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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tekboy who wrote (123376)	1/17/2004 4:10:47 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 281500

I thought it was sort of banal, too. I was somewhat surprised to see him sort of dissing Rumsfeld, though. Cheeky, that. It always seemed to me that the hardcore PNAC people didn't much hold with "nation-building", in Iraq or anyplace else. Maybe that's why Fukuyama didn't get a job in the admin. What's he doing now, anyway?

To: tekboy who wrote (123376)	1/17/2004 4:20:41 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

PS: The piece I really liked from the current Atlantic was Fallows's, yellow though it might allegedly be. It sort of fizzled out in the end, though. What did you think of it? Packer's New Yorker piece seemed a lot better on the current situation, maybe that was just beyond Fallows' scope.

To: tekboy who wrote (123376)	1/18/2004 4:30:35 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

REALITY vs. FANTASY calpundit.com

To: tekboy who wrote (123376)	1/29/2004 9:29:17 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Demolishing The WMD Theory _______________________________ Editorial The Hartford Courant Tuesday 27 January 2004 truthout.org Nations should go to war only when threatened with imminent danger. President Bush's decision to topple the Taliban government in Afghanistan followed that sensible principle. The Taliban were willing hosts to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorists, who dealt a devastating blow against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. America had to eliminate the terrorist sanctuary for its own security. But the president's case that Iraq presented an imminent threat to the American people looks as though it were built upon a house of cards. The remarks last weekend by a highly credible source - this country's former chief weapons inspector, David Kay - pretty much demolish the president's war rationale. Mr. Kay said he now believes Iraq's Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction. U.N. inspectors had destroyed his arsenals after the first Persian Gulf war in 1991. As Mr. Bush says, the world is indeed a better place because Iraq's regime was toppled from power. But the primary reason the White House gave the world for going to war turned out to be untrue. Many, if not most, Americans believed him when he repeatedly asserted that Iraq had the dreaded weapons. To eliminate what he and Vice President Richard Cheney described as an imminent threat, thousands of American troops were sent into battle at a cost that is approaching $200 billion. There have been thousands of American and Iraqi casualties. Mr. Bush, leading members of his administration and the president's top ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, trumpeted intelligence reports that said the Iraqi dictator had chemical and biological weapons stockpiled around Iraq and was prepared to use them. They speculated that Iraq was just a few years if not months away from having a nuclear weapons capacity. Bush Cabinet members even quantified the amount of agents such as anthrax and other toxins that Mr. Hussein was thought to have. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell gave a slide presentation to the U.N. Security Council last February that purported to show weapons labs and launch sites. But UN inspectors and Mr. Kay's team, active in Iraq since the end of major fighting in May, could find no weapons of mass destruction. "I don't think they exist," Mr. Kay said of WMDs. He blamed it all on a failure of intelligence gathering and interpreting and said the intelligence community owes the president an explanation rather than the president owing the American people an explanation. That's too easy. Mr. Bush's contemporaries should ask, as historians surely will, whether the president and his Cabinet were too willing to accept intelligence that should have been questioned and whether the administration pressured analysts to fit their assessments with the White House's preconceived notions about Iraq. Americans are owed an explanation of why their government's case for war does not hold up. It should come from Mr. Bush. The director of the CIA does not take the nation to war. The president is the one who makes such life and death decisions.