MB Civic

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/09/20/opinion/20dowd.html?pagewanted=print

In comparing the U.N. speeches of the American and Irani Presidents, Dowd notes, “Mr. Bush played down Osama for five years, while he focused on Iraq. But his ill-fated endeavor into Baghdad just ended up magnifying another enemy and giving Mr. Ahmadinejad a huge strategic opportunity to stoke the growing fundamentalist and radical Shiite surge unleashed by the bungled occupation. Because W. blew off diplomacy with Iraq, he is now hostage to diplomacy with Iran.”

Addressing the broader issue, she adds cogently that, “W. has now put so many bad actors in the terror stew…and has justified so many sketchy programs under the war-on-terror rubric, that the word ‘terror’ is losing all meaning and just becoming a marketing slogan.”

Still, she misreads as “shrewd” Ahmadinejad’s statement that, “If the governments of the United States or the United Kingdom…commit aggression, occupation and violation of international law, which of the organs of the U.N. can take them into account?” Far from being “shrewd,” it is, unfortunately, a truism, one that the U.N. has seemed unwilling or unable to address.