The US, UN & Iraq II

tres


Well done. It is pretty transparent, is it not.

Really?

This:

reads like a judgement to me.

As did snood, you seem to suggest that this is necessarily a bad thing. Politics is a show. There's no getting around that, and you can't blame Bush for doing what politicians do. (No, let me take that back. It's quite clear that you and others can and do blame Bush for doing exactly what other politicians have always done. :wink: )

Well done Robin Cook !! NO blood on yr hands !

I hesitate to post here, since I'm not as informed as I like to be before expressing an opinion. But I have thought the war is about oil. But it's not so much taking possession of Irac's oil fields for profit, which given the opportunity, I'm sure can and probably will happen too. But my understanding is that the White House believes we will loose control of Middle Eastern oil if we don't control of Irac's oil fields. I'm terribly uninformed about this, but I understood that the war's about oil because this administration thinks we could be held ransom by a Middle Eastern coalition and the health of our economy will be in jeopardy. It's Daddy B's old theory and that of his advisors who are now running the country, unelected, I might add.

I'm just thinking, if it would be any good to take the old "non-combattant" identity card of my late father with me, when I'll fly to the London meeting on Thursday.

Sorry, kind of touch of gallows humour.

Great, now I have three folks I know flying on Thursday! I am wondering if there will be significant changes in air schedules and procedures now that we are at 'war', sorta.

Re snood's question about Bush going to the Azores:

March 17, 2003

In Iraq Drama, Cheney Emerges
As President's War Counselor

As Bush Pursued Diplomacy, Vice President
Made Certain Invasion Remained on Table
By JEANNE CUMMINGS and GREG HITT
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


WASHINGTON -- Last September, President Bush set out on two tracks for dealing with Iraq that were never going to be easy to reconcile.

On Sept. 12, the president stood before the United Nations and asked for new Security Council resolutions calling on Iraq to peacefully disarm. But two days earlier, Mr. Bush had received a proposal to deal with Iraq in a manner more favored by his influential vice president, Dick Cheney: an updated plan for invasion.

The divergence of the two paths was fully apparent Sunday, when Mr. Bush joined his two closest allies on the Azores Islands and called on the United Nations to immediately fall in line behind the unconditional disarmament of Saddam Hussein, by force if necessary.

"Tomorrow [Monday] is a moment of truth for the world," declared Mr. Bush, flanked by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. Their joint news conference made clear that without U.N. action in the next 24 hours, the military option would become the only one left on the table.

It's also clear in retrospect that Mr. Bush always harbored doubts about what the diplomatic route could produce -- and that Mr. Cheney has quietly reinforced those doubts. At crucial points in the last eight months, he has stepped up internally with qualms about relying on the U.N. to finish what he considered to be an American job -- and has sown doubts about the usefulness of the U.N. at all.

BUILDING THE WAR FRONT



• March 6, 20031: Bush says U.S. will act without U.N. authorization.

• Jan. 312: In a tense appearance with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush reluctantly agrees to seek a second U.N. resolution paving the way to war.

• Jan. 303: Cheney: "Our purpose is not simply to follow a process ... the course of this nation does not depend upon the decisions of others."

• Dec. 19, 20024: Pentagon prepares a series of deployment orders that will wind up sending more than 250,000 troops to the Persian Gulf region.

• Nov. 85: U.N. Resolution 1441 passes, threatens "serious consequences" if Iraq fails to disarm.

• Sept. 126: Bush urges U.N. to confront "grave and gathering danger" of Iraq, says U.S. will act alone if necessary.

• Sept. 107: General Tommy Franks delivers updated Iraq invasion plans.


Source: USAID documents and contracts



While much attention in the move toward war with Iraq has been focused on the roles played by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, the vice president has played the largest role of all. That dynamic was clear Sunday, as the Iraq drama reached its final act. The two most overpowering pictures were of Mr. Bush at a summit meeting and Mr. Cheney, after nearly a month out of public view, emerging to make the case for war with lengthy interviews on national television.

