Good Cop / Bad Cop

From Reuters/Yahoo

Blair confident of new U.N. Iraq motion

By Andrew Cawthorne

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tony Blair is back home from his "war council" with U.S. President George W. Bush expressing confidence the United Nations will pass a second resolution potentially authorising war on Iraq.

"I believe that there will be a second resolution," Blair told reporters on the plane back to London after Friday's pivotal meeting with Bush at the White House.

Blair used his visit to the United States to insist on sticking with the U.N. route over Iraq. But Bush appeared less enthusiastic over a second motion at their joint news conference, saying it should not be used as a delaying tactic.

The PM, who has been Washington's closest ally since September 11 and was effusively hailed by Bush as "a friend of mine", said it was "nonsense" to suggest a diplomatic chink over Iraq had opened between London and Washington.
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It seems to me that the Bush / Blair combo is doing an excellent bad cop/good cop double act as seen in endless police TV shows. And, as in the TV shows, the act really gets results; in this case doing an exellent job in smoking out weaselly politicos and their intellectually bankrupt academic supporters.

I don't know if this is intentional or if it was planned from the beginning, but it could well be that this results in a moment of truth for the UN and the other great powers. Essentially what I think we will see is that the Iraq war is placed (correctly IMO) into context in terms of its complete and utter flouting of UN resolutions and treaty conditions. Then we have a moment of truth - how should the UNSC react to such flagrant abuse? At this point all those countries (mainly beginning with F and G) that have claimed the UN as the ultimate fount of authority and justice will be forced to either say "yeah well actually we don't have either testicles or vertebrae" or do some serious backpeddling with, in the case of G at least, some possibly fatal results in national politics.

The end result however is likely to be that the UNSC either becomes publically discredidited as a toothless paper tiger - in which case the case for an alternative Pax Americana becomes strong - or we see the UN becoming more like it was originally proposed to be in the 1940s. I truly hope that we get to the second option because I believe that the US acting in the role of self appointed gloabl policeman will eventually cause a lot of grief.

If looked at in this context the whole Iraq disarmament debate becomes more of a sideshow as the world finally gets to grip with the New World Order we hoped for in 1991. It is quite possible that the Bush and Blair administrations have gone this route deliberately as they feel that the laternative drift scenario leads to more Sept 11th style unrest but I doubt we will know this until 30 or more years from now when the various governments release the relevant papers.

DD