Making Case for Iraq War Is a Critical Test for Bush nytimes.com
[ This seems to be the big NYT analysis article of the day, with sidebar links to 9(!) other stories in today's paper, so it's a good one to link for the record. Pollack gets quoted prominently: ]
"Blix laid out the bill of indictment for Saddam Hussein, and it is more credible coming from him than from Bush," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former national security official in the Clinton administration, who is director of research at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Pollack said he was expecting Mr. Blix to "focus on the positive."
But Mr. Pollack and others cautioned that it is far from clear that Mr. Bush will be able to capitalize on the Blix report. Already today European officials were saying that even if everything Mr. Blix says is true — and they did not dispute it — Iraq has been hiding whatever weapons it has for a decade. And the question that Germany and France have pressed remains: If Saddam Hussein's power is contained by the presence of inspectors and the troops massing on his border, what is the urgency of toppling him now?
"The pressure on Saddam is fine, and we want to keep it up," one senior German official said today by telephone from Berlin. "Why risk everything else that can go wrong — uprisings in the streets, a broken Iraq — if we have him where we want him?"
[ more amusing is the little bit from Andy Card that followed the above ]
Mr. Bush's aides know they have to answer that question directly in one of the most widely anticipated State of the Union addresses in recent history. There was evidence today that Mr. Bush understood the challenge, and that he would argue that Iraq is not only a major threat, but also an urgent one.
Over the weekend, his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., a Massachusetts Republican who is usually as understated as Mr. Blix, said it was up to the United States to "protect us and the world from a Holocaust" should Mr. Hussein begin thinking about using weapons of mass destruction.
[ I don't actually follow Card closely, it just seems odd to hear that the guy who leaked the "war marketing plan" line back in August is "usually as understated as Mr. Blix" . Hard to say for sure, but perhaps the above telegraphs an apocalyptic presentation tonight, sigh. One more clip in the sequence: ]
Today the White House pushed that argument further, sending Secretary of State Colin L. Powell out to reiterate — without providing much new evidence — that there are links between Mr. Hussein and the terrorist organization Al Qaeda. Implicit in that argument is that even if Mr. Hussein does not lash out at America directly, he could pass his weapons to terrorists who will.
[ "without providing much new evidence" seems to be an unfortunate and not totally comprehensible part of the marketing plan. Oh well. ] |
