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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (18535)	5/1/2003 9:50:55 AM
From: Cactus Jack	Respond to of 89467

Scott, Bonds is so quick to turn on an inside fastball that its scary, especially considering he's the oldest guy on the field. Players are supposed to slow down as they age; he's getting quicker. jpg

To: stockman_scott who wrote (18535)	5/1/2003 5:38:35 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 89467

Reconstruction The tracks of postwar Iraq. By NR Editors, from the May 19, 2003, issue of National Review America takes on the reconstruction of Iraq and the challenges of a postwar world at a happy time, for it is flooded with advice, all of it good. Unfortunately, all of it is also contradictory. We must have an agenda for Iraq's political future, but we must not behave like occupiers. We should not formally end the regime of sanctions until we have scoured the country for weapons of mass destruction, yet we should restore Iraqi prosperity forthwith. We should be wary of a fundamentalist uprising, without imposing our values. Got that? American efforts in Iraq are proceeding along two tracks. The first might be called geo-forensic: the effort to piece together Saddam Hussein's weapons program, and his contacts with world terrorists. Observers with MTV attention spans have shown dismay over our failure to find the chemical warheads and plague vials, all neatly labeled on shelves, as in a Bond villain's secret lab. A little patience is in order. Hans Blix had several months to look for weapons of mass destruction, and the international community had eleven years before that. In the rubble of a regime that was surely destroying or exporting evidence as the end came, we can take a little time. Meanwhile, Farouk Hijazi, a former intelligence official captured near the Syrian border, reportedly has evidence of Saddam-al Qaeda contacts, while the tireless Daily Telegraph has found intelligence files detailing the same thing. How could the secularist and the visionary cooperate? The same way the Bolsheviks and the Nazis did. On the political front, Iraqis held a second U.S.-sponsored conference to discuss a transitional government. Zalmay Khalilzad, fresh from similar midwife duty in Afghanistan, co-chaired the meeting. Retired general Jay Garner, who heads the overall American advisory effort, seems to be an ideal presence — calm, tough, respectful. Iraq will want some form of federal system, like multilingual Switzerland, or the Yankee/Quaker/planter/backwoods United States. Should exiles play a role? No one should be disdained because the threat of death forced him to flee. With security, Iraqis can have a decent interval to work these questions out. How will the world threaten Iraq's security? Syria, the last remaining Baathist state, has adopted a meek tone: They coughed up Mr. Hijazi. Iran has not, sending in agitators to stir up Iraqi Shiites. We need to patrol the borders, take a firm line, and hope that events in Iran, which is writhing under the ayatollahs' dictatorship, will remove the problem at the source. The French seem — slightly — penitent, moving to suspend U.N. sanctions against its beaten ally. But they do not want the program terminated until U.N. inspectors give the country a thorough look. This is a ruse to maintain U.N., and thus French, leverage. Until the old chien learns new tours, we should downgrade France everywhere we can, beginning in NATO, by shifting decisions to the French-free Defense Planning Council. Meanwhile, at home, nothing has changed. Everyone who disliked Donald Rumsfeld still dislikes him; everyone who opposed the war rages at the peace. Yet everything has changed. In spite of naysayers, America moved, and it won. They were as wrong as they are impotent

To: stockman_scott who wrote (18535)	5/1/2003 8:10:54 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 89467

WMD's Wednesday, April 30, 2003 By Bill O'Reilly Hi. I'm Bill O'Reilly. Thanks for watching us tonight. Right-wing spin. That is the subject of this evening's Talking Points Memo. Last evening, we told you the anti-Bush left had only one issue left, weapons of mass destruction. And lo and behold today, the two most anti-Bush newspaper columnists around, [Robert] Scheer of The Los Angeles Times and [Paul] Krugman of The New York Times, wrote almost identical columns bemoaning the lies and deceit about weapons of mass destruction. Of course, this is no accident. Scheer and Krugman are part of the far left Talking Points crowd. Seems political opinion these days is indeed mass marketed. And that holds true on the right as well. Listen to Hazel Edwards, who lives in Houston, Texas. "It is absolutely immaterial and irrelevant whether or not any weapons of mass destruction are ever found. Just the threat that Saddam had them was a danger. If it turns out Saddam was bluffing, the world should be thankful that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair had to guts to remove him." That is the conservative spin. And that point of view is just as fallacious as demanding the Bush administration produce the weapons on the spot. Here is the No Spin truth: Saddam Hussein was effective at hiding stuff, so a fair-minded person is going to give the Bush administration some time to track the weapons down. In fact, the CBS News poll today said 68 percent of Americans aren't surprised weapons are hard to find. However, a fair-minded person is also going to want the President to explain the situation because the war was partially sold on the danger of Saddam's weaponry. This is a matter of trust. Most Americans believed Mr. Bush and Colin Powell when they said Saddam had deadly weapons. If he did not, we need to know who screwed up. To be fair, President Bush didn't do the analysis. The CIA, the NSA, and the military intelligence did. But the leaders of those organizations have to be held accountable. If no weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq, President Bush must fire the men and women who misled him. There's no spinning this. Americans have a right to know exactly why we went to war and the entire WMD scenario. Talking Points believes the President should address the issue in the next few weeks and lay it all on the line. And that's The Memo. sunspot.net