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His first message to the UN was his refusal to knell and take the phony global warming Kyoto treaty as gospel.

Since then there has been a list of slaps in the face of the anti Americans in charge of the UN.

I believe that he set this entire fiasco for the UN and France/Germany up last year. Then, he set the trap in his speech at the UN in September. He told them to act and do something or become irrelevant.

They behaved just like he expected and last week was they started to slide into irrelevance.

The giveaway here is that this whole thing with the UN is so eerily reminiscent of the Arafat gambit -- especially the way Powell has been deployed. I should have seen this coming a mile off. (So should Kofi and his pals, but they're smug, self-satisfied nincompoops who couldn't find their arses with both hands.) As you pointed out a while back, Dubya is using the post-9/11 crisis as a pretext to clean house. Bad actors are being removed from the stage. In the wake of 9/11 and the ensuing WMD blackmail threats, Team Bush sat down, took a good long look at the chessboard, and figured out who needed to be taken out. Saddam, of course, but he's the scorpion with the sting in his tail, so we have to deal with him last. But, in the interim, there were a lot of soft targets: Osama bin Laden, terrorism's foremost pitchman; al-Qaeda, now the largest supplier of human missiles to Saddam; the Taliban, AQ's hosts and enablers; Yasser Arafat, Saddam's ally and legitimator in the eyes of the eurosnobs; the United Nations, especially Kofi Annan and the "Axis of Weasels," whose duplicity put WMD in the hands of the world's most dangerous tyrant. They all had to go. And, one by one, they're being picked off. Before each one is taken out, we go through an exercise in which their true nature is very publicly exposed. Bush and Powell knew from the get go that Arafat wasn't going to pull it out. They knew from the get go that the UN weapons inspections were a sham -- it is obviously physically impossible for weapons inspection to disarm Saddam Hussein, given the nature of his arsenal. But, we had to go through the motions: it buys us valuable time, and legitimates the hammer, once it comes down. This is all quite brilliant, I have to say. Can you imagine Al Gore doing this?