Let's talk about replacing GWBush in 2004.

Bush was at the UN to share the feelings and opinions of the majority of Americans

Quote:

Bush was at the UN to share the feelings and opinions of the majority of Americans

Had he done so, he would have humbly asked forgiuveness and help. Instead, he yammered on about 9/11 and the "war on terrorism." The man is a disgrace, not just to America, but to humanity.

Bush leads the UN
(Filed: 24/09/2003)


There will be no lack of American pundits warning George W Bush against making Iraq the defining issue of his presidency. Growing domestic dissatisfaction with the way he is handling the aftermath of the second Gulf war suggests that he could go the way of his father, who drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait at the beginning of 1991 and was voted out of office at the end. The message then and now is that to be seen as a foreign policy president who neglects matters back home is electoral suicide. And that message will become more persistent as the 2004 campaign gets under way.

It is to Mr Bush's credit that he royally over-rode such admonitions in his speech yesterday to the United Nations General Assembly. He began by describing the destruction of the World Trade Centre in 2001 as the symbol of an unfinished war, then led his audience through bombings in Bali, Mombasa, Casablanca, Riyadh, Jakarta and Jerusalem to what he termed the central front of the war against terror, Iraq.

He rebutted those demanding a rapid transfer of power in that country by calling instead for an orderly and democratic process neither hurried nor delayed by the wishes of other parties. He spoke of his request to Congress for $87 billion to help Iraq and Afghanistan, which would be the biggest commitment of its kind since the Marshall Plan. And he called on the UN to join America in building free and stable societies where the Ba'ath party and the Taliban once ruled.

Far from coming cap in hand to the General Assembly, Mr Bush was as confident as he was when he last addressed that body a year ago. Then, he warned it that it would become irrelevant if it failed to meet Saddam's defiance of its resolutions. Yesterday, he did not admonish, but left his listeners in no doubt of his determination to prevail in Iraq and of his conviction that all nations of good will should contribute to this endeavour. His speech reached beyond the differences between Security Council members over Iraq to what he listed as the scourges of our age - terrorism, weapons proliferation, HIV/Aids, famine and the slavery of child prostitution.

How persuasive it proves will emerge over the next few months. Mr Bush first wants a resolution authorising an expanded but not determining UN role in Iraq. Then he would like troop contributions from countries such as Pakistan and Turkey, and increased financial commitments from a donors' conference in Madrid next month. He may yet be disappointed in some of these ambitions. But the tone of his speech suggested he thought the worst of UN obstructiveness was over.

In News
BUSH'S SPEECH: REACTION FROM U.S. TROOPS[/size]
By J. Grant Swank, Jr.
Sep 23, 2003, 14:10

''I personally don't care if the U.N. helps,'' said Sergeant-Major Rodney
Placzek. ''They weren't here for the start and they weren't here
afterwards. Why do we need their help now?''

''I feel it's good to see we have the support of everyone in our government and that they're trying to carry that over to the U.N.,'' said Sergeant Darryl McDougal. ''Then maybe we can get global support for what we'redoing.''

Rosalind Russell's Reuters' report goes straight to those defending New
Iraq - the troops.

What I don't get is the title of Ms. Russell's post: "U.S. soldiers in Iraq
shrug at Bush's U.N. speech."

Why the negative headline to the speech delivered by the United States President George W. Bush? The soldiers' comments are not shrugging off Mr.Bush's speech. They're speaking to the lack of U.N. support in contrast to the U.S. support.

I just don't get it. Or maybe I do.

Had he done as you suggest, Hobitbob, he would have been forwarding the views of the minority of Americans. 911 is significant to most Americans, as is progress on the struggle to prevent a recurrence.

He may be a disgrace to his English teacher, and he may be oratorally challenged--but I'm glad he was the one making the decisions when this crisis presented to us.

I will allow that perhaps in rural Georgia the majority agree with a belligerant, fundamentalist, anti-intellectual foreign policy, but I really doubt "most Americans" believe the dung that Bush shovels. if they do, then maybe America's time has passed

I do have a south Georgia edumacation

George Bush's speech that followed displayed the usual tone-deaf rhetoric that has become a hallmark of his foreign policy. While there were no outright lies, he was, as a British Cabinet Minister once said, "economical with the truth." Indeed, the president was positively miserly with the truth this time around.

His speech barely acknowledged the fact that the vast majority of UN members disagreed with the invasion being conducted in their name. Being the president of the United States means never having to say you're sorry. But even so, an occasional hands-on contact with reality would be useful. While Bush admitted last week that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 attacks, he declared once again today, "The regime of Saddam Hussein cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction." The phrase "ties to terror" is seemingly the ambiguous phrase of choice, carefully crafted to reinforce the mistaken beliefs of the 70 percent of Americans are convinced that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 without having to actually say so.

Indeed, Bush's speech introduced a whole new word to the spin-meisters' dictionary: "proliferators." This is an entirely new category of people, who have joined the ranks of assorted "evildoers," as enemies of all that is good in this world. While he did not explicitly mention a list of potential target countries like Cuba, Syria, or Iran as "proliferators," it sounded a lot like neoconservative vigilante justice as usual: "Because proliferators will use any route or channel that is open to them, we need the broadest possible cooperation to stop them."

* * *

In the end, there was little that was new in Bush's speech - just the same old tired assortment of cliches about terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and Iraq. It's not an argument that won many supporters in the UN when it was new, and is unlikely to do so six months into a botched-up occupation.