Arrogance 1 Diplomacy 0. Rumsfeld’s “darn good job”

The rhetoric from Washington defies logic. Using September 11 as an excuse, the administration intends to eliminate possible dangers before they exist. The words of Donald Rumsfeld made this patently clear this weekend.

Donald Rumsfeld the US Defence Secretary, made no attempt to mince his words in an interview with Fox News this weekend. He declared that the USA has intelligence reports which indicate that the Iraqi authorities are not cooperating with the UNMOVIC weapons inspection team, that Iraq has an active biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programme.

Donald Rumsfeld explained why the US intelligence services are not telling the UNMOVIC team where the weaponry is hidden: “We can’t say where things are otherwise the next day they wouldn’t be there” and admitted what Washington’s real policy is: “We’re trying to connect the dots before the fact. I think we’ve done a darn good job”.

A darn good job. Washington has systematically destroyed three centuries of diplomacy, of development within the international community towards what is called crisis management and away from war. Washington has belittled the UNO at a time when the organisation is trying to emerge, ably led by Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Washington has turned most of the international community away from its aggressive and bullying stance on Iraq.

A darn good job. Claiming that a country has WMD and then when various inspection teams fail wholly to find any evidence whatsoever of these programmes, that this is proof that the Iraqi authorities are not collaborating, is reminiscent of a bad loser, the playground bully that beats up his opponent because he lost the game.

Washington insults the international community by brazenly and arrogantly refusing to listen to opinions which spell out an alternative path to war, professing diplomacy and crisis management tactics instead of military intervention. Moscow, for instance, has declared in an official communique that “The results of the inspections again demonstrate thathe efficiency of the weapons inspection system of the UNO in Iraq, whose work should continue so as to conclude totally and definitively all the dossiers on the iraqi disarmament process”. Washington, on the other hand, claims that the inspection process is useless because it has unearthed no smoking guns. A darn good job.

A darn good job. The administration in Washington continues to hammer a deep wedge between the USA and the European union, whose population is massively and determinedly against unilateral military intervention by the USA and UK without the proper mandate from the Security Council of the UNO. Athens, currentkly the EU president, has declared that a global vision of the weapions inspections should be taken, not paying attention only to what it termed “isolated cases”, such as the discovery of 11 out-of-date and empty warheads lying under a pile of pigeon excrement.

The supposition that Iraq is not collaborating with the UNO team because nothing has been found is nonsense. The Russian Federation is clear on this point. The official communique reads that “Iraq continues, in accordance with its obligations, to facilitate immediate and unconditional access to all places of interest for the inspectors”.

The administration in Washington has succeeded in two years to destroy the fabric of friendship and peaceful co-existence within the international community. A darn good job. Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY PRAVDA.Ru