Teribus,

your claim that France stated it would use its veto is in itself debatable; they made several different claims at several different times, and whether they would indeed have vetoed is not at all clear.

But what I was asking was not how you knew the French were planning to veto. It was, rather, what evidence you had that it was the French threat of a veto that was the decisive factor in Bush's decision to avoid seeking a Security Council resolution. That was your original claim:

The reason the second resolution was not put to the vote was because France said that they would veto it.


There is no evidence I know of that will support this. Bush never stated this publicly, nor were the French blamed officially by the US Government, freedom f-cking fries notwithstanding. The fact was that Bush did not have enough votes to carry the resolution, regardless of the French. (This is, as I have said, an educated guess, in that no-one can predict the future with accuracy, but it was the projection of every media outlet based on statements from the various governments on the council, and no doubt of Bush's people as well.) That's why I said you were wrong, and you have so far supplied no evidence to change my mind.

The fact is, if Bush had had enough votes on the table barring a French veto it would have made sense to go ahead with the vote, for two reasons:

1) it wasn't clear, as I said, that the French would in fact veto

and

2) even if they did veto, this war in which we are now engaged would still have been seen as carrying the votes of the majority of the Security Council nations, making France the isolated naysayers that Washington is trying to claim they are. In fact, France was in the majority and the United States and Britain are the isolated ones.