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

To: calgal who wrote (533843)	2/1/2004 5:26:39 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

January 30, 2004, 9:04 a.m. The Mad Doc Could we see it coming? By Adam Wolfson Not since "Dewey Defeats Truman" has the press been so surprised (and so wrong) about a political race as last week in Iowa and this week in New Hampshire. For months and months the liberal press had been declaring Dean to be the Next Big Thing. He was their darling. Time, Newsweek, and National Journal all ran cover stories on him. The New York Times Magazine and countless newspapers wrote in-depth analyses of why Dean could not lose. He was called "invincible," and his nomination "inevitable." Yet as it happens, he was a total flop among real Democrats, coming in a distant third in the Iowa caucuses, and a disappointing second in New Hampshire. What gives? Anyone can make mistakes, of course, and Howard Dean's chances are hardly dead yet (just nearly so). But it's still worth asking why the liberal media got this one so spectacularly wrong. They had convinced all of us that Kerry was a washout and Edwards a bumpkin. I was certainly convinced. Why was the media so quick to crown Dean king? Sure, the former Vermont governor was a money-attracting machine, and that counts for something in politics. But so was Senator Phil Graham in the 1996 Republican primaries with his "ready cash" — and look what happened to him. It now seems pretty clear that Dean's early enthronement was based less on his actual campaign prowess than certain prejudices of the mainstream liberal press. Dean was two things that the liberal press, in particular, loved. First, he was radically antiwar. In Dean the Left had the opportunity to relive the 1960s' protests against the Vietnam War. They could throw up the barricades, march in protest, and denounce the American Imperial Power — at least vicariously. They could also, like Dean, vent their anger. And Dean gave voice to the Left's more wild claims: He wondered whether Bush knew about September 11 before it happened; he made accusations of a neoconservative cabal manipulating the president; and he doubted whether the capture of Saddam Hussein was in fact a good thing. Second, Dean was the candidate who was thought to be a transformative political figure, some kind of charismatic leader or "change agent." He had discovered a way to raise huge sums of money through the Internet. It was claimed he would bring into the process millions and millions of new young voters. The Democratic party would never be the same again: Dean would kind of break things up all over again, 1960s style. Always on his lips were the words, "I want to change America." Dean's antiwar message no doubt appealed to older journalists who had lived through those heady days, as well as perhaps a younger generation who believed they had been born too late and had missed out on Something Really Big. Dean made things sound exciting again. Most of all Dean provided liberal journalists with the frisson of protest politics. As for us conservatives, we were all too quick to believe what we read about Dean in the mainstream media. We did so either in eager anticipation of another Nixon-like landslide against McGovern in 1972. Or we did so in a mood of near religious dread for the fate of our country. The man was obviously ever so slightly unhinged. Was it really possible that so many of our fellow citizens, even liberal ones, could vote for this guy? We were pretty quick to think so. But the fact is that protest politics only succeed under extraordinary circumstances. In retrospect, Gore's endorsement of Dean should have been the tip-off that Dean might not make it all the way. Gore has less political acumen than just about any national politician in recent memory. That he decided before a single primary vote had been cast to back Dean should have raised more than a few questions about just how good Dean's chances really were. The Democratic party is still not quite the equivalent of the French postmodern Left, and nor is it ready for a Jacque Chirac. For Dean to win (even in the Democratic primaries) the war in Iraq would have to look a whole lot more like the Vietnam War than it presently does. Many liberal Democrats think the war is a terrible blunder, and an immoral and unjust use of American power. But Iraq is not exactly Vietnam. We have lost about 500 soldiers in Iraq so far. Each and every one of these losses is a terrible personal tragedy for the families. This is all too painfully obvious. However, it was the staggering loss of some 50,000 American lives that helped make the antiwar candidacy of McGovern a possibility. Also, today, unlike then, there was no precipitating attack on American soil, no September 11. Many Democratic voters object to the war in Iraq, but few see it as Dean does: as the only thing worth talking about. They're in favor of reforms, but few seem to want the radical change prescribed by the mad doctor from Vermont. That's what the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries demonstrated. — Adam Wolfson is editor of The Public Interest.

To: calgal who wrote (533843)	2/1/2004 5:51:52 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Respond to of 769670

Westi OUTSTANDING, Charles Krauthammer BRILLIANT!!! Charles Krauthammer URL:http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer.html What Kay really was saying newsandopinion.com \| Before the great hunt for scapegoats begins, let's look at what David Kay has actually said about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. First, and most trumpeted, he did not find "large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction." He did find, as he reported last October, WMD-related activities, from a very active illegal missile program to research and development ("right up until the end") on weaponizing the deadly poison ricin (the stuff London police found on terrorists last year). He discovered "hundreds of cases" of U.N.-prohibited and illegally concealed activities. Significant findings, but still a far cry from what the administration had claimed last March. Kay has now offered the most novel and convincing explanation for why U.S. intelligence — and, for that matter, U.N. inspectors and the intelligence agencies of every country that mattered — misjudged what Iraq possessed. It was a combination of Iraqi bluff, deceit and corruption far more bizarre than heretofore suspected. Kay discovered that an increasingly erratic Saddam Hussein had taken over personal direction of WMD programs. But because there was no real oversight, the scientists would go to Hussein, exaggerate or invent their activities, then pocket the funds. Scientists were bluffing Hussein. Hussein was bluffing the world. The Iraqis were all bluffing each other. Special Republican Guard commanders had no WMDs, but they told investigators that they were sure other guard units did. It was this internal disinformation that the whole outside world missed. Congress needs to find out why, with all our resources, we had not a clue that this was going on. But Kay makes clear that President Bush was relying on what the intelligence agencies were telling him. Kay contradicts the reckless Democratic charges that Bush cooked the books. "All the analysts I have talked to said they never felt pressured on WMD," says Kay. "Everyone believed that [Iraq] had WMD." That includes the Clinton administration. Kay told The Post he had found evidence that Hussein had quietly destroyed some biological and chemical weapons in the mid-1990s — but never reported it to the United Nations. Which was why President Bill Clinton in 1998 declared with great alarm and great confidence that Hussein had huge stockpiles of biological and chemical arms — "and some day, some way, I guarantee you he'll use the arsenal." The intelligence failure is quite spectacular, but its history is quite prosaic. When the U.N. inspectors left in 1998, they assumed that the huge stockpiles of unaccounted-for weapons still