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...Abroad, UN authorization is an important precondition, even if only as a legal and political fig leaf, for most countries likely to support a U.S. invasion. Many U.S. allies are resigned to the inevitability of an invasion, and many of those who have opposed it all along may feel obliged to support once it begins - not that their skepticism is insincere, but simply because their primary concern is stability and as U.S. allies they'd have an overriding interest in seeing the war won quickly and decisively. Further, many of the key foreign players in this conflict, from France...
...Taking the Iraq issue back to the UN has always been, from the Bush Administration's point of view, a compromise. It bridged the positions of the hawkish elements reluctant to allow diplomacy or renewed arms inspections to slow the momentum towards invasion, and moderates who warned that the only basis for building international support and legitimacy for a campaign against Saddam is to make the central issue the danger posed by Saddam's defiance of UN disarmament resolutions. The threat of the U.S. acting alone if the UN demurs has proven remarkably effective in spurring the Security Council back...
...simply be a bargaining tactic aimed at forcing Security Council members to accept Washington's demands. And it could signify a genuine intent on the part of the President to take matters into his own hands. The deeper question facing the President is to what extent he still needs UN authorization politically, despite the congressional vote. The Administration is certainly aware that the extent of congressional support for the war resolution was determined by the administration's decision to work through the UN to achieve maximum support for any move against Iraq. And opinion polls continue to indicate that...
...Bush Administration hawks, however, there are two flaws in pursuing the UN route. The first is that the international body does not share Washington's policy of regime-change, and is concerned only with disarmament. That gives Saddam plenty of wiggle room by simply playing ball, unconditionally for now at least, with any new inspection regime. The second flaw is that a UN process is likely to delay a showdown, particularly if arms inspections are actually resumed. The case for urgency may have less to do with any immediate concerns about the state of Saddam's weapons programs...
...Relatively speaking. They've enjoyed a fair degree of autonomy from Baghdad, and there's a large UN humanitarian infrastructure that has very effectively administered money from the oil-for-food program to fund development. So there's a lot of construction and new business activity - you can see that more clearly in Sulaimaniya, which is livelier than Erbil. There's also a lot more Kurdish-language media now, and Kurds are allowed to study in their own language rather than being forced to speak Arabic, as they were under Saddam. Over the decade you've seen the emergence...