Registered: May 2002
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...did he say anything important? funny?
Apparently the soothing voice of the chick who does the Annan translations put me to sleep, 'cause I slept pretty much through Bush's entire speech. Woke up to the irritable sounds of Congress arguing about the cost of the War.

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Upstate NY
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STANDING FIRM
John Podhoretz

September 24, 2003 -- FOR two weeks now, there's been a whole lot of nyah- nyahing from the opponents of George Bush on the subject of the United Nations.
News reports were saying Bush was going to change his tune and ask the United Nations to take on a major role in the reconstruction of Iraq.

There was talk that France, once again, would flex its flabby little muscle on the U.N. Security Council in an effort to counteract American plans with a mischievous insistence that Iraq be granted total political sovereignty by next month.

How humiliating for Bush, his adversaries crowed. Having warned that the United Nations was in danger of becoming irrelevant at last year's General Assembly meeting, Bush would now be admitting he had been mistaken and that there could be no forward progress in Iraq without the world body.

Wrong.

In an exquisitely polite speech before the General Assembly yesterday, the president asked the United Nations to play the following specific role in Iraq's rebuilding: "As in the aftermath of other conflicts, the United Nations should assist in developing a constitution, in training civil servants and conducting free and fair elections."

As he told Brit Hume of Fox News on Monday night, "I do think it would be helpful to get the United Nations in to help write a constitution. I mean, they're good at that. Or, perhaps when an election starts, they'll oversee the election."



But that seems to be about it.

Yes, the United States is trying to secure military assistance and troops from other countries for Iraq.

No, U.S. forces in Iraq will not be placed under U.N. command. No, the Iraqi economy will not be run by U.N. bureaucrats. No, no, no. The job in Iraq still belongs to the United States. The $66 billion we'll be spending there this year is money America will be spending, not Kofi Annan.

Bush showed off his Yankee roots in the mannerly and gentlemanly tone of his speech. He commended the U.N.'s ongoing efforts at food aid and childhood immunization in Iraq, and paid moving tribute to Sergio Viera de Mello, the U.N. administrator killed in last month's terror strike in Baghdad.

He even made a conciliatory bow to France, a country somewhere in Europe full of rude people who are possessed of the delusion that they matter:

"I also recognize that some of the sovereign nations of this assembly disagreed with our actions," the president said. "Yet there was and there remains unity among us on the fundamental principles and objectives of the United Nations. . . . So let us move forward."

The one thing the president did not do - the one thing his adversaries and others expected he would have to do - is emend the challenge he posed last year to the United Nations in these famous words: "All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?"

Bush glided over the question of U.N. relevance by casting the war in Iraq as the fulfillment of U.N. Resolution 1441 and the "serious consequences" it promised Saddam Hussein if the dictator did not comply.

But once again the question must be asked: If George W. Bush fails to get some kind of resolution out of the Security Council committing the United Nations to a role in Iraq's reconstruction, what effect will it have?

None.

The work will go on. American academics and legal scholars, rather than U.N. officials, will help draft the new Iraqi constitution. Americans (maybe even Jimmy Carter) will be asked to help oversee and validate Iraqi elections. And should the United Nations pull out entirely due to security concerns (there was another bombing at its Baghdad compound yesterday), the United States and its allies will be there to finish the job.

Bush did not say the United Nations was irrelevant. He also didn't say that the ground gets wet when it rains.

Some things are irrefutable matters of fact even if they aren't discussed openly.

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/o...nists/40559.htm

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Registered: Aug 2001
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Got to love those Murdoch papers.

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Registered: Jun 2002
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Another viewpoint from the Foreign Editor of the London Times

Bush solves nothing with bungled pitch to the world
by Bronwen Maddox



PRESIDENT BUSH won what he thought he wanted from the United Nations yesterday, but as he walked away from the podium, it was already vanishing in his hands. It is a superficial triumph that will fail to solve a single one of his problems in Iraq.
He will get the UN resolution that he thinks he now needs. That will give UN endorsement to the project of rebuilding Iraq. But if Bush thinks that it means troops and money will now flow from other countries towards Baghdad, he is deluding himself.

Other leaders will back his resolution, or abstain, because they know that it will be a meaningless expression of support for the principle of united action. In practice, it will commit them to nothing.

We are told that Bush’s speechwriters wrestled with his text for weeks, rewriting it throughout the weekend. He should sack them. It is no shame that his delivery fell short of the tragedy and fury of his speech just days after the September 11 attacks, or the one that followed the first anniversary last year.

But even by everyday standards, it was one of his worst: flat, self-indulgent and much too long. It began by invoking the “battlefield” of New York; Bush was referring to September 11, but it was an unfortunate metaphor, given his battles with the audience in front of him.

