Yeah, everybody enjoys watching France go to CAMAROON, AFRICA to convence a less the 3rd World Country to jump on board their Band Wagon (stopping disarmament Action by the US). We're Held hostage by the wims of a the third World, NOT! The United Nations is DEAD, and France is buried underneath the rubble of the UN.
Cameroon opposes possible Iraq war Tuesday, March 4, 2003 Posted: 4:56 PM EST (2156 GMT) YAOUNDE, Cameroon (Reuters) -- Cameroon, a temporary member of the U.N. Security Council, opposes war against Iraq and thinks weapon inspectors should be given more time, an aide to the country's foreign minister said Tuesday. "Cameroon cannot support U.S. ambitions to dominate and dictate to the rest of the world," he told Reuters, warning that unilateral U.S. action against Iraq would be very regrettable. "It would be sad if it should be the world's leading power that starts the destruction process of the U.N. system," said the aide to External Affairs Minister Francois Xavier Ngoubeyou. "Cameroon is opposed to war," added the aide, who declined to be named. "We agree Iraq should be disarmed but through peaceful means." http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/africa/03/04/sprj.irq.un.cameroon.reut/
Cameroon and France have the nerve and guts to openly discuss how they feel the need to stand against unjust behavior in this effort. But why have they not gone into Bagdad and explained to Saddam that they will not tollerate his behavior any longer? They have no fear discussing this issue and mounting a challenge with America because they know we will listen and possibly adjust our posture. Why haven't they done more than send some low level expendable reps to Iraq?
Here's the bottom line: The reason most of these countries are taking this stance is that they are hoping we will float them some economic aid in return for their vote....Think about it: If you are cameroon and you know your GDP is less then Bill GAtes' annual income, wouldn't you sit on the fence and look for a hand out? We have Tom Daschle and the French to thank for this , but in the end, they are all going to be sorry, although not as sorry as france will be ...the boycott is on baby!
Canvassing the Votes to Gain Legitimacy By DAVID E. SANGER WASHINGTON, March 12 â As President Bush called around the world today with an intensity his father might admire, his aides were arguing behind the scenes over a single question: how many votes does it take to confer an aura of international legitimacy on an attack against Iraq? More votes, it seems, than the president had in hand when his aides emerged tonight from the White House situation room. Over the next day or two, the White House will have to deal with the warnings that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others have expressed in private conversations. President Bush said publicly on Thursday that he would bring the issue to a vote, win or lose, and today White House officials were still insisting that is the case. Mr. Powell, however, according to diplomats who have talked to him, is cautioning that it would be better to scrap the vote entirely than to go to war against the expressed wishes of a majority of the Security Council. "Colin hasn't given up" on the possibility of a victory, said one Arab official involved on the sidelines of the negotiations. "He might have eight tonight, and that would be respectable. With a lot of luck they could get nine, a supervote." But this evening some of those votes seemed iffy at best, and imaginary at worst. If Mr. Bush and his aides cannot persuade and arm-twist wavering members into voting for an ultimatum along the lines the British have proposed, the United States will find itself in a place it has never been before: openly, unashamedly, starting a conflict that the Security Council says cannot be conducted in its name. That never happened during the Korean War, when President Truman won United Nations backing to counter North Korea's invasion of South Korea. To this day the American-led command along the DMZ flies the United Nations flag. During the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy wanted the imprimatur of the Organization of American States before he ordered a naval quarantine on Cuba. He got it. Even during the Kosovo conflict, the Security Council was frozen in place, but President Clinton forced action through NATO, muting charges of American unilateralism. But this is different. Mr. Bush says he is willing to go to war without the cover of any international organization other than the "coalition of the willing" that he is organizing. That is exactly the script that Vice President Dick Cheney warned about last summer when he said it would be worse to lose a vote than to act in the name of enforcing existing United Nations resolutions. But eventually the president decided it was worth the risk, and that looked like a good call in November, when the Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441, calling for Iraq's immediate disarmament. White House officials insist that Mr. Bush â while frustrated and angry at France, Germany, Russia and Mexico â has no regrets. They say he had to test his own thesis that Iraq would decide whether "this is the United Nations or the League of Nations." Now, however, Mr. Bush must decide in the next 36 hours or so whether to attempt a vote. And that decision hinges on how he defines victory, and whether he is deterred by the specter of defeat. "You can see, talking to American diplomats, the tension inside the American administration," said Inocencio F. Arias, the Spanish representative to the United Nations. "You can see they are fighting a battle there. They don't say anything. You can see it in their body language." Veto threats from France and Russia are no longer the chief concern. "That's not the issue," one senior administration official said, as the president cajoled and argued over the phone today with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, among others. "Do you really need nine? Wouldn't eight â an actual majority â suffice?" the official said. "This isn't about the rules of the U.N.," he added. "It's about showing that we are not alone." While Mr. Bush insists that America needs no other nation's permission to act, his actions in the last two days reveal that he would like to claim at least a moral victory. With eight votes, one friend of Mr. Bush's said today, "he could go on television the night of the U.N. vote and say, `We are backed by a majority of the Security Council.' And that would help a lot." Mostly it would help Tony Blair, the British prime minister, who needs a second vote to win approval in Parliament to commit British forces to war. But if it appears that the vote will be lost, Mr. Blair may be in worse shape than before. With that in mind, the hawkish elements of the administration â including Mr. Cheney â are said to favor avoiding a vote if the alternative is defeat. One possibility discussed here today is that the White House, if short of votes, will declare that at the request of its co-sponsors, Britain and Spain, it is withdrawing the resolution. It may not come to that. But the strain of keeping Cameroon, Angola and Guinea on board â countries not usually at the forefront of this administration's diplomacy â was clearly taking its toll. The problem, one official said, is that while the African countries and nations like Pakistan may be willing to commit their votes to President Bush, they want to make sure they are on the winning side. So no one wants publicly to declare to be behind the United States if the resolution is destined for defeat â or likely to be pulled off the United Nations' docket entirely. "This is worse than anything we've ever had to do with Congress," one White House official said. The State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, deliberately mixing his metaphors to underscore the chaos of the day, said at a briefing: "I wouldn't deny that we are making progress, but I don't want to mislead you into thinking that we've got it in the bag. We stay fixated on the rule that you don't count your chickens until the cows come home."
