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A year ago in New York, I led a Canadian effort to find a compromise between Washington, in its determined march to war, and others - in fact, the great majority of others - equally determined to give the UN weapons inspectors more time to do their jobs. The substance of the compromise consisted of setting a series of tests of Iraqi co-operation, on a pass-or-fail basis, and a limited time frame within which to assess results. We knew the odds against selling the compromise were long, but we believed the consequences of a war made the effort mandatory. Many, including members of the so-called coalition of the willing, encouraged us to persevere. Most, including me, disbelieved the allegations emanating from the White House about Iraqi nuclear weapons. Few were persuaded by the "intelligence" presented to the UN Security Council and to the world by the US Secretary of State and the director of the CIA. There is little doubt that it would have been in everyone's interests, especially Washington's, to have accepted the compromise. In the end, the horses would not drink. The war proceeded, with consequences that the world is still trying to calculate.
The most obvious consequence is that the United States and its posse are caught in a morass. They cannot end the occupation precipitously without triggering a civil war and undoing the good they have done in removing Saddam Hussein. They cannot stay in Iraq without losing more soldiers and more money. Echoes of Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Iraqi toll also rises. As one Arab ambassador at the United Nations put it, the Americans have swallowed a razor and nothing they do now will be painless or cost-free.
The cost to US interests extends well beyond Iraq. In December, the US Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, headed by former US ambassador to Israel and Syria, Edward Djerejian, reported that "the bottom has indeed fallen out of support for the United States." According to a poll released this week by the Pew Research Center, international discontent with the United States and its foreign policy has intensified rather than diminished since last year. In some Muslim countries, support for the United States is in the single digits. Pew found little change in the overwhelmingly negative attitudes of countries toward the Iraq war. In Britain, support has plummeted from 61 percent last year to 43 percent now. The Globe and Mail/CTV News poll found that two-thirds of Canadians believe that President George W. Bush "knowingly lied to the world" about Iraq.
Nor are all the critics foreign. The war, according to a report of the US Army War College, was a strategic error, a distraction from the war on terrorism. Beyond the neo-cons, few see terrorism as monolithic. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that weapons of mass destruction were not an immediate threat, inspections were working, the terrorism connection was missing and war was not the best or only option.
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