More email with my British pal. (cleaned up for readability)


Him: I take it you caught the Azores address and press Q&A?


I admit to being a bit puzzled at Bush's address at first. When he mentioned "tomorrow", as the day we'll find out ... I was trying to work out if that was a declaration of war or not. It wasn't really till Blair spoke that I realised what they've (seemingly) planned.


I'm guessing a 24-hour deadline delivered to the Security Council tomorrow? The words seem strong enough for it to be just 24 hours (which is obviously a formality). Failing compliance with that, the commencement of hostilities?


I was very pleased with the emphasis placed on Iraq's natural resources being utilized to the benefit of the Iraqis. OK, I have no doubts that the US, Brits and Spain will filter off a fair slice of profit there, too (and rightly so, if you ask me), but the wording seemed to totally rule out FRANCE !!! Yeehaaw. Screw Total Fina :-)


A little less mention of including the UN in the future, especially in 21st century wars, would have been nice. Though I quite liked Bush's final bit, slagged the UN off a bit there.


Except for the "legs"...

I'm sure he meant to say (in reference to the UN) "get their act together"... But it came out as "Get their ... legs ... their legs of responsibility"

LOL


Me: I'm sorry to say I f**king missed it. My folks came back up from their winter in Florida so we were out. So far I've not been able to catch more than a snippet here and there. Now I'd like to watch the whole thing but it's not up at whitehouse.gov yet.


I think the 24 hour thing sounds about right. I *think* they're going to give the UN tonight and tomorrow by the end of the day we'll see what they've come up with and that'll be it. I'm sure they'd rather not have a vote that they'll lose - Blair could always say, "Look, now the US is going ahead anyway and we're not going to let them go alone" (He's fucked anyway from what I can tell. He's got to count on a quick war and shitloads of undeclared nasty stuff in vast underground storehouses and lots of horrible stories from survivors. But don't believe for one second any fantasy about that being enough, though. The left and the rest of the anti-American crowd will be able to spin whatever happens to cast doubt on the success of this no matter what happens.) The thing is that at Bush's last big press conference, he said that there would definitely be a vote at the UN, that everyone would have to "show their cards." Now, he could spin it and say that since France has said they'll veto no matter what, there's no point, but I don't think it'll work out well either way. Oh, and they've also got

to give the UN guys a chance to clear out.[...]


And they better take a cut of the proceeds! (quietly)


The good side-benefit to this whole thing is that disdain for the UN has gone from being a fairly fringe, right-wing thing to relatively mainstream in the US right now. No politician is going to be able to make much hay about working with the UN as an important matter anymore


Me (later): OK, I just read the transcript up at whitehouse.gov. I'd still rather see video to get the nuance, but still, it'll have to do.


OK, I get that what's going on at the UN is that they're gonna go to the last minute at the UN to see if they can pull off the 9 votes and force France to veto. If not, then the lesser evil I guess will be to skip the vote, blame France for saying in advance that they'd veto anyway, and Bush will spin and say that France had "shown their cards" which was all he was really asking for at his press conference (not). I guess they'll need to stay with what they have in 1441 so they can claim to be still acting within international law.


I don't know. Let me be the 7 millionth blogger to say that I think the war starts tomorrow night (Baghdad time). Of course, now I'll find out about some statement or reason why that's not so, but as far as I know now...


Side note: I was wondering about the fact that it seemed that none of the news reports were saying that the Portuguese Prime Minister would be present, even though The Azores is part of Portugal. A Portuguese-American caller to a talk radio show I was listening to said not to worry, he'll be there, they're just very quiet about those things in Portugal. I dunno. Curious.


Oh, and maybe I'm glad I didn't see the video. The "legs" thing...I cringe when he does stuff like that.