The grownups are (still) in the house.
Further gackery, this time from the antic muse: a quick sneak peek inside some of what’s passed for diplomacy in the Bush foreign policy, courtesy the Daily Telegraph. Want to know why Colin Powell didn’t pull a James Baker and travel the world convincing the Coalition of the Willing to actually pony up? “Powell was so busy protecting his position in Washington that he did not travel,” says Unnamed Source, a senior British official. (I wonder if there’s any relation to everyone’s favorite Bush administration spokesperson?) But the money quote, as Ana Marie points out, is the one which maybe gets to the heart of all our French troubles:
A few days later, Mr Bush delivered his key address to the UN General Assembly.
Another senior British official said: “There was tremendous in-fighting in Washington. The drafts of the speech went back and forth. I think there were 28 versions before the final text was agreed.
“For us the key phrase was Bush’s commitment to seeking a new UN resolution to disarm Iraq. We were only sure we had it 24 hours before the speech.
“For some reason this was left out of the text on the teleprompter as Bush was reading it, and he had to improvise.
“He managed to ad-lib a sentence saying ‘we will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions’. But instead of saying ‘resolution’ he said ‘resolutions’ in the plural. That’s how we got stuck with the French idea of two resolutions.”
Almost crazy enough to be true, isn’t it.
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