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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (176762)	10/16/2003 8:28:10 PM
From: Alighieri	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573216

The man didn't vote to go to war...what's your point. Al ------------------------------------------------------------- Not Getting the Truth By Richard Cohen Thursday, October 16, 2003; Page A25 BERLIN -- In 1967, following the ambush and mauling of an American unit in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland awarded Purple Hearts to the wounded. One of them was Bud Barrow, a top sergeant with plenty of experience, who politely told the general that his outfit had "walked into one of the damnedest ambushes you ever seen." Westmoreland corrected him. "Oh, no, no, no, that was no ambush," the general told the man who had been there. Rank has its privileges -- and one of them is to turn black into white. I cite this incident, taken from David Maraniss's magisterial and brilliant new book, "They Marched Into Sunlight," for a reason. It is not because I think that what is happening today in Iraq is necessarily what happened in Vietnam decades ago. It's because once again we have a government that baldly insists on telling us what we know is not true. Take, for instance, Vice President Cheney's recent speech. In it, he repeated the now-discredited charge that the war in Iraq was "an essential step in the war on terror." He trotted out the old bugaboos of weapons of mass destruction and links to al Qaeda and, of course, reminded us that Saddam Hussein was a beast, a fact that not even critics of the war dispute. "They must concede . . . that had their own advice been followed, that regime would rule Iraq today," he said. Hear, hear. But also, wait a minute. We now know -- as we did even before the war -- that Iraq's links to al Qaeda and therefore to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were so tenuous as to be nearly nonexistent. The celebrated meeting between an Iraqi official and one of the Sept. 11 hijackers happened only in the minds of administration propagandists. There is no proof of it. In fact, the terrorist in question is now believed to have been somewhere else that day. Weapons of mass destruction have not been found. It now seems possible that the much-abused United Nations inspectors did a credible job. Of course Hussein once had such weapons and used them, but sanctions and inspections -- not to mention the looming threat of war -- may actually have done the trick. If these weapons programs still existed, particularly the nuclear one, they did so in the most rudimentary form. This was no just-in-time program. President Bush now says the American people "aren't getting the truth" about Iraq, and so he has taken his pitch to regional media outlets that are thought to be more compliant than the national newspapers and television networks. He forgets that many of the national outlets originally supported the war in Iraq -- my own Washington Post and yours truly come to mind. Now the president says that great and wonderful things are happening in Iraq but that the media are unaccountably fixated on the daily suicide bombings and the general chaos. But there are plenty of reports about progress in Iraq -- the opening of schools, etc. Still, both the press and the American public are entitled to wonder whether these numbers add up to anything more than wishful thinking. Vietnam -- that awful analogy -- also produced its hopeful numbers, enemy body counts and the like, and while they were often wrong and sometimes just plain lies, even when they were true, they were largely beside the point. A school could be opened -- and the students still fight you at night. More to the point is the administration's Westmorelandish insistence on asserting the insupportable -- that Saddam Hussein was a grave threat to the United States because he was linked to terrorism and armed to the teeth with those awful weapons. There is no truth to that -- none. And yet Bush continues to insist on it. Once, it was possible merely to argue the matter, as some of the Europeans did. Now, though, questions about facts have become questions of judgment -- and candor. How can we believe what Bush says about the reconstruction of Iraq when we no longer believe the rest of what he says? I am ensconced here at the American Academy in Berlin. I came to see my country from abroad, to defend it and what it did in Iraq (to the extent that I can), but the task has become increasingly difficult. No one specifically mentions Vietnam -- that's my own point of reference -- but they wonder about an administration that has been ambushed by the facts in Iraq and insists it has been vindicated. It's one thing to be an Ugly American. It's another to be a dumb one.

