Reuters again

Check out this paragraph from a Reuters dispatch:

Bush, who initially shunned the United Nations, is now relying heavily on the world body to set up the caretaker government, and expects U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to name the country's interim leaders within the month.

I seem to remember Bush speaking at the UN in September 2002, telling them:

The United States helped found the United Nations. We want the United Nations to be effective, and respectful, and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced. And right now those resolutions are being unilaterally subverted by the Iraqi regime. Our partnership of nations can meet the test before us, by making clear what we now expect of the Iraqi regime.

(...)

My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge. If Iraq's regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account. We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions. But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced -- the just demands of peace and security will be met -- or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.

And so began months of effort to try to raise the UN out of its apathetic inertia. The US hasn't shunned the UN, The UN has shunned the US.

This is one the many tiny inaccuracies that are scattered through much of Reuters coverage. Just a little jab at the US, nothing important, but the cumulative effect of all these little jabs has a large effect on the casual and unquestioning news reader.

Posted by Bruce Gottfred at May 24, 2004 12:25 PM | TrackBack