretary Powell, who's been collecting an appalling load of reliable intelligence for 12 years.
Secretary Powell now says that to believe that there are not any more hidden or undeclared weapons is preposterous.
Still what fuels the argument and suspicion of the Bush administration is the fact that by last March the French and the Germans in the Council were saying in the face of American derision, "Give them more time, give them more time."
And now only the other day, with no irony at all, the great warrior Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld cried, "There are 600 sites to examine, we've looked at only 200. Give us more time, give us more time."
And what does the Commander-in-Chief, George W, say? Amazingly little about the missing weapons and chemicals.
He's off around the country day after day presiding over fundraising luncheons, dinners, rallies. Fundraising for what? For whom?
Fundraising for George W Bush, to help him fulfil his ambition to raise $200m in support of his candidacy in November 2004.
More than anything in life he wants to be president of the United States. Again. |
