'Coalition of the willing' is no longer willing

The Brits are going home.

Forty thousand marched in beside the Americans. Only 7,100 remain; 1,600 will be heading home by Easter.

By August, the Danish force of 470 is to be withdrawn, as is the tiny Lithuanian unit. South Korea has 2,200 troops in the Kurdish north. Though they rarely leave base, 1,100 are to depart by August, the rest by year's end.

The Italians are gone. The Spanish pulled out after the Madrid bombings. Ukraine's 1,600 have departed. The Japanese have gone. Declaring the war ''unjust and wrong,'' Slovakia's new prime minister just ordered home his country's contingent of 110 engineers.

Only the Americans are going in deeper. Aussies excepted, the ''coalition of the willing'' is no longer willing.

In Afghanistan, Americans, Brits, Canadians and Dutch fight, as Germans, French and Italians do ''reconstruction.'' In World War I, France, Italy and Germany lost four million men. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the three together have probably not lost 50.

`A sign of success'

Prime Minister Romano Prodi resigned Wednesday, when his plan to stay in Afghanistan and enlarge a U.S. base in Italy, lest refusal be seen as ''a hostile act toward the USA,'' was rejected in the Senate.

Vice President Cheney hails Tony Blair's announced withdrawal of British troops as a sign of success. Yet he says the Pelosi-Murtha plan to withdraw U.S. troops would only ``validate the al Qaeda strategy.''

The White House says that the British pullout is an affirmation of our partnership, but the Brits could have sent those 1,600 to Baghdad or Anbar. They did not. - PATRICK J. BUCHANAN
www.creators.com
********
Buchanan goes on to rail at Europe, NATO, and a few others. (Buchanan is always railing away at somebody.) The important part of the article, however, is that the so-called Coalition of the Willing has been reduced to, for the most part, the Coalition of the Blind and the Bribed. (Buchanan neglected to mention how most of the remaining forces became "Willing" in the first place; you do have to wonder why US forces had equipment that was not up to current standards while other, much much smaller national militaries had up-to-date equipment, with, of course, "Property of the US Dept. of Defense" carefully erased.) The Coalition, like many of Iraq's citizens, are voting with their feet. It seems that bush is paying just as much attention to their votes as he does to November's vote here in the US. Why is that?

Don't know where the author of the link gets his knowledge that " Tony Blair is only weeks away from resigning". If he knows then he's the only person in the whole world, apart from Blair himself, who knows when Blair is planning to leave. 'Resigning' is something of an emotive or pejorative word to use in this context.

We don't know that over here in Britain . The author seems to want to suggest that Blair is resigning because of the chaos in Iraq or because he took us there. Sorry, but he ain't. Blair said long ago that he would stand down some time during his present term.He has never given any date for standing down nor has he hinted at one. In Britain we don't have fixed terms of office any more than we have fixed terms between elections.The length of tenure of the Prime Minister is decided by the Prime Minister himself unless he is thrown out as leader of his own party in the House, his government loses a vote of 'no confidence' or he loses office at a general election. Current thinking is that he will quit in June, but nobody knows for sure and he's not telling.

Whist it is true that he has pulled 1,600 troops out of Iraq he is now sending almost that number as extra forces to Afghanistan instead

(As he reluctantly acknowledges now, it was a mistake for him to say that he was leaving. It turned him instantly into a lame duck. Ever since he said that all eyes have been on the future. His supposed allies were soon openly planning and plotting to pick his successor.Everything he said or promised was taken in the knowledge that he would not be around to carry his words into effect. He lost much of his authority in cabinet and in the House).

quote:

Originally posted by DorianGreyed:
The important part of the article, however, is that the so-called Coalition of the Willing has been reduced to, for the most part, the Coalition of the Blind and the Bribed.

The important part to whom? Maybe I missed it, but does Buchanan use the words "blind" and "bribed?" Is the "railing" not his conclusion? Maybe this is not the right article to make your point.

You are right, Fuse, that he didn't use those words, nor did he refer to how the smaller militaries were bribed. I guess I thought that the bribed part had been proven beyond a doubt by previously disclosed information. I also refered to Buchanan's words on a talk show (The McLaughlin Group) rather than this specific article. Further,
continual editing on my part resulted in phrasing that started out in one sentence and ended up in another, with the original sentence discarded.

What I was trying to get across is that the Coalition has fallen apart, with most of the other main partners (george still has Macedonia's three dozen men!) dropping out due to the realization that whatever drove them to Iraq was no longer something that could be accomplished, was not the truth, or is no longer worth it. If Buchanan has realized that a Republican administration has failed, it has really failed. It should be noted that Buchanan, who defended his boss Nixon long after it was obvious that he had committed impeachable offenses, was against the Iraq War from the start, and has pointed out that Iraq had a more stable leader in Saddam than in anyone the US could put in his place.