Europe was displeased with the USA for leading a war against Saddam Hussein and his regime of homicides and tortures. Europeans accused Americans of working "unilaterally" (along with most of the other Anglo-Saxon states of the world, Japan, several states in Europe and several others). The French and the Germans wanted the United Nations to give the thumbs up on attacking Iraq. The United Nations has never taken any action in any situation at any time, and that on top of the French's promise to veto everything in the United Nation's Security Council says that the United Nations would never have approved of removing Saddam Hussein and his Baath-party from the palaces of Iraq.
In short, the Europeans where not too happy about Americans making a decision about something without full consent of the world-community, even though that decision was something the world-community had been saying needed to be taken at some point if Saddam wouldn't stop his threats against people of the free world.
The opposite of this disagreement is the Kyoto-protocol. There the Americans are saying the Europeans are trying to force a decision down their throat that harms more than it benefits. The Europeans sail their path of state-controlled pollution-reductions and the Americans refuse to take part, rightly stating that it does more harm than good (we all know rich people pollute less than poor, and that the Kyoto-protocol harms the economic-growth of its participants, which again keeps people from becoming rich and thereby polluting less). The Americans could rightly say that the Kyoto-protocol had to be agreed by the United Nations as international law before it can be forced upon individual members of the U.N., just as the Europeans say that to remove a blood-thirsty dictator from power needs the approval of "everyone".
Its a battle of the bureaucrats and no-one wins. The world needs less politics and more freedom, and that's the lesson to be learned.
2 comments:
I don't think that the invasion in Iraq can be justified, and be it only USA invading Sudan to stop massacres or USA+allies invading Iraq to overpower a regime I don't think attack-wars can be justified at all.
But can it always be avoided? I wonder.
Kyoto does good in the way that it tries to quantify pollution as a finite resource which can be sold and bought on the free market, rewarding those to use less (and can unload excess-quoatas on the free market) and offering those who need the means to buy. Kyoto does bad in the way that the amount of "pollution" (emission) has been rationed between states already, and already it has been decided in what states the quoatas will go down and where they will go up.
Kyoto is a compromise between those who believe pollution is the biggest problem of humans/Earth, and those who believe the free market should prevail. It satisfies neither party but should stop both from complaining too much.
EU buys a huge part of its energy from Eastern-Europe, which problaby contributes to their nice pollution-percentage vs. economic size. I don't know how much energy USA buys from Cananda and Mexico.
"if Saddam wouldn't stop his threats against people of the free world."
Jesus Geir, is this really what you think. If you do I have underestimated how blindly you follow the decisions bade by Bush.
Saddam's behaviour towards the UN's repeated warnings over a decade or so where resulting in phrases like "serious consequences" coming from the Security Council's documents. He was dissing the UN and he was getting away with it pretty nicely.
This doesn't justify an invasion into Iraq. However, does anything justify an invasion? What tools does the UN have to enforce human rights laws across the world besides threatning phrases?
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