Monday, March 17, 2003

HAPPY ST. PAT'S DAY TO ALL

It's not a day I celebrate personally but I have plenty of Irish ancestry (I still remember my Grandmother Kelly quite well) so you will not find me saying a bad word about the Irish.

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U.N. -- R.I.P.

Jeff Jacoby says it as well as anybody can:

"The American people understand," President Bush said at his March 6 news conference, "that when it comes to our security, if we need to act we will act. And we really don't need the United Nations' approval to do so."

"And as we head into the 21st century, when it comes to our security, we really don't need anybody's permission."

What Bush knows but doesn't want explicitly to say is that the United Nations is finished. Oh, it isn't going to go out of business any time soon -- the League of Nations wasn't formally dissolved until 1946 -- but it is finished as a force of any consequence in world affairs, and it is finished as a body whose judgments serious people have reason to take seriously.

Last fall, Bush warned the UN that it would make its own downfall inevitable if it failed to support the US campaign to disarm and depose Saddam Hussein.

"The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace," he said on Sept. 12. "Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?"


More here

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GREAT NEWS FOR FREE TRADE

US to rein in its farmers

THE Bush administration is prepared to confront Washington's protectionist farm lobby to secure a genuine free trade deal with Australia, the US Government declared yesterday


More detailed coverage here

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