Posted on 01/31/2003 2:27:37 PM PST by mountaineer
Some European nations' leaders oppose the United States' policy regarding Iraq, while others offer firm support. It has been suggested that we might boycott tourism and the agricultural products of countries like France and Germany, for example, who oppose President Bush's efforts.
Some also have suggested offering words of support and thanks to those nations that have chosen to stand with us. The eight nations whose leaders endorsed a letter of support of the U.S. were: the United Kingdom, Spain, Hungary, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Portugal and the Czech Republic:
Washington, 31 January 2003 (RFE/RL) -- With an array of European countries voicing support for U.S. policy on Iraq, President George W. Bush moved closer to securing a broad "coalition of the willing" to back possible military action against Baghdad.
Yesterday, leaders from Britain, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Portugal signed a letter expressing support for the tough U.S. stance on Iraq, which the United States accuses of hiding weapons of mass destruction. Slovakia later said it supported the letter and today government leaders in Latvia, Romania, and Slovenia said they also back the contents of the letter. source
In any event, contacting foreign countries takes some doing. This thread attempts to provide some practical suggestions.
Feb. 3 - Barbra Streisand is finally agreeing with George Bush. George H. Bush that is. In a posting on her Web site, the outspoken anti-war diva quotes a passage from "A World Transformed," a book by the father of the current president and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, explaining why it would have been unwise to try to remove Saddam Hussein from power at the end of the Gulf War.
TRYING TO eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have...incurred incalculable human and political costs, Streisand quotes the book as saying.
"We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. . . . Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different and perhaps barren outcome."
Streisand calls the elder Bush’s statement "so incredibly relevant right now," and quotes the person who brought the passage to her attention as saying, "You know we’re in trouble when George Bush, Sr. is the most rational member of the family." MSNBC
You know we're in trouble when we give a rat's patootey about Barbra's analysis of foreign policy.
![](http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:HiuSiqoFZ9gC:www.life.uiuc.edu/plantbio/260/nomenclature/Pieris.jpg")
65K for Chelsea's new job? That's all? Geesh all that special schooling at our finest institutions and she'll make 65K? Well according to her daddy, he only made 35K as govenor, yeah right. Maybe she can ask her mommy how to turn her money into a quick 100K buying cattle futures.
How cute! Here are MORE PHOTOS
(If you're not familiar with Flat Stanley, he was in a kiddies' book...a little boy named stanley is flattened by a bulletin board and makes lemonade out of lemons. He mails himself to a friend...and then to lots of exotic places. It's become a kid's game to get pictures of Flat with famous people.)
But I've been busy! I wrote to all of the PM's and Presidents on your list. Still trying to compose just the right letter for the french, germans and canadians. Seems every other word I write is yellow belly, coward, worthless, your mama dresses you.. etc....
But I promise I'll behave and write an adult letter, not that those grown teenage twits could comprehend it.
BWB, good work on those letters! Sorry you've been under the weather. After I spend a few minutes catching up on things at FR, I must get to work spackling and painting, as I'm redoing a walk-in closet. It's a glamorous life.
So why am I sick of Tina Brown (friend of Arianna)?
". . . but beyond these sectional self-interests there is a deeper unease. Americans long to have their moral energies roused, really roused, and give their hearts to sacrifice. Franklin Roosevelt did it with his pledge to the Four Freedoms. JFK with his 'ask what you can do for your country' inaugural. But Bush just can't get there. In his State of the Union pep rally a smirk of privilege hangs in the air even as he goes for maximum gravitas." Quoted in Liz Smith's column.
As if we didn't already know:
LONDON - Michael Jackson admits he still sleeps in the same bed with young boys and said he fathered his third child using a surrogate mother he has never met "and my own sperm cells." The freaky King of Pop called the sleepovers harmless fun in a bizarre documentary set to air on ABC's "20/20" at 8 p.m. Thursday. "I have slept in a bed with many children," the eccentric superstar told British celebrity journalist Martin Bashir. "I am Peter Pan in my heart." full story
In other news:
Britney Spears brought a little trailer-park panache [Wow, that's a stretch] to Justin Timberlake's 22nd birthday party in L.A. on Friday. Brit's once (and future?) boyfriend threw a "White Trash"-themed party that included a Twinkie-trimmed frosted cake, tabloid tablecloths, pork rinds, Slim Jims and cans of Spam. source
One more interesting bit from the Reliable Source:
• We remember when our friend Christopher Hitchens was a card-carrying (or at least Scotch-hoisting) member of the left. But the British-born polemicist has apparently come a very long way since he stopped writing for the Nation magazine last year.
In the new issue of Doublethink, a Washington-based right-wing quarterly, Hitchens reveals that he plans to support President Bush's reelection campaign -- never mind his recent Vanity Fair puff piece about Democratic hopeful John Edwards. "I don't believe in [Edwards]," Hitchens tells Doublethink interviewer Tom Ivancie. "I mean, I told him I wouldn't vote for him. . . . Because I'd vote for Bush. The important thing is this: Is a candidate completely serious about prosecuting the war on theocratic terrorism to the fullest extent? Only Bush is." Hitchens also scoffs at the Everyman pitch of the millionaire trial lawyer turned North Carolina senator: "Oh, that's all [bleep]. . . . Spare us the false populism."
Meanwhile, Hitchens suggests that old nemesis Bill Clinton was a CIA plant at Oxford, where both were students in the late 1960s. "I think he was a double," Hitchens says. "Somebody was giving information to [the CIA] about the anti-war draft resisters, and I think it was probably him. We had a girlfriend in common -- I didn't know then -- who's since become a very famous radical lesbian."
Oh no, there's more news on the "I just discovered Jews in my family tree" front:
In recent weeks, Gen. Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander who is considering a run, revealed to the Forward newspaper that he descends "from generations of rabbis" in Minsk, and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean has touted his Jewish wife and children. But Lieberman campaign press secretary Jano Cabrera told us the Connecticut senator isn't worried: "Oy vey. All this talk about who is Jewish and who isn't is absolutely meshuga. That said, there's only one candidate in this race with a real lox box."
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