Jinn of Current Events

This is what France and Germany, and to a lesser extent Russia, have achieved: Saddam believes he will succeed in manipulating the UN, avoid the US-led liberation of Iraq, and continue to develop weapons of mass murder. In other words, they have made it more difficult and dangerous to deal with him. These are not allies, but enemies of the US and of freedom lovers everywhere. NYT: a government statement issued from a meeting presided over by President Saddam Hussein and editorials in the government-controlled press all reached the same conclusion: that Iraq had been declared sufficiently free of weapons of mass destruction to warrant the cancellation of sanctions imposed after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The sense here was that the strong resistance by France, Russia and Germany to the use of force against Iraq revealed a growing consensus that put the United States and Britain on the defensive.