March 16, 2003

Troops move to battle positions as Bush and Blair give up on UN route (Sean Rayment and Colin Brown, telegraph.co.uk)

Ministers said Mr Blair was left with no option but to support military action without a fresh UN mandate, blaming Jacques Chirac, the French president, for sabotaging attempts last week to win the Security Council votes of six wavering countries.

"Chirac has handed the case for military action to us with his intransigence," said a Cabinet minister. "He has been inflexible and unreasonable."

Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, will tell the Lords tomorrow that he advised Mr Blair that existing UN resolutions, including last year's resolution 1441, give him the legal authority to declare war. He felt that the legal case might be weakened if a further resolution was voted down by a majority of the 15-member Security Council.

I know there are sceptics among us, but as far as I can see this has played out pretty much the way the administration expected. 1441 gives us a "legal" basis for acting. There's not much the UN can do about it (which might be the legendary statement that's never false). Public support in the US has only grown, Blair had the opportunity to try to work through the UN and our build up is just coming up to full strength. M. Chirac has done us a signal service in helping bolster US and British support. I wish Turkey had cooperated, but it is not entirely to the bad that it hasn't and I'm still not convinced that the northern front is lost. It could have gone better, of course, but it could have gone much worse.

Posted by David Cohen at March 16, 2003 7:11 PM
Comments

I'll take any war I can get, but if there

was any advantage to the US from all

this futzing around, I fail to understand it.



Is France more irrelevant than it was in 2002

-- or 1939 or 1919? No. And if it were, so

what?



I wrote a pro-war column last week -- just

about the only pro-war statements to have

appeared in my paper -- and the response

has been, in the understated local style,

tremendous.



The Americans -- polls be damned, I'm

talking about my friends -- are quietly

ready for war and resolute. None has

taken off his clothes for war; unlike the

"hippie chicks" (ugly, underfed hippie chicks,

I might add) that Tim Blair linked to

yesterday.



The utter irrelevance of the antiwar stance

is summed up in clothes. They do, indeed,

make the man.

Posted by: Harry Eagar at March 16, 2003 8:38 PM

Turned Powell into the leading hawk, destroyed the EU and the UN, gave us time to position our forces, etc., etc., etc.

Posted by: oj at March 16, 2003 9:15 PM

And gave Saddam....?



Let's hope your right, oj.

Posted by: Barry Meislin at March 17, 2003 2:13 AM

Well next time the US wants to do something they'll know the bulk of the population will understand if they tell the UN to buzz off.

Posted by: M Ali Choudhury at March 17, 2003 4:39 AM
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