"There's no question but [that] we're close to the end, if you will, of the diplomatic efforts," Mr. Cheney told NBC's Meet the Press. In one stark comment, he also made clear his underlying views of the U.N. "I don't think we damaged the United Nations. I think the United Nations up until now has proven incapable of dealing with the threat that Saddam Hussein represents."

As the Iraq drama unfolds, Mr. Cheney has become the war counselor with the lowest profile but the highest credibility with Mr. Bush. Repeatedly, he has defined the bottom line for U.S. policy: Mr. Hussein's prompt removal from power, with or without a broad international coalition.

Messrs. Bush and Cheney have shared that goal since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks made vivid the threat posed by anti-American terrorists who might obtain weapons of mass destruction. Before then, the administration had been content to contain Mr. Hussein. A debate over whether to join with Iraqi exiles in a renewed push for regime change languished inside the State Department. Mr. Bush never really addressed the question directly, for it never was pushed up to him.

Even after Sept. 11, the White House initially postponed its move toward regime change to keep focused on its war against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. "We've got Saddam Hussein bottled up for now," Mr. Cheney said at the time.

But with little public notice, Mr. Cheney began working on the Iraq issue with a new dedication. He quietly sought out experts on the politics and culture of the country. He reached out to Iraqi exiles such as Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile whose family led the country decades ago and who seeks to lead a post-Hussein Iraq. And he began hosting a series of small dinner parties -- some at his elegant official residence in Washington and others at the "undisclosed locations" where he'd been secluded for security reasons -- to share ideas with anti-Hussein intellectuals such as Princeton University scholar Bernard Lewis, Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami and conservative author Victor David Hanson.

Intellectual Support

The hard line struck at these gatherings provided intellectual support for Mr. Bush's own instincts. As the defense secretary in the first Bush administration, which closed the first Persian Gulf War without removing Mr. Hussein from power, Mr. Cheney had been called on for years to account for that decision. In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Rumsfeld adopted a wicked grin once when he prodded the vice president to admit to a crowded room of Pentagon employees that "not going to Baghdad" was one decision he regretted from his stint as Pentagon chief. "Yeah, I guess you're right," the vice president responded.

The policy debate over Iraq came to a full boil once war with Afghanistan subsided in the middle of last year. By late summer, it was becoming clear to insiders that the administration and the Republican Party were split on the question of how to proceed. Privately, Secretary of State Powell urged Mr. Bush to seek the assent of the United Nations before moving against Mr. Hussein.

By mid-August, Mr. Bush realized that he had to deal with the split. In a teleconference of leading administration figures that he conducted from his Crawford, Texas, ranch, Mr. Bush heard out the debate between Mr. Cheney and Mr. Powell. Initially, Mr. Powell seemed to gain the upper hand as the president agreed to seek U.N. approval in a scheduled speech at the U.N.

Mr. Cheney promptly moved to make sure nobody thought the U.N. solution and inspections would supplant Mr. Bush's ultimate goal of disarmament and regime change. In a speech to a veterans' convention in Nashville in late August, he said: "A person would be right to question any suggestion that we should just get inspectors back into Iraq, and then our worries will be over," Mr. Cheney said. "On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow 'back in the box,' " the vice president said.

Mr. Bush was annoyed at the appearance of public discord, if not at Mr. Cheney's reasoning. And within three weeks, it appeared that Mr. Cheney had lost the debate to Mr. Powell. On Sept. 12, President Bush asked the U.N. for the "necessary resolutions" to authorize new action against Iraq.

Parallel Path

In fact, Mr. Bush was proceeding on a parallel path to military preparations that Mr. Cheney favored. Two days before the U.S. submitted Security Council Resolution 1441 calling on Iraq to disarm, an updated plan for military action from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks landed on Mr. Bush's desk.


Mr. Powell's drive for diplomacy helped the administration win authorization to use force from Congress on Oct. 8. In private meetings with lawmakers through the fall, Mr. Bush acknowledged the appeal of acting through a coalition rather than simply imposing a U.S.-British military solution. Mr. Cheney argued that broad support wasn't necessary.

Throughout, Mr. Cheney was often absent from the public stage, fueling perceptions that security concerns had once again forced him to the "undisclosed locations" to which he repaired after the Sept. 11 attacks. In fact, his low profile stemmed from his belief that he can best serve Mr. Bush by offering advice privately.

The Security Council's unanimous endorsement of Resolution 1441 fostered an initial impression that the debate -- both within the administration, and between the U.S. and its allies -- had been settled. But it flared anew in early December when Mr. Hussein sent a 12,000-page report to the Security Council claiming he possessed no weapons of mass destruction. The next month, Mr. Powell himself began siding publicly with administration hawks after receiving a hostile lecture at the U.N. from the French foreign minister, the first unmistakable sign that France would prove an intransigent opponent of the war.

But Mr. Bush by then had already cast his lot with Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld by quietly directing the deployment of a critical mass of U.S. troops. By the end of February, they would number 250,000.

In new public remarks -- before a group of conservatives in a Virginia hotel ballroom -- Mr. Cheney once again warned the international community that the diplomatic effort wouldn't distract the U.S. from its ultimate aims. "Our purpose is not simply to follow a process, it is to end the terrible threats to the civilized world," he said.

That hard line didn't help Mr. Bush's staunchest ally, Mr. Blair, when they appeared in a joint news conference at the White House. Mr. Blair wanted Mr. Bush to take several steps to mollify opponents in Britain and across Europe. In the last two weeks, Mr. Bush, Mr. Powell and Mr. Blair have worked frantically to build support for a resolution that would set stiff requirements for Mr. Hussein to demonstrate, in short order, that he's ready to disarm.

Largely Aloof

Mr. Cheney has remained largely aloof from the process. He made a pitch for the second resolution in a call to Angola's president and a private meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin's chief of staff. But Mr. Cheney has spent much more time smoothing the way for military action and occupation. He placed a call to Turkish leader Racep Tayyip Edogan aimed at winning, at a minimum, the use of Turkish airspace in an attack on Iraq and, at best, gaining permission to move U.S. ground troops onto Turkish soil; that attempt has so far been fruitless.


Those close to him say the vice president is spending more time monitoring homeland-security efforts on the eve of war, and working closely with Mr. Rumsfeld to iron out last-minute adjustments to the war plans. The vice president has also taken a significant role in planning for the postwar rebuilding of Iraq.

In the last week of February, Mr. Cheney met here with the president of Azerbaijan to see if troops from that secular Muslim nation could serve in a peacekeeping role in postwar Iraq. And he has participated in a new internal debate with Mr. Powell on the role of Iraqi exiles in any new government.

State Department and CIA officials mistrust the wealthy, American-educated Mr. Chalabi, who was convicted in a Jordanian banking scandal more than a decade ago. But Mr. Cheney and his senior staff have remained stubborn advocates of Mr. Chalabi, a man they first got to know in the mid-1990s at the barbecues and golf games held at private seminars hosted by groups such as the Aspen Institute.

In the tug-of-war, the State Department has managed to quash any hopes Mr. Chalabi or other exile leaders may have held out for an appointed presidency similar to that of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. But the exiles remain undaunted, as are the vice president's senior aides. Mr. Cheney's senior aides are also regrouping -- lobbying the Pentagon to team U.S. administrators with some of the Iraqi exiles, including Mr. Chalabi.

Last month, Mr. Cheney joined Mr. Bush at an Oval Office meeting with three representatives from the Iraq exile community. Mr. Bush peppered them with questions about how the U.S. "could do this right." The visitors differed, with some arguing for elevation of the Iraqi exiles while Mr. Mukhlis said Iraqis still in the country should take on more-important roles than the exiles. As is typical, Mr. Cheney said very little during the meeting.

The last act of the diplomatic endgame has remained a subject for debate into its final hours. Administration officials say Mr. Powell doesn't want to force a Security Council vote that faces certain defeat, fearing long-term damage to the U.N. and American alliances. Mr. Cheney and his allies would be happy to force Security Council members to "show their cards," as Mr. Bush put it in a recent news conference.

He is also content to endure the barbs of world opinion to achieve the goal he shares with the president. Noting his own Western heritage, Mr. Cheney said on NBC Sunday that "the notion that the president is a cowboy ... is not necessarily a bad idea. He cuts to the chase ... . The leaders who will set the world, if you will, on a new course, deal effectively with these kinds of threats we've never faced before, will be somebody exactly like President Bush."

Write to Jeanne Cummings at [email protected] and Greg Hitt at [email protected]

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Kara - Please consider posting the important paragraphs from a citation and giving us the link. Such lengthy posts make for lots of scrolling and over time really do a number on load-time for the page.

(Just a friendly request! You are completely entitled to ignore it!)

tres, I tried. (And I'll admit all of the info at the bottom escaped me. I should have deleted it.)

I can read an article online at the WSJ site by giving my password, showing that we subscribe to the paper. But if I put that link here, you will get a password screen and won't be able to read the article.

I know it was long, but I felt it was important to let people read it.

Danish police have launched a manhunt after a former Iraqi army chief living under house arrest in Denmark disappeared.
He is now searched internationally.

Danish media speculate now that the CIA might have captured him to help the US
a) in war with the Kurds,
b) by his charismatic as a Iraquian war hero.
Exiled Iraqi ex-general missing [radio correspondant report, German 8 o'clock news]

Kara,
I have no subscrition to the WallSreetJournal, so thank you for posting.


Israel Eyes Possible Iraqi Strikes
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=540&ncid=721&e=7&u=/ap/20030317/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_iraq

Today's UN Wire
http://www.unfoundation.org/unwire/current.asp

Hi Lola, appreciate your straighforwardness. I had a2k cut down to a window so your name did not show. I hoped as I expanded the window, that it might be GWB posting for the first time, but I was not disappointed to find it was you!

Kara, you can get a password just by subscribing to the print version? How do you do that? I pay for the print version, but cannot also afford to spring an additional $23.00 or so for additional access.

roger, it is my husband's subscription, paid for from his office, but delivered to our home so that he can read it before work. His office must have paid for the online version, too. I got the password from his secretary.

steve

Oh, well. . . .

From USA Today, of all places, but good article:

"After Sunday's summit in the Azores, Portugal, President Bush (news - web sites) is poised to order a U.S.-led attack on Iraq even if the Security Council fails today to approve a resolution paving the way. He is proceeding with the support of such new allies as Bulgaria but against the open opposition of longtime friends such as France, a comrade in arms since the days of the American Revolution. He is pushing ahead despite the breach that the showdown has opened at the United Nations (news - web sites) and NATO (news - web sites) and the political peril it poses for his chief ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites).


It would be the first preventive war in U.S. history, the first time the nation has attacked without being struck first. An aide says Bush sees himself as redefining the U.S. role at a moment the ''tectonic plates'' of the world order are shifting -- as they did in 1776 and 1914 and at other big moments in history.


After the war, he has told aides, he plans to seek some way to prevent more nations from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.


''This is the boldest roll of the dice any president has done in the 30 years I've been a senator, and I would argue since 1947,'' as the Cold War began, says Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ''It is bold and it is dangerous.''


''It's a new era for foreign policy,'' says William Kristol, a leading Republican who helped develop the strategy while the party was out of power during the Clinton administration. ''Iraq has implications beyond Iraq and in a sense is about more than Iraq. It reflects a broader worldview. How it goes -- whether it goes well or not -- will very much affect people's judgments about what to do in the future'' in the world.


Going to war will be the first exercise of what some call the Bush doctrine. Under it, the United States is willing to use its military and economic supremacy to protect its interests and assert its values with or without direct provocation. And it is willing to act with or without the backing of the international alliances that it helped create after World War II.


That's a dramatic change from the policy of containment, adopted by President Truman in 1947, under which a united West would block Soviet expansionism until the Communist regime collapsed. Now, Bush's strategists believe, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the rise of a new terrorist threat a decade later have created the need for new global arrangements.


''We had certain strategies and policies and institutions that were built to deal with the conflicts of the 20th century,'' Vice President Cheney said Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press. ''They may not be the right strategies and policies and institutions to deal with the kind of threat we face now.''


One reason the U.N. debate has been so fierce is that others in the world, especially France, also see it as being about more than Iraq. ''We are defining a method to resolve crises,'' French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin told the Security Council last week.


Advocates of war with Iraq envision a quick victory, a welcoming populace and a transition to a stable democracy that provides a model for other countries in the Middle East. In the aftermath, the United States would turn less often to the United Nations and NATO. New alliances might be formed. Facing a triumphant United States, the reasoning goes, rogue nations would no longer dare support terrorism against Americans.


But skeptics caution that the war could be more protracted and more costly, and that the process of rebuilding Iraq could defy the best-laid plans. A diminished United Nations and NATO could be unable or unwilling to step in when the United States wants their involvement. Resentment of what is seen as imperialism could isolate the United States from its oldest friends and provoke more terrorism against Americans.


At stake in coming weeks is not only who rules Baghdad but also what role the United States will play in the 21st century. Ultimately, history's judgment of Bush's presidency is surely at stake.


The McCain doctrine?


Bush seems an unlikely architect of a new global doctrine.


During the 2000 campaign, the Republican contender advocating a more assertive foreign policy wasn't Bush. It was his chief rival, John McCain. The Arizona senator outlined a policy of ''rogue state rollback'' that included a willingness to use military might against outlaw nations.


Then, Bush's response to a possible nuclear threat from North Korea (news - web sites) was to support deployment of a national missile-defense system. He eschewed the ''nation-building'' that President Clinton (news - web sites) had pursued in Bosnia and Kosovo. He said the U.S. attitude toward other countries should be ''humble.'' His campaign promises focused on domestic and economic issues, not national security.





But the al-Qaeda attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, made fighting terrorism Bush's top priority. It also provided an opening for some advisers to persuade him to target Saddam as part of that war.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had been urging action against the Iraqi leader since soon after the first President Bush decided against pushing to Baghdad at the close of the first Gulf War (news - web sites). Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were powerful advocates, too.

''Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle ages ago decided that Saddam Hussein was really bad news,'' says Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind. Perle -- who worked for the first President Bush, as did Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld -- chairs a Pentagon (news - web sites) advisory board. ''But they had not won that argument'' with the president before Sept. 11.

Presidential declarations on foreign policy typically have been forged in the State Department. But the Bush doctrine has its roots in the Pentagon. He embraced it without extensive debate in public or apparent angst in private. Aides describe Bush as serenely confident about the course he's plotted.

Bush once dismissed a suggestion by Biden that he consider the nuances of some decision. ''Joe, I don't do nuance,'' he said.

Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) has found himself in the role of restraining the president on some fronts -- he pushed Bush to seek a U.N. resolution before acting on Iraq, for instance -- and explaining his policy to foreign officials who have reacted with concern and in some cases open opposition.

Step by step, Bush has moved toward the sweeping worldview of his most hawkish advisers:

* On the night of the attacks on New York and Washington, he vowed in a televised speech that the United States would ''make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.''

* In the State of the Union address in January 2002, he decried an ''axis of evil'' -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- whose pursuit of weapons of mass destruction threatened the world.

* In a new National Security Strategy, released in September 2002, he outlined a policy of pre-emption, of striking before a threat had fully materialized. ''We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends,'' it said.

Now, he is poised to order more than 225,000 U.S. troops massed in the Persian Gulf to attack Iraq. The goal is to end Saddam's brutal reign and dismantle Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction programs before chemical, biological or nuclear weapons could be used against the United States or its allies.

While the White House has lobbied hard for a Security Council resolution that would put a U.N. imprimatur on an attack, Bush made it clear on Sunday that he is prepared to act without it.

Never before has the United States launched a pre-emptive or preventive war, says Scott Bennett, a political scientist at Penn State and co-author of a new study on the causes of international wars in the 19th and 20th centuries. Three of the 85 wars fought during that time were classified as preventive. None of those was launched by the United States. One of them was launched against the United States, by Japan with the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

''Iraq is an optional war,'' says Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank in Washington. The attack on Iraq is intended not only to deal with a military threat but also to change the politics of the region. That is ''profoundly different'' from the way the United States has used its power before, she says.

Unprecedented in scope

In the past, some presidents have acted pre-emptively against threats. John Kennedy secretly backed Cuban refugees who sought to topple Fidel Castro (news - web sites) in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Lyndon Johnson, alarmed by the prospect of a Communist government in the Dominican Republic, sent in U.S. forces in 1965. Dwight Eisenhower used the CIA (news - web sites) in 1953 to help solidify the pro-Western reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran.

But none of those conflicts involved launching a war or declaring a new doctrine. ''What we're doing is not entirely without precedent, but it really is on a much larger scale,'' presidential historian Robert Dallek says.

Whether the Bush doctrine becomes enduring U.S. policy depends not on the war but on the aftermath. Some doctrines have had shorter lives than others: Truman's decision to offer aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947 began a containment policy that continued for more than a half-century and prevailed in the Cold War. But Woodrow Wilson's vision of a new order after World War I collapsed in failure and chaos.

When the war with Iraq is over, does the breach between Washington and what Rumsfeld has dismissed as ''Old Europe'' heal or worsen? Does the pre-emptive U.S. attack on Iraq become a model for dealing with other rogue nations? What role will the U.N. play?

Never before has the United States been so certain of victory and so unsure about what would happen next.

Some White House officials have long been impatient with and even contemptuous of the United Nations. Bush warns that it risks irrelevancy by failing to enforce its resolutions demanding Iraqi disarmament. A senior administration official says that Bush plans to seek a new way to control the proliferation of the world's deadliest weapons. He won't try to do so through the United Nations or some similar body.

''You need something effective,'' the official says. He dismissed the ''political correctness'' of the United Nations, where small countries like Cameroon and Chile have the same General Assembly vote as the superpower United States.

Joseph Nye, a presidential scholar and dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, says Bush is likely to find he needs the support of the U.N. and other international institutions to rebuild Iraq and combat terrorism. ''You can't solve terrorism by yourself, and the military can't solve the whole problem of terrorism,'' he says. Bush says he realizes that. ''I understand the wars of the 21st century are going to require incredible international cooperation,'' he said Sunday. After the war with Iraq, if it comes, he said the United States would help the U.N. ''get its legs, its legs of responsibility back.''

He didn't elaborate on what the U.N. role would be.

If war with Iraq succeeds as envisioned, Kristol says, the United States will be in a position to pursue a more confrontational policy toward rogue regimes and move to ''remake'' the Middle East.

And if it doesn't go well? ''Then everything is up in the air.''

"France has put a secuirty council consensus beyond reach"

J Straw

- go to war, (illegally) destroy the authority of the UN split the EU and NATO and blame the froggies. Nice one Jack.

You can always tell, when people throw all the blame in one direction, that they NEED to have someone to blame to get THEMSELVES off the hook...

In which case it is probably illegal for you to post the piece here. If you have to pay for access to it, that--by definition--means they intend people to pay to read it. When you post it here you are technically breaking the law. (Not to mention it just isn't "cricket".)

Not trying to be a jerk, but I happen to believe in letting the owners of property dictate how it can and will be used. (The law agrees with me on this.)

With a pay source, the best you can do is mention what you've read and point people to how to pay to read it themselves.

(Or am I wrong? Anyone?)