He moved too briskly through his remarks on Iraq, supposedly the heart of the speech. He conceded nothing on his handling of the war and its aftermath, but amended his justification for military action. American troops had uncovered countless examples of Saddam Hussein’s cruelty, he said, even if they had not found the elusive weapons of mass destruction.

He had some slight compliments to pay the UN, saying that its agencies had done a good job of fighting malaria. But oddly, he devoted almost the final minutes of the speech to the evils of sex tourism with children, sex slavery and, finally, slavery in general.

No one would disagree with him, of course, but for just that reason, it was a gratuitous attempt to claim common cause — as perhaps was his parting benediction of “God bless you all”. Sex tourism might be emotive, but it is way down the UN agenda; at the top, inescapably, is Iraq.

Despite the chippiness of Bush’s pitch, will other countries help him? Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General, while taking the opportunity to chastise the United States for unilateralism, also called for united action in Iraq. The US has hoped that four, in particular, would do so: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Turkey. It wants as soon as possible another international division of about 15,000 troops, and beyond that even more, to allow some of the 130,000 US troops in Iraq to go home.

If the UN now passes a resolution, it will reveal whether countries were using its absence as the perfect excuse to stay out of Iraq. But they have others. There is the danger, as the car bomb on Monday near the UN headquarters reminded them, and there is the political risk, given the sheer unpopularity of the Iraq enterprise among many of their people.

Pakistan said yesterday that passage of a resolution would make it “much easier” to contribute troops, but President Musharraf made no commitment. India? Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, acknowledged yesterday that it would probably still be too difficult politically for Delhi to join in. But he maintained that Turkey “is a possibility” and so, too, Bangladesh.

This looks like the recipe for a few thousand soldiers, at best a division. But it is not the a signal that US soldiers in Iraq should pack their bags. For Bush, not much that was said yesterday looked like lifting the burden of acting alone.

Security issue


Kofi Annan mentioned, in passing, that it might be time to look again at whether the size of the UN Security Council and its voting rules were still appropriate. That is a perennial theme for the past ten years, but one that suddenly is gaining new impetus after four moribund years.

Nobody has an easy solution, but in calling on the UN to look at reasons why countries felt obliged to act unilaterally, Annan was not just throwing a sop to Washington in his otherwise caustic lecture. He was saying, bluntly, that he personally thought it was worth another try.

At the moment, there are five permanent members, each with a veto: the United States, Britain, Russia, China and France. There are ten other rotating members, serving two-year terms.

Almost all ideas for reform would expand the Security Council. “Enlargement” is the word that France has tried to insert into all discussions; it is UN code for not throwing existing members — such as France — out into the cold. In the last attempt four years ago to draw up a new scheme, there was general agreement that Japan and Germany were obvious candidates. Some favoured also adding one from Asia, Africa and Latin America. But although Brazil, India and Nigeria thought that they were the leading contenders, Argentina, Pakistan, Indonesia and South Africa (for a start) did not agree.

Could the number of permanent members be enlarged, but the number of rotating ones shrunk? Possibly, but do you then give 10 or 15 permanent members a veto? It would be unworkable, many agree.

Drafts finally stalled on whether there could be an “outer circle” of permanent members without a veto.

These are arcane matters, of course, rivalling any European debate over bureaucratic architecture. But if Annan wants to avoid future cause for countries to go it alone, he may have to dust off those plans.

Changing sides


In a gathering where there were few enough declaring themselves to be friends of the United States, one formerly friendly voice added itself to the opposition.
Ahmad Chalabi, the present head of the interim Iraqi Governing Council and a former protégé of the Pentagon, sided firmly with the French in calling for a very fast handover of sovereignty.

While thanking the US for getting rid of Saddam, he made a long list of demands that clash at every point with American policy. He wants the UN General Assembly to give his US-appointed 25-member body sovereign status. He wants the council to have at least partial control of finance and security. And he does not want any more foreign troops in the country.

This is a blow, for the Pentagon had groomed Chalabi to be its man in Baghdad.

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Registered: Aug 2001
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Gotta love those Murdoch papers.

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Registered: Oct 2001
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Looks like there Chiswick Towers will likely be coming under the mandate of future UN resolutions against Sexual Tourism.

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http://www.nationalpost.com/comment...81-481ACFFADF3C

This is a U.S.-led project

David Warren
Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, September 24, 2003


President Bush's address to the General Assembly yesterday will not make sense, entirely, if the reader has fallen for the false media account of the sequence of events. The first thing to grasp is that the U.S. appeal for United Nations help in Iraq and Afghanistan is nothing new. It is the continuation of an appeal that began more than a year ago, when Mr. Bush last addressed the General Assembly.

