Stardate 20021015.1713

(On Screen): The nations involved in the UN Security Council are continuing the process of destroying any remaining significance it may have. France, in particular, seems hell-bent to kill it all off entirely.

Of course, that's not what the government of France thinks it's doing. It thinks that it is using its threat of veto to try to control whether there will or will not be a war in Iraq. But the reality is that they're controlling whether the US will or will not have UN approval when it attacks anyway. Are they so blind now, so entranced by their vision of international governance, that they cannot see that the Security Council doesn't actually have binding power of control over anything?

It's approaching the point where it seems as if the government of France is living in a fantasy world, where French opinion actually still matters, and where the US actually asks for French advice and actually follows it.

France isn't the only one. The head of the Arab League is living in a world of his own, too. Even as the US continues to work to set up Kuwait as a staging area for invasion, and Qatar as a regional C&C facility and major airbase, Amr Moussa says that no Arab state would participate in any way in any attack against Iraq. Which is odd, because he said this just after visiting Qatar and talking to officials there. (Evidently they didn't invite him to tour the Al Udeid air base.)

Oh, and he yet again summons the spectre of the Angry Arab Street.

It's refreshing to see that someone out there actually understands reality, but it's rather odd that it's Iran. They're building a series of refugee camps at the Iraq border to handle Iraqis who will flood in after we don't begin that war that's not going to happen because the UN Security Council won't authorize it and no Arab nation will cooperate.