Blaming America for 9/11 (Major Barf alert) CBN News ^ | September 10, 2002 | Dale Hurd Posted on 09/10/2002 7:54 AM PDT by apackof2 One year after 9-11 and European sympathy for the United States has all but evaporated. CBN.com â PARIS â If anything symbolizes the disturbing change in European feeling toward the United States since 9/11, it may be the amazing popularity of a book called The Horrifying Fraud. A summer-long blockbuster in France, it claims that shadowy figures within the American military-industrial complex planned the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The book fascinates the French. One year after 9/11 and European sympathy for the United States has all but evaporated. Europeans will tell you that they like Americans, but they hate American policy. In fact, a lot of Europeans view America as a rogue state and a bully. Opposition to American policy and especially the American President is now virtually continent-wide. In Germany, the criticism is fierce. "We want to join the resistance against George Bush's global war," one German man said. Those sentiments are echoed in Belgium. "He's [Bush is] breaking international agreements, and that's true for human rights, for environment and for disarmament," one Belgian claimed. And the anger is especially palpable in France, where a crusading anti-American farmer is a national folk hero for destroying a McDonalds, the symbol of American cultural imperialism. Along Paris' Champs Elysee', at least half of the French express strong anti-American feelings. "I am not good friends with the Americans," one woman said. Another French man said, "They are warmongers." "It is appalling. They keep to themselves, they don't help others. They look after their own interests. They don't get involved in other countries except to wage war," another said. Yet another French man said, "I think once more the American Government seeks to protect their own interest while pretending there are threats but their aim is to protect their industry be it petrol or anything else. It's a pity for such a great country." In an opinion poll last week for the French magazine Marianne, 68 percent of respondents said they had little or no trust that U.S. leadership will create a better world. And 83 percent said the United States foreign policy serves only its selfish economic and strategic interests. More than three-quarters want less U.S. influence in the world. In France, as in most of western Europe, the Left wing dominates most of the media. The conservative American President is consistently portrayed as the idiot son of a famous father and a dangerous cowboy. Europeans are told that American culture is retrograde and barbaric. America is a nation where criminals are executed, people carry guns and few care about saving the planet. Meanwhile, America's overwhelming military and economic power breeds paranoid theories in Europe that American leaders create and stage-manage events like 9-11 as a way to increase America's global dominance. An example is Europe's obsession with Iraq. The European media portray Iraq as a poor defenseless nation about to be devoured by the American military machine. Most French oppose any U.S. move against Saddam Hussein. A western missionary, who has served for 17 years in France, told CBN News that French and European mistrust of the U.S. only mirrors their mistrust of everything. His identity hidden because he fears harassment by the Chirac government, he calls French society no longer a democracy but "a jungle," gripped by paranoia, where a left-wing anti-American media controls the culture. He said, "French society today is totally dominated by the media, not even by politicians. Politicians are made or broken by their public image, perhaps more so in France than in other countries. President Mitterand himself has called the French people amoral⦠there is no intrinsic sense of right and wrong. It is very fluid, so something that is wrong one day will be right the next day on the basis of circumstances. And there is this underlying fear that what we're being told is not really what is happening." It is the perfect breeding environment for a book like The Horrifying Fraud, which says the U.S. was behind 9-11. We sat down with the author, Thierry Meyssan. "In no way do I suggest that the whole American government undertook a concerted effort to sacrifice 3,000 lives, but what I am saying is that there are some people within the government machinery that have manipulated the situation. Certainly the terrorist attacks on 9-11 were ordered by people within the American machinery...be it the civilian or military machinery." Meyssan's book, now out in English as The 911 Lie, is already a bestseller in 10 languages. It does have its French critics. Intelligence expert Jean Guisnel says Meyssan is an "intellectual crook" who is telling people what they want to believe about America. "Why do people buy Meyssan's book â it's like in X-Files, truth is somewhere else. So they like that. They like that idea. They want to believe that," Guisnel said. One reason for Europe's flight to fantasy may be that reality is too hard. While the U.S. is now being called the most dominant economic and military power in history, Europe continues to slide into irrelevance. France's economy is now smaller than California's. Its general population is shrinking while the number of Muslims is rising. Out of this malaise comes the right wing, in the form of Jean Marie LePen, who made a surprisingly strong bid for President this year before losing to Jacques Chirac. LePen calls France a leftist dictatorship. He also wants Muslims expelled. But LePen also says America is becoming a dangerous nation, and he opposes an attack on Iraq, calling it immoral. Almost one-third of the French now view the U.S. as France's chief enemy. We may be allies, but culturally, we are at war. Or as one American analyst put it, it is time to stop pretending that Americans and Europeans share a common view of the world. The United States and Europe today are on two separate continents, heading in different directions. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------