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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (466792)	9/29/2003 6:49:42 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Spookie, there was no CIA agent who was outed.. ROTFLOL... And I also believe no-one in the White House said anything to anyone about anything in the Novak story before it was published.

To: American Spirit who wrote (466792)	9/29/2003 6:57:09 PM
From: Srexley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

"BUSH WINS AGAIN" A good editorial on the current situation. Please read it and learn. nypost.com September 29, 2003 -- WHEN a beloved cleric was murdered at a holy shrine in the Iraqi town of Najaf and suspects got caught boasting about it at an Internet café, the outraged townspeople didn't lynch them - instead, they got marched off to the police. It's a small but telling hint that despite decades of Saddam Hussein's brutality, the Iraqi people have the potential be a bulwark of Mideast democracy - and also a clue to the logic behind President Bush's policy. The cover of this week's Time magazine blares: "Mission Not Accomplished" - as if the Iraq war has suddenly morphed into a total failure. But is that true? The mission was to get rid of Saddam. He's gone from power. It's an ongoing frustration that he hasn't been caught, but his removal has already brought a major shift in the Middle East, the center of terrorist threats. Oddly enough, Saddam's exit has been most quickly accepted in the Arab world. The famous "Arab street" didn't erupt. Al-Jazeera TV lost some credibility. And post-Saddam Iraqi leaders were welcomed into OPEC and the Arab League. It hasn't led to instant Arab-Israeli peace, but it has enormously reduced the potential support for Mideast terror. Saddam is no longer there to bribe the families of homicide bombers. No one but terrorists regrets his fall. And others, notably Russian President Vladimir Putin this weekend, have joined Bush in warning the other two nations with Iraq in his "Axis of Evil" - North Korea and Iran - against any nuclear-weapons ambitions. All of which suggests that Bush's action against Iraq strengthened America's credibility around the world, rather than weakening it as critics claim. After Bush spoke to the United Nations last week, the loudest foes of the Iraq war - France and Germany - rushed to snuggle up to the president and say they'd like a role in postwar Iraq. And contrary to a lot of press reports, the Iraqi people aren't ungrateful - even in unsettled Baghdad, a remarkable 67 percent of Iraqis are optimistic and expect to be better off in five years. In most of the country, the number is surely higher. Yes, there were plenty of blunders in planning for the postwar, many perhaps because the State Department and CIA were too suspicious of Iraqi exiles. In hindsight, it would have been smarter to trust the exiles more - and train more of them as Iraqi soldiers and police. It's also true that the Bush administration has been remarkably inept at communicating the success stories out of Iraq. One result is the surging growth of an Internet universe - a lot of it linked via Instapundit.com - focused on spreading good news from Iraq and lambasting "Big Media," especially the anti-American BBC, for ignoring it. But this week's Time magazine is typical of a press corps that has - mostly - raced to highlight every bit of bad news from Iraq, and virtually none of the good news. When NBC anchor Tom Brokaw went to Iraq, it was as if he was visiting a different country than that any other TV journalist had reported from, because he left Baghdad and many of his reports actually had an optimistic tone. Why? Perhaps because Brokaw has chronicled the Greatest Generation and World War II, a time of patience instead of attention deficit disorder and a demand for overnight success. Nowadays, one can imagine critics instantly howling for Dwight D. Eisenhower's head over the deaths on D-Day. It's worth remembering, as critics revive their Vietnam quagmire comparisons, that over 57,000 U.S. troops died in Vietnam and so far the U.S. death toll in Iraq is 308, fewer than the 343 firemen who were killed on 9/11. Every death is a tragedy. But that doesn't make the war a failure. In fact, it is a success. Deborah Orin is The Post's Washington Bureau Chief.