To: i-node who wrote (176762)	10/17/2003 12:49:11 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1573216

"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction." Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002 Thanks for that post. It speaks volumes. Message 19409903

To: i-node who wrote (176762)	10/17/2003 1:48:05 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1573216

Senate Defies Bush on Iraq Aid By ALAN FRAM, AP WASHINGTON (Oct. 16) - The Senate defied President Bush on Thursday and voted to convert half his $20.3 billion Iraqi rebuilding plan into a loan, dealing the White House an embarrassing foreign policy setback. Despite an administration lobbying campaign that in recent days involved Bush himself, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials, the Republican-run chamber voted 51-47 for a bipartisan proposal making $10 billion of the aid a loan. The administration argued that loans would worsen Iraq's foreign debt, slow its recovery and hand a propaganda victory to America's enemies. But the vote underscored that with presidential and congressional elections 13 months away, many lawmakers were more worried about vast new spending for foreign aid at a time of record federal deficits at home. ''It's very hard for me to go home and explain that we have to give $20 billion to a country sitting on $1 trillion worth of oil,'' said one loan supporter, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. The vote came as the House and Senate edged toward approval of similar $87 billion measures to finance American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the reconstruction of both countries. The lion's share of both bills is about $66 billion for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, funds over which there was little controversy. About two hours before the Senate roll call, the GOP-led House voted 226-200 to kill a similar loan proposal introduced by Democrats. The two chambers will have to negotiate compromise language before a final bill is sent to Bush for his signature - which congressional leaders hope to do before next week's conference of donor nations in Madrid, Spain. ''They've counted him (Bush) down and out before. It's just another bump in the road,'' said Tom Korologos, a congressional lobbyist for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority now running Iraq. Eight Republicans abandoned Bush and voted to change his plan: Sens. Sam Brownback of Kansas, Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, John Ensign of Nevada, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Democrats who opposed the loan proposal were Joseph Biden of Delaware, Maria Cantwell of Washington, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, and Zell Miller of Georgia. Under the bipartisan amendment to $10 billion of the Iraqi aid a loan, the money would be transformed into a grant if other countries agreed to forgive at least 90 percent of the debt they were owed by Iraq. That debt is usually estimated at between $90 billion and $127 billion. The loan proposal was the most dramatic change lawmakers have made in the mammoth spending package that the president proposed on Sept. 7. Its approval by the Senate marked the first congressional vote in opposition to Bush's policies in Iraq. It was also the latest of several setbacks that Congress has dealt him in recent months on issues including concentration of media ownership, new rules on overtime pay, and travel to Cuba. While the Senate bill provided the full $20.3 billion for rebuilding that Bush sought, the House measure chopped it down to $18.6 billion. It did so by erasing politically fragile proposals: funds for buying $50,000 garbage trucks, creating Iraqi ZIP codes and restoring the country's marshlands. The administration and its supporters wanted the rebuilding assistance to be entirely grants financed by U.S. taxpayers. They warned that loans would nurture Arab suspicions about the United States' true motivation in Iraq. ''The battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people is not over by a long shot,'' said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. He said the amendment ''will send a clear signal that the United States is really, really there for the oil.'' Cheney called senators during the day hoping to block the loan plan, congressional aides said. And two senators - Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, who had initially said they supported loans switched Thursday and said they had been persuaded to oppose them. But as the day wore on in the Senate, expressions of optimism by administration officials and GOP Senate aides faded. The White House budget office released a statement saying the administration strongly opposed loans. But the letter omitted any mention of a veto threat, which the office sometimes includes to send a strong message of opposition. The sponsors of the Senate loan amendment were: Sens. Sens. Evan Bayh, D-Ind.; Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga.; Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.; Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine; John Ensign, R-Nev.; Ben Nelson, D-Neb.; and Graham. In earlier tests, the Senate voted 57-42 to reject a Democratic proposal to let Bush quickly spend the first half of the $20.3 billion but require him to get Congress' assent next year to spend the rest. It also voted 65-34 to kill an amendment by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., barring funds from going to contracts with companies that owe deferred compensation to 22 top Bush administration officials. Among them was Cheney, whose former firm, Halliburton Co., has received $1.4 billion for working to restore Iraq's oil industry. AP-NY-10-16-03 2244EDT Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.