On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, Doug Henwood wrote:
> > And even better in yesterday's Telegraph was a report from a highly
> > placed Downing Street source that the British government was asking
> > the US to put off an invasion till the autumn to allow time for the
> > weapons inspectors to do their work.
>
> A friend of mine recently heard the same tale from a former Clinton
> admin official.
This, it should be pointed out, is multilateralism at work. Despite the fact that all the troops will be in place and ready to go, it's going to be harder for the US to attack during the window of opportunity than hawks think. The only great time for an invasion weatherwise is January and February. We've already missed January waiting for Blix to report. And when Blix reports, it's going to be that there is no smoking gun. The US feels of course that it can say what it wants and attack. But Karl Rove knows that if the Security Council clearly said this was wrong -- not in principle, but because we should wait -- American domestic support will be low, if not during the war then after it, when it will count, like it did with his Daddy. And waiting more for the inspectors will push it past February into March when it starts to get hot again. (One could only attack in August if one really had no fear of chemical weapons. Even Iranians couldn't keep their chemical weapons gear on in 40 degrees centigrade.)
On top of that is the Venezuelan oil situation. Attack before that is resolved, and the oil shock will be more like 1979 than 1991. Exactly what the US economy doesn't need at this moment. And it doesn't look like it will be resolved in 3 weeks.
And all of this is not counting the fact that local cooperation on the base issue will be harder to get if the Security Council seems even mealy-mouthedly to denounce us. We're the ones who have now raised it to an arbiter.
The hawks were right -- multilateralism is a snare where if you get even your big toe stuck it starts to grow over you like vines. And that's a good thing. It may not be enough. But it's not nothing. It's already slowed them down. Ideally they wanted to start bombing in the beginning of January because we always bomb for a month before we invade anywhere.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com
"I'm an optimist because it's intellectually more challenging" __________________________________________________________________________