Politics As Usual

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Your type takes the party line that the U.N. was against the war because it knew there were no weapons.

No, that's BS. Different countries had different reasons to be against the war, no doubt, but I don't know anyone who thinks the UN had better intel than we did.

In fact, the U.N. either thought there were weapons or it is one of the most vile institutions conceived. It was starving Iraquis with unwarrented sanctions if it really felt there were no weapons.

"Iraqis" without the "u" is more sinister and terroristic.

This presumes the sanctions were motivated by WMD. I think we pushed for the sanctions as part of a containment policy, motivated more by the threat posed by Iraq to its neighbors from conventional forces. That was the focus after the first war. And it's not like the sanctions were something invented by a bunch of foreigners without our input. It was Bush/Clinton foreign policy to use the UN this way.

Our sides, if I might be so modest as to take a shot at this, would say the U.N. took a position that makes it irrelevent to modern times.

You could be modest in that way, but now that we know there weren't WMD, the idea of waiting to invade until inspections turned up WMD doesn't sound so out there.