per il NY Times i pacifisti sono la nuova superpotenza con cui Bush si deve misurare

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg@tin.it>]

A New Power in the Streets
By PATRICK E. TYLER
tp://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/17/international/middleeast/17ASSE.html

ASHINGTON, Feb. 16 - The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and
the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders
that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and
world public opinion.

In his campaign to disarm Iraq, by war if necessary, President Bush appears
to be eyeball to eyeball with a tenacious new adversary: millions of people
who flooded the streets of New York and dozens of other world cities to say
they are against war based on the evidence at hand.
Mr. Bush's advisers are telling him to ignore them and forge ahead, as are
some leading pro-war Republicans. Senator John McCain, for one, said today
that it was "foolish" for people to protest on behalf of the Iraqi people,
because the Iraqis live under Saddam Hussein "and they will be far, far
better off when they are liberated from his brutal, incredibly oppressive
rule."

That may be true, but it fails to answer the question that France, Germany
and other members of the Security Council have posed: What is the urgent
rationale for war now if there is a chance that continued inspections under
military pressure might accomplish the disarmament of Iraq peacefully?

The fresh outpouring of antiwar sentiment may not be enough to dissuade Mr.
Bush or his advisers from their resolute preparations for war. But the sheer
number of protesters offers a potent message that any rush to war may have
political consequences for nations that support Mr. Bush's march into the
Tigris and Euphrates valleys.

This may have been the reason that foreign ministers for 22 Arab nations,
meeting in Cairo today, called on all Arab countries to "refrain from
offering any kind of assistance or facilities for any military action that
leads to the threat of Iraq's security, safety and territorial integrity."

War, like politics, is affected by psychology and momentum. The strong surge
in momentum the Bush administration felt after Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell's Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council on the case for war has
been undermined by at least four converging negatives.

The most obvious is the rupture in relations between Mr. Bush and some of
his principal partners in Europe: France and Germany, now joined by Russia,
China and a growing list of other countries. Just weeks ago, it seemed that
Mr. Bush was successfully coaxing France and Germany into the war camp,
especially after one of the chief United Nations weapons inspectors, Hans
Blix, delivered a negative report on Jan. 27 on Iraqi compliance.

But the swell of popular opposition to war across Europe, the second
negative, plus the corrosive effects of the hawkish jibes that Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have hurled across the Atlantic,
have only roiled the waters further. Washington discovered just how deeply
Western unity had been sundered when it asked for defensive NATO deployments
to Turkey to protect that front-line state from Iraqi intimidation - a
request that brought opposition and contentious debate that were resolved
today.

The Security Council meeting on Friday that was to be the penultimate step
in laying the groundwork for war, instead produced two significant
negatives. Giving his latest report, Mr. Blix indicated that the inspectors
were making noteworthy progress in forcing Iraq to make concessions on
everything from allied surveillance flights to giving inspectors greater
access to Iraqi weapons scientists. Mr. Blix said Iraq was still not
cooperating like a state that truly wanted to disarm, but there had been
progress, he said.

The implication was that Mr. Blix saw the virtue of taking more time, though
he did not specifically ask for it. But neither was he ready to tell the
Security Council that inspections had failed as a tool for disarmament.

In another negative, Mr. Powell's performance on Friday appeared to fall
short of public expectations that he would demonstrate that the threat posed
by Iraq under Mr. Hussein was so imminent that the only logical response was
war as soon as possible

Mr. Powell promised new intelligence on connections between Iraq and Al
Qaeda, but then did not provide it, at least within public view. And he did
not respond to Mr. Blix when the arms inspector challenged one point of the
American intelligence briefing of Feb. 5.

Mr. Blix pointed out that the satellite images Mr. Powell brought before the
Council were shot two weeks apart and did not necessarily show Iraqi
deception. A chemical decontamination truck is present in one photo and not
the other. "Routine" movements were also a possible explanation, Mr. Blix
pointed out, and Mr. Powell nodded.

Advertisement




Though Mr. Powell was nimble as ever in his extemporaneous remarks, the one
thing that his presentation did not provide the Security Council was an
answer to the question that hung over the body: Why war now?

To the rest of the world, it might have seemed necessary that Washington
provide an answer, if only to respond to the argument of the French foreign
minister, Dominique de Villepin. He placed an alternative logic before the
Security Council: Could anyone argue that immediate war would be shorter and
more effective in disarming Iraq than continued United Nations inspections
under the threat of force?

It didn't help Mr. Bush or Mr. Powell that the French said their
intelligence agencies found no support for the American claim of a strong
connection between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden's terrorism network. It also
did not help that Mr. Powell's appearance on Friday came just days after
Prime Minister Tony Blair's latest intelligence white paper was found to
have been plagiarized from Internet sources.

As if to defy the deteriorating support for immediate war, Mr. Bush's
advisers warned against playing "into Saddam Hussein's hands," as
Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, said on Fox News
Sunday this morning.

But the more senior members of Mr. Bush's team, especially Mr. Powell, live
in the shadow of Vietnam, where their careers began and out of which they
brought a determination not to take the country into war without strong
public support. Given Mr. Hussein's record, the actions of Iraq over the
next few weeks could conceivably resurrect that support and reverse the
negative psychology and loss of momentum that the Bush administration
suffered this week.

For the moment, an exceptional phenomenon has appeared on the streets of
world cities. It may not be as profound as the people's revolutions across
Eastern Europe in 1989 or in Europe's class struggles of 1848, but
politicians and leaders are unlikely to ignore it. The Arab states'
declaration in Cairo seems proof of that.


**************************************************
Nello

change the world before the world changes you because  another world is
possible