Great NYT article, criticizes US, France, everyone

superdave · Mar 17, 2003

To me, that's what made it great...this situation is really f**** up, so there's lots of blame to go around. It's multi-faceted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/17/international/middleeast/17RECO.html
Some highlights

Dining in September with a group of foreign ministers at the elegant Hotel Pierre in New York, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was uneasy. France was advocating that a first resolution at the United Nations Security Council, demanding that Iraq promptly disclose its weapons and disarm, must be followed by a second resolution authorizing war if Iraq refused.

"Be sure about one thing," Mr. Powell told Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister. "Don't vote for the first, unless you are prepared to vote for the second."

Mr. de Villepin assented, officials who were there said.
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This makes it sound like the French are lying weasels.

Administration officials acknowledge that as the White House switched its signals — was the aim to disarm Iraq, or to defeat its leaders? — the mixed messages undercut the claim that the United States, too, wanted to avoid a war.
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Assertions that Iraq was linked to Al Qaeda backfired, too, European officials said, as intelligence services in Europe told their leaders that even the Central Intelligence Agency had doubts about the connection.
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In retrospect, the military buildup and the diplomacy were out of sync with each other," said Richard C. Holbrooke, ambassador to the United Nations in the Clinton administration. "The policies were executed in a provocative way that alienated our friends."

By mid-September, the contradictions were apparent to both sides. It was then that Iraq acceded to receiving the inspections, with Secretary General Kofi Annan at the United Nations helping Iraq draft the statement letting them in.

French officials recall that, whereas they were elated at this development, they detected that American officials seemed to be upset. "It should have been a happy moment," said a French official. "But the Americans saw it as a setback. They showed they never wanted the inspections to work."
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Ouch.

Some in the administration say that before Mr. Blix went in, Mr. Bush or Mr. Powell should have made a major speech framing the issue the way that the United States saw it — that small, niggling steps by Iraq were not evidence that inspections were workable.

But again, they said, there was a desire not to be seen as too eager for war even though the eagerness was barely disguised anyway.
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A major theme of the article, to me, is that the Bushies never really figured out what they wanted. And that impacted our actions. The world perceived many, many of our actions as contradictory, which naturally heightened mistrust of the US. In particular, this "the US wanted to do X but didn't because they didn't want to appear too eager for war" pops up alot.

Everyone comes in for criticism...the French, the Bush hawks, Powell (for being naive, and making too many phone calls and not enough trips), Blix.

Also, the article has alot of really good stuff on why we haven't been able to persuade Chile, Mexico, etc., to side with us. It would be too long for me to snip it all here, but interesting.

I always thought the United States would have been able to get nine votes for just about anything," said a diplomat involved in the process of the last few months. "What I didn't expect was that the skeptics would become more entrenched. One African official said to me, `What can the Americans do to us? Are they going to bomb us? Invade us?' "
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The article is worth the time you'll invest reading all 4 pages.

MikeLastort2 · Mar 17, 2003

Bump

Ian McCracken · Mar 17, 2003

Hmmm, interesting. Does the New York Times bother to criticize SADDAM HUSSEIN at all? I refuse to put a hit on NYT's website so you'll have to answer the question for me.