�Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?�
-President George W. Bush, September 12, 2002
�We must come together to deal with this crisis or it tends to make the United Nations somewhat irrelevant.�
Secretary of State Colin Powell, September 13, 2002
�Now, at some point [the United Nations] has to ask how does it feel about that--does it want to be irrelevant? . . .�
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, September 18, 2002
�. . . [T]he president cannot imagine that the United Nations wants to make itself irrelevant.�
Presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer, October 3, 2002.
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�We�ve got to have more international participation in the international coalition force.�
General John P. Abizaid, top American commander for Iraq, August 28, 2003
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Oh, how it must stick in Rummy�s wrinkled craw, hearing his own top general tell everybody who will listen, �Look, we need help from the rest of the
world.� A year ago, the neocons in the White House could not have been more eager to declare the United Nations �irrelevant� because it wouldn�t
follow our marching orders on Iraq. The president�s advisors were practically begging him to go it alone, to show the rest of the world we didn�t need
it. But now our own commanders are begging for something else: more �international participation� to fix the mess Bush, Rice and Rummy have created in
Iraq. He won�t say so out loud, but you can bet General Abizaid would love to have in the field beside him right now a couple of divisions from �Old�
Europe�s Germany and France.
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