{"id":125,"date":"2003-03-22T13:28:17","date_gmt":"2003-03-22T13:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"tag:owlfish.com,2004:colinweblog.20030322132817"},"modified":"2003-06-30T23:21:00","modified_gmt":"2003-06-30T23:21:00","slug":"22032003","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/2003\/03\/22032003\/","title":{"rendered":"The French veto"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This post can&#8217;t be classed as breaking news, but it&#8217;s an important subject from the perspective of how this war started.  As pointed out <a href=\"http:\/\/thelookingglass.blogspot.com\/2003_03_16_thelookingglass_archive.html#90992734\">here<\/a> by Charles Dodgson the original French position was <b>not<\/b> a veto under any circumstances.  The original position was that any resolution that automatically authorised war would be vetoed because the UN weapon inspectors had not given up on Iraq&#8217;s disarmament through inspections.<\/p>\n<p>This statement was made on the 10th of March, and was reported fairly accurately by the BBC <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/world\/middle_east\/2838269.stm\">here<\/a>.  By the 12th however it was being spun by the British that France had <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/uk_politics\/2845245.stm\">threatened<\/a> to veto under any circumstances.  Unfortunately France did not act on this interpretation and issue a statement to clarify the position, a move that implicitly gave credibility to the British interpretation of their position.  It wasn&#8217;t through lack of time either, the war <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/world\/middle_east\/2867593.stm\">started<\/a> a week later on the 20th.<\/p>\n<p>This lack of clarification is in my opinion the biggest mistake that the French made in handling the crisis.  A statement to the effect that France will back a war, and commit troops to the effort, as and when the weapon inspectors declared that Iraq could not be disarmed peacefully would have turned the tables on the US\/UK position.  The public could easily have supported such a position, and the focus would have shifted back to whether inspections worked rather than the politics of France versus the US.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This post can&#8217;t be classed as breaking news, but it&#8217;s an important subject from the perspective of how this war started. As pointed out here by Charles Dodgson the original French position was not a veto under any circumstances. The original position was that any resolution that automatically authorised war would be vetoed because the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}