The US, UN & Iraq II

Perception - not one of us here wants america to fail. We want america to raise to it's greatest potential. Some of us don't believe that being a bully is our supreme goal.

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LittleK, I agree with you. Our finest hour would be in leading the world out of war, showing the other countries how it is done.

Gautam, Nice photo

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Perception - not one of us here wants america to fail. We want america to raise to it's greatest potential. Some of us don't believe that being a bully is our supreme goal.

LittleK, I agree with you. Our finest hour would be in leading the world out of war, showing the other countries how it is done.

great wilso

What are they all saying?

Sources said that one of the documents was a letter discussing the uranium deal supposedly signed by Niger President Tandja Mamadou. The sources described the signature as "childlike" and said that it clearly was not Mamadou's.

Another, written on paper from a 1980s military government in Niger, bears the date of October 2000 and the signature of a man who by then had not been foreign minister of Niger in 14 years, sources said.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/14/sprj.irq.documents/

The impact of Bush linking 9/11 and Iraq ...

Secret US report scorns Bush policy attacks Middle East policy
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
15 March 2003


A classified State Department report has poured scorn on George Bush's much-touted policy that a military invasion of Iraq will lead to a flowering of democracy across the Middle East.

The report, leaked to the Los Angeles Times, is the latest indication of divisions within the Bush administration on the goals and even the wisdom of the war it is itching to start. And it offers a rebuke to neo-conservatives whose grandiose theories about refashioning the world in America's image have been central to the Iraq enterprise from the start.

"Political changes conducive to broader and enduring stability throughout the region will be difficult to achieve for a very long time," the report says. It cites corruption, serious infrastructure degradation and overpopulation as reasons to doubt whether any kind of stability, much less fully functioning democratic government, will be possible in the foreseeable future, in Iraq or in many of its neighbours. "Liberal democracy would be difficult to achieve," the report goes on. And it warns that any electoral democracy would be subject to exploitation by "anti- American elements" - a reference to the Islamist parties that American foreign policy has been at pains to exclude from government across the Middle East, even if that means supporting autocratic and repressive regimes. The intelligence source who leaked the document concluded: "This idea that you're going to transform the Middle East and fundamentally alter its trajectory is not credible."

The date on the report, 26 February, was the very day the President laid out his vision of a domino effect, in which a US invasion of Iraq would be the beginning of a democratic revolution throughout the Middle East. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," Mr Bush said.

The State Department report, by contrast, dismisses the domino theory in its title: Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes.

A private memo written by the Spanish ambassador to the UN, Inocencio Arias, and seen by the Guardian, accuses the British government of being "exclusively obsessed" with swaying public opinion.

Mr Arias, clearly exasperated by the extent of leaks from the UK, said the British government was so nervous about the lack of public support for military action it had broken a joint agreement between the three governments to keep silent about strategy .

The British, he said, were engaged in "an attempt to show to their public opinion that London has made, right up until the last moment, a major effort to seek peace, which explains the leaks to the press".

Pentagon seeks freedom to pollute land, air and sea

Robert Fisk: The forgotten power of the General Assembly
14 March 2003


For 30 years, America's veto policy in the United Nations has been central to its foreign policy. More than 70 times the United States has shamelessly used its veto in the UN, most recently to crush a Security Council resolution condemning the Israeli killing of the British UN worker Iain Hook in Jenin last December.

Most of America's vetoes have been in support of its ally Israel. It has vetoed a resolution calling for the Israeli withdrawal from the Syrian Golan Heights (January, 1982), a resolution condemning the killing of 11 Muslims by Israeli soldiers near the al-Aqsa mosque (April, 1982), and a resolution condemning Israelis slaughter of 106 Lebanese refugees at the UN camp at Qana (April, 1986).

The full list would fill more than a page of this newspaper. And now we are told by George Bush Junior that the Security Council will become irrelevant if France, Germany and Russia use their veto? I often wonder how much further the sanctimoniousness of the Bush administration can go. Much further, I fear.

In the respected Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, a leading hawk, was quoted last month as telling Israeli officials that Iran would be ''dealt with'' after the war with Iraq. Bolton declined requests for an interview.