UN Prepares for Meeting About Iraq, Wary of US Motives

[kskiska]

UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 17 — The United States comes to the United Nations on Monday, asking the organization that the Bush administration has kept at a deliberate distance from its Iraq stabilization plan to step in now and help rescue it.

In off-the-record comments, many here complain about being asked to validate a process from which they were excluded, and wonder if the world organization is not being manipulated by the White House for election-year political purposes.

The November agreement between the United States and the Iraqi Governing Council to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30 made no mention of any United Nations role, and the omission was one that Secretary General Kofi Annan said he took as a snub.

But on Monday, L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, and a delegation of the United States-appointed Governing Council will be asking Mr. Annan to commit the United Nations to saving the arrangement, after it has come under fire in Iraq.

more…
http://nytimes.com/2004/01/18/international/middleeast/18NATI.html

[lovedems]

1. Just like Christie Todd Whitman (for those who have read the O'Neill book)

This administration took Colin Powell's hard earned reputation and made him look like a fool in front of the entire world.

On the one hand, I can't see the UN turning their backs on a nation so in need of help, but on the other hand, if they feel snubbed, they might make the chimp and his handlers sweat it out for awhile and let some trouble brew. I can't call this one.

Edit: You know the chimp will take full credit for an "international force to hand over democracy to Iraq". I can see the ass wipe smiling right now, patting himself on the back.

[Dover]

2. The UN needs to refuse to deal with the US until there is new leadership.

PERIOD!

[Snoopy2]

3. The UN should suggest pushing back the June 30 date

The entire world knows the schedule was decided to turn Iraq over the sovereignty prior to the US elections. If Annan does tries to hard to push Sistani it will give the UN less credibility globally.

[pinto]

4. you can bet Security Council will be watching this other event on Mon

She was an anonymous junior official toiling away with 4,500 other mathematicians, code-breakers and linguists at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham.

But now Katharine Gun, an unassuming 29-year-old translator, is set to become a transatlantic cause célèbre as the focus of a star-studded solidarity drive that brings together Hollywood actor-director Sean Penn and senior figures from the US media and civil rights movement, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson.


Gun appears in court tomorrow accused of breaching the Official Secrets Act by allegedly leaking details of a secret US 'dirty tricks' operation to spy on UN Security Council members in the run-up to war in Iraq last year. If found guilty, she faces two years in prison. She is an unlikely heroine and those who have met her say she would have been happy to remain in the shadows, had she not seen evidence in black and white that her Government was being asked to co-operate in an illegal operation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1125854,00.html

and discussed at

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=319578

[Snoopy2]

5. The irony that these are both occuring at the same time

n/t