I think that the international community implicitly understood that the US was giving them the finger when Bush appointed John Bolton as the UN Ambassador without the requisite Senate vote.
Now it is official.
In a January 4 Financial Times article quoted an unnamed senior State Department official:
"We 'ad hoc' our way through coalitions of the willing. That's the future," a senior State Department official said in a briefing this week that reflected Washington's search for alternatives to the post-second world war global architecture in the new era of its "war on terror".
Ad hoc??! What about the existing structures such as NATO and the UN?
"Nato would remain a "bedrock alliance, a model and framework", the official said, but he questioned its reliability."
Oh, so because they didn't blindly follow along they're useless and unreliable?
Check out the full article:
http://msnbc.msn.com/...
So the Bush Administration thinks that the current "coalition of the willing" model is really working in Iraq? Apparently it's good enough. The rest of the world would call it a failure; perhaps that's why BushCo is flushing them.
Also, as an aside, why didn't we see this in the MSM? The FT is an excellent publication, but I would expect to see this in the NYT or the WaPo.