April 2, 2003
WHO WILL MAKE THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME?:
Germany Now Backs Regime Change in Iraq (STEPHEN GRAHAM, Associated Press)German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said Wednesday he hoped Saddam Hussein's government would collapse quickly, marking a stark turnaround from Germany's previous opposition to regime change as a goal of the U.S.-led war."We hope the regime will collapse as soon as possible and we'll have no further loss of life--civilians or soldiers," Fischer said before a meeting with his British counterpart, Jack Straw, at a hotel in Berlin's Grunewald suburb.
Both foreign ministers stressed common ground in Europe on Iraq--a position that would seem hard to stake out after the diplomatic rift over whether war should be waged to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.
Germany firmly opposed the war, joining France and Russia in opposing a U.N. resolution that would have authorized force, on the grounds that peaceful means to disarm Iraq had not been exhausted. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has condemned regime change as a war aim.
Britain, Italy, Spain and several eastern European countries have stood firmly behind the United States' conviction that Iraq would never disarm voluntarily.
However, Straw said the divide over how to disarm Iraq "disguised a great deal of agreement."
Fischer grounded his wish for regime change in Iraq in the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Iraq--a similar argument to the one he laid out when he supported NATO--led campaigns to end the Bosnian war and the Kosovo conflict.
"The humanitarian situation is very alarming," Fischer told reporters.
Who but a German leader would be unconcerned about the humanitarian situation in a dictatorship but alarmed during the liberation?
MEANWHILE, IN VICHY:
French PM wades into a tide of anti-Americanism (John Lichfield, 03 April 2003, The Independent)
The Prime Minister of France, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, is expected to make a statement today denouncing anti-Americanism and making it clear that France is "on the side of democracy" in the Iraq war.Although the French government remains convinced that the war is unjustified and probably illegal, M. Raffarin has been alarmed by signs of growing anti-American and anti-Semitic feeling at anti-war demonstrations in Paris and other French cities.
He has also been disturbed by an opinion poll earlier this week that suggested one in four French people was on the side of the Iraqi government and one in three would prefer to see a victory for Saddam Hussein. Other commentators suggested that the poll – showing a majority of French people (53 per cent) wanted to see an American victory, despite 78 per cent opposition to the war – was nothing to worry about.
They pointed out that the far left and the far right in France – both habitually anti-American and blindly pro-Iraqi for many years – added up to about 30 per cent of the electorate. Seen in this light, the 33 per cent "on the whole supporting Iraq" was not such a surprising total, they said.
There's a national motto for you: only one in three a Stalinist! Posted by Orrin Judd at April 2, 2003 8:05 PM
To invert Branch Rickey's famous maxim: We could have finished in first place without you. Oh wait - we did
. I guess it's not too soon for the bandwagon to get moving.
...a French leader..??
Posted by: John J. Coupal at April 2, 2003 8:31 PMJohn:
Even lemmings have a point man.
What is illegal about the war? I keep reading this, hearing it on radio and seeing it on the tube, but nobody explains why. Everything I can find seems to show it to be authorized by the UN resolutions - especially the one ending GWI and establishing the original inspections. What is the thought process and evidence that would lead one to believe this nonsense? This is not a rhetorical question, I am truly stumped!
Posted by: Pat H at April 3, 2003 1:07 AMPat H:
The anti-war crowd would say there'd be a requirement for a resolution specifically authorising war on Iraq in order for it to be legal.
The fascist left has the idea that society should be organized hierarchically and that authority should flow downward from the top of the hierarchy, rather than upward from the people. In so far as there's a hierarchy of nations, the UN is at the top, and therefore they think it must be the lawgiver.
Whereas we Americans think that authority and power resides with the people, who delegate it in limited doses to governments. We've never delegated any significant authority to the UN, and so we don't recognize its authority.
paul:
IMHO you have hit the nail on the head. The danger that is building in the good old USA, it seems to me, is our abondonment of the basic principles you cite. It's happening slowly and through small steps but it's happening.
I think it was Howard Taft who said that .." when the people support the government the control rests with people, but when the government supports the people the people are controlled.." I am paraphrasing but the principle is profound.
The experiment with statism in all its forms
during the 20th century, and the UN is a great example, has created a huge and costly government structure that has developed interests of its own aside from the interests it was designed to serve. The growth of the administrative state within our own country, i.e. the vast beuracracies in charge of education, energy, housing, health, welfare, environment etc., all have their versions in the UN I'm sure, and are about as efficient and productive. Government permission is necessary before any business can hire, expand etc. The threat of the cutoff of federal funding to the states controls the
states and makes them conform to standards created by administrators answerable to our representives in theory.
The cult of the expert has cowed the people into honestly believing that global warming, for instance, is real because the head of the Clinton/Gore EPA said it was.
The mantras of the left in the current global crisis have been international consensus as opposed to "unilateralism", as you said:when did we delegate authority to any international body? The real danger, it seems to me, is the more comfortable we become with the administrative state domestically the easier it will become to sell the people on the ideas inherent in world government.