US: During his UN speech on September 12th, George Bush's tele-prompter omitted a key line, a pledge by the US President to "work with the Security Council for the necessary resolutions". Bush ad-libbed it back in, having rehearsed his delivery before entering the UN chamber, which he later compared to a "wax museum" because of the stony-faced ranks of diplomats.
It was perhaps the most important line of an important speech and originated in what Newsweek magazine described as a Eureka moment for Bush at his Texas ranch in mid-August. There he suddenly saw the advantages of what Colin Powell had been urging upon him, that he should paint Saddam Hussein, rather than the US, as the unilateralist defying the world. Bush could go to the UN as the defender of the honour of the world body.
"Does the UN really want to be irrelevant? You've got to be kidding me," Bush reportedly cried as he seized upon the idea. Hence the frequent asides since then by the President about how the UN could go the way of the old pre-war League of Nations if it didn't hang tough against the defiant one.
The League of Nations was presided over by Eamon de Valera, who famously warned its members in 1935: "Make no mistake, if on any pretext whatever we were to permit the sovereignty of even the weakest state among us to be unjustly taken away, the whole foundation of the League would crumble into dust." That was on the eve of the Italian aggression against Abyssinia, after which the League faded into irrelevancy.
Now the UN is being told if it does not take on Iraq, it, too, will "crumble into dust".
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While the US President was seeking approval for military action against Iraq, his administration was making punitive armed raids on another state. The target was California, one of nine US states with laws legalising marijuana use for sick people.
On September 5th about 30 federal agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration carrying M-16 rifles cut down and carted away 167 plants at a one-acre pot farm near Santa Cruz. On Tuesday the resort city held a defiant version of the Boston Tea Party, with a medicinal marijuana organisation handing out pot in front of the city hall while the mayor, Christopher Krohn, looked on approvingly.
"It was a compassionate gathering in support of sick people who need the medicine," the mayor said, while a mysterious helicopter hovered overhead. Protesters held up placards criticising US Attorney General John Ashcroft. Dope-smoking Californians are probably just as repulsive as terrorists to Ashcroft, who doesn't drink, smoke, dance, swear or gamble and has had the naked breasts of Justice Department statues covered up for modesty's sake.
He is applying federal anti-drug laws with zeal, despite a lifetime advocating state's rights, with the backing of a 2001 US Supreme Court ruling that state voter initiatives do not provide a defence against federal prosecution. The crackdown has driven many Californians suffering from cancer to seek refuge in a more tolerant Canada.
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Security at the US-Canadian frontier has been stepped up since 9/11. That's how 10 undocumented Irish were caught this month in a Chicago-to-Boston train that stopped at Buffalo, New York. They thought the train would be less risky than air travel.
Two petrol station attendants of Indian descent who set out from New York for a convention in Las Vegas on September 10th found out just how fraught air travel can be in the present atmosphere. Gurdeep Wander and Pal Singh missed a connection in Minneapolis and boarded a later flight without luggage, which had been sent on. Suspicious flight attendants asked the biggest (white) men on the plane to keep an eye on them. When both Indian men and a Hispanic man used the same lavatory in succession, fears that a bomb was being assembled persuaded the captain to make an emergency landing in Arkansas, causing a full-scale emergency. The men were dressed in orange jump-suits and kept behind bars until this week.
When released they returned home by car. But even road travel can lure foreign-looking Americans into Kafka-land. Three medical students - Kambiz Butt, Ayman Gheith and Omer Choudhary - who stopped to eat at a Shoney's restaurant in Georgia while driving from Chicago to Miami for hospital internships, were allegedly overheard by another customer, Eunice Stone, laughing about the September 11th attacks and talking about another on September 13th.
The men were pulled over on a Florida Interstate highway. For several hours CNN and other television channels carried non-stop Breaking News pictures of police in space-suits inspecting the cars of men of "Middle Eastern descent". The men were released without charge after flatly denying the woman's story.
But that wasn't the end of it. The hospital turned them away after receiving 200 threatening e-mails. They were sent to another hospital, while the media was left with some soul-searching about racial-profiling.
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President Bush unfortunately didn't have a tele-prompter on Wednesday when he enlarged on his Iraq policy to an audience in Iowa by trying to recall the saying: "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." It resulted in one of the most embarrassing moments of his presidency.
"There's an old saying in Tennessee," he began at a rally. "I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says: Fool me once, shame on (pause) shame on you. (Pause) Fool me (long, uncomfortable, agonising pause) you can't get fooled again."
No, indeed.