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

To: sylvester80 who wrote (35644)	1/19/2004 12:51:11 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 89467

One year after trumpeting WMD threat, the world tunes in for explanation of inconsistencies. By Elizabeth Armstrong \| csmonitor.com www.christiansciencemonitor.com During his State of the Union address in January 2003, President Bush claimed that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had enough anthrax to "kill several million people," enough botulinum toxin to "subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure," and enough chemical agents to "kill untold thousands," according to a White House transcript. He sourced the United Nations and US intelligence for the estimates, adding that Mr. Hussein "has given no evidence that he has destroyed" any of the chemical weapons. As Mr. Bush prepares to deliver this year's State of the Union address Tuesday, the Washington Post reports that long-term consequences of the administration's rhetoric regarding weapons of mass destruction could be severe overseas, "particularly because the war was waged without the backing of the United Nations and was opposed by large majorities, even in countries run by leaders that supported the invasion." Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and head of policy planning for Secretary of State Colin Powell when the war started, says that, "if the United States argues the intelligence warrants something controversial, like a preventive attack ... we've made the bar higher for ourselves and we have to expect greater skepticism in the future." 01/16/04 'A moral war' 01/15/04 Iraqi Shiite protest complicates US plans 01/14/04 White House's 'rush to war was reckless' Sign up to be notified daily: Find out more. On Capitol Hill, the Post reports, Bush is being pressured to acknowledge in his address the inability to find weapons of mass destruction. But the president says he will use the address to insist that his administration is successfully tackling the nation's problems at home, according to The Associated Press. "We will continue to confront the challenges of our time, and we will continue to make America a more secure, more prosperous and more hopeful place," Bush said as he gave a stripped-down preview of his Tuesday night speech in his weekly radio address Saturday. Millions are expected to watch this year's address, and while US intelligence and security may be on the minds of analysts and politicians, the American people are more concerned with his handling of the US economy than the war on terrorism, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. (The poll was conducted by telephone last week with 1,022 adults nationwide; its margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points.) Mr. Bush retains a powerful advantage on national security. Sixty-eight percent, including majorities of both Democrats and independents, gave him high marks for the campaign against terrorism, and 68 percent said the Bush administration's policies have made the United States safer from terrorist attacks. Sixty-four percent said they considered him a strong leader. Pentagon Defense Advisory Board member Kenneth Adelman tells the Post that the inconsistencies between the administration's rhetoric about weapons of mass desctruction in Iraq and actual postwar findings need to be addressed - not only because the preemption doctrine rests "on solid intelligence," but "also on the credibility that the intelligence is solid." Last Friday, the Post reports, a British TV reporter asked whether Secretary of State Colin Powell would some day admit that he "had concerns about invading Iraq," and a Dutch reporter asked whether he ever had doubts about the Iraq policy. "There's no doubt in my mind that [Hussein] had the intention, he had the capability," Powell answered. "How many weapons he had or didn't have, that will be determined."