The fact that UN members have been remarkably unco-operative in the meantime does not make this latest speech surprising. I, personally, may disagree with the Bush strategy, in having gone to the UN at all, but the administration has been perfectly consistent, and almost inhumanly patient. The rebuilding of Iraq -- which necessarily involved the removal of the totalitarian dictatorship of Saddam Hussein -- has been U.S. policy continuously. And so has been the U.S. appeal for help. They didn't get much of it for the invasion, they are still hoping for more in the après-guerre.

As Mr. Bush affirmed yesterday, this is a U.S.-led project. It cannot be otherwise -- no one else volunteered for the job. Politically, the Bush administration must take the lion's share of credit for what is being achieved in Iraq -- there are few saints in high political office. But then it deserves the credit, from doing the lion's share of the work.

As he also hinted, there would be no point in muttering ungraciously if France, Germany and other powers, which got conspicuously in the way, now want to be included in the prize round. The world is the world, it needs mercy more than justice.

The second big lie, in urgent need of correction, is that the United States expects much from the UN itself. The haplessness of that organization has already been demonstrated, with an abundance exceeding farce. What the United States instead needs is a resolution from that augustly fickle body. It can then use the resolution to collect on promises from not only France and Germany, but more particularly such countries as India and Turkey, which said they'd send troops and aid of various kinds, but have used the lack of a UN resolution as an excuse for dawdling.

What the UN itself can do, are the few things it has proved good at: the academic game of constitution-writing, and sending observers to monitor free elections. It has other skills, which were previously requested, such as the art of processing and sustaining refugees. But as there appear to be no refugees to process or sustain, they may turn their attention back to the various human catastrophes in sub-Saharan Africa. (Interesting fact: I learn from someone inside the Canadian refugee claims bureaucracy that not one Iraqi has applied for refugee status in Canada since May 1, which as The New York Times says in its malicious daily mantra on sniping incidents, was "the day President Bush declared an official end to major combat operations.")

What the UN can also do, is get right out of the way of efforts to attract foreign investment to Iraq, and to develop and export its oil resources. Aid commitments are useful for the short term, and anything that can be spent intelligently on Iraq's physical infrastructure is helpful. It is not war damage that needs recovering from: this was merely incidental. Decades of Saddamite tyranny left the country, like so many others in the Middle East, with an infrastructure designed for the benefit of the country's military and political elites. It is time now to beat swords into ploughshares, and spears into pruning-hooks.

In the longer run, it is better if Iraq pays for its own reconstruction. It sits on the second-biggest oil reserve, after Saudi Arabia's, it should not be hard to make ends meet, and the discipline is important. The U.S. taxpayer has been hit fairly heavily for the cost of the country's liberation, and need not follow this up by cultivating a form of welfare dependency. Afghanistan, lacking oil, has anyway the greater need.

As to the UN itself, President Chirac of France, and Kofi Annan the Secretary-General, have been displaying more than their wonted openness towards institutional reform. It would be nice if we could have a United Nations in which, for instance, such vicious governments as those of Libya, Syria, Cuba were viewed as the pariahs, instead of such bourgeois democracies as Israel and USA. But that is asking more than I think is obtainable from an organization ultimately controlled by the votes of its 191 members, the majority of which are unspeakable despotisms, and most of the rest ruled, democratically or otherwise, by cynical, posturing hooves (like our own dear Prime Minister). For the foreseeable future, sweetness and light should be sought more practicably, as socialism once was, "in one country" at a time.

Iraq, and Afghanistan, now offer the world, and the Islamic region, an unprecedented opportunity to pursue good works -- to raise men up from squalour and slavery to prosperity and freedom. Through its courage and persistence, the Bush administration and the United States have created this opportunity. It is beyond the moral and intellectual capacity of much of the world to acknowledge this fact, but let them at least act in subconscious acknowledgement.

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Registered: Sep 2000
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quote:

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Originally posted by MstrG
It would be nice if we could have a United Nations in which, for instance, such vicious governments as those of Libya, Syria, Cuba were viewed as the pariahs, instead of such bourgeois democracies as Israel and USA. But that is asking more than I think is obtainable from an organization ultimately controlled by the votes of its 191 members, the majority of which are unspeakable despotisms

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Registered: Aug 2001
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I personally prefer to hold my nation and those we choose to ally with to far far higher standards than other nations.

Incidentally, the Israeli government is, without much doubt, a vicious one; the debate (it seems to me) is about whether or not it has to be or ought to be, but not about whether or not it is.

Great paragraph to stick on the wall if you like emotive nonsense.

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Registered: Aug 2001
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*coughvetoscoughfundingcough*

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Registered: May 2002
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thanks for posting the articles guys.

Yeah, I agree with mudded. Our president blows. Congress should use the funding like a carrot on a stick so the Lonestar HAS to ask for UN support.

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