"Germany and France reiterate their full support for Kofi Annan whose commitment to the aims of the United Nations is total," Chirac said at a press conference after holding talks with Schroeder.
bright spot
The two leaders also welcomed the proposals for a radical reform of the United Nations which were published this week.
And this part is interesting....
"But US congressional investigators say Saddam's regime may have skimmed billions of dollars from the program, and allegations have surfaced of pay-offs to officials and private individuals from around the globe. "
May have!!! May have!!!
cube
Friday, December 03, 2004
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3 comments:
Actually your 'bright spot' is less bright than it appears. The reforms boil down to giving more power to the U.N. (and France with it's permanent veto) and restraining the power of the U.S.
Obviously they support the idea. Shouldn't necessarily make us happy though.
Do you have a link detialing the changes? All i have see have been short news articles, but i have not been looking very hard.
Of course, as you have said before, if they do not want to play with us, we take our toys (our money) and go home.
As to the reforms, i thoguht that they were planning on adding new seats to the security council (in one idea at least).
I do not see how that helps france specifically, but i do not see how that hurts them either.
Also any changes that have to be made must be approved my all members, so i doubt that france will be able to get somthing in that increases their power only.
Here is the Belmont Club summery of what the reforms will mean. It has lots of links to other news stories.
None of the plans for increasing the number of seats on the Security council would give any new countries veto power or remove veto power for any country.
The biggest deal though is plans to deal with 'preventive war' i.e. things like Iraq where the threat is not immanent but is very real (Iran if it doesn't give up its nuke program or N. Korea are also good examples of this.) On the surface it sounds great that the U.N. is going to deal with this issue, but part of what they are saying is that if you want to do this, here is the plan that you have to follow; i.e. get security council approval.
This gives the security council more power. It especially gives more power to those countries with a veto who lack other means of disuading a country to act (real power) more power. Since France is the least militarily significant of the 5 countries with Veto power, any increase to the power of the Security Council is an increase in power for France more than any other nation.
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