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...Speaking before Bush, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan warned that world peace was imperiled by the doctrine of preemptive action promoted by the Bush administration, but he urged those critical of U.S. unilateralism to offer a multilateral alternative through the UN that would nonetheless take effective action on issues such as terrorism and proliferation. Following Bush's address, French President Jacques Chirac did not pull his punches either, slamming the U.S. for going to war without UN mandate and warning that this approach risked "anarchy." Still, like Bush, Chirac emphasized the need to focus on international cooperation to achieve...
...Despite reiterating its case for war, the U.S. was never going to persuade France, Germany, Russia, China and much of the rest of Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America that it had made the correct choice. Instead, the focus of intense diplomatic negotiations at the UN this week is on enlisting help to ensure the best possible outcome in the postwar. And on that score, the French have already signaled their willingness to cooperate, or at least to refrain from throwing up obstacles. President Chirac has promised that France won't veto a new Security Council resolution being pushed...
...speedy transition to Iraqi self-rule. But while the French may give some ground on the question of how quickly to empower Iraqi institutions, they may dig their heels in on the questions of who is in charge in the interim. The French and other Europeans insist that the UN, rather than U.S. administrator Paul Bremer, be placed in charge of the transition in Baghdad; a position rejected by Washington...
...Central to both questions is the issue of legitimacy: The reason the French and other European and Arab allies are so apparently obsessed with issues of sovereignty and UN control is precisely that they see the current occupation as lacking legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis, and therefore inherently unstable. While President Bush may cast the U.S. as liberators promoting freedom in the face of resistance by terrorists and "holdouts of the former regime," those on the other side of the debate fear that hostility to the U.S.-led occupation is drawing even ordinary Iraqis with no ties either...
...American narrative presented by President Bush, the U.S. acted decisively while others dithered in the face of danger, and now it is nurturing an exemplary democracy in a region mired in autocracy and economic stasis. But for many other UN member states Iraq is not free but occupied without international consent. And the President's suggestion in passing that the Palestinians ought to learn from what the U.S. is doing and jettison their elected leader, Yasser Arafat, won't have helped him persuade the skeptics. At the UN, after all, Bush is even more isolated on the question of Arafat...