Coalescence
The Washington Post reports that Colin Powell has had enough of this crap.
On the other hand, the hackneyed "Cheney & Rumsfeld are hawks, Powell's a dove" script has always been more press spin than reality methinks.
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Dean's World Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy. |
The French and the Germans, make that Frogs and Krauts, have screwed the pooch bigtime.
This means that the UN will be gone from New York City within my lifetime.
If I were Powell I'd be pissed off too. The French even went so far as to ambush him for seemingly no reason other than that they could.
It will be no big loss if we receive support from neither the French nor Germans. They gave up their ability to influence international events when they opted for socialist welfare state statism after the Cold War ended. Projecting your political influence internationally is more difficult without a strong military; the Germans and French are just learning this now.
America has done the heavy lifting for NATO for the past few decades anyway. We were doing the heavy lifting for the United Nations for years paying the largest dues share to that organization. Now France and Germany have little to offer in this new round with Iraq since each dedicates only about 1% of their respective GDP to national defense. Neither Germany nor France can contribute much even if they want.
Dean, a Guardian article on some of the current process:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,881215,00.html
Interesting stuff. Looks like they are working on things like timing to allow Blair to get over here and consult with Bush before any major commitments. This would help prevent the appearance of Blair being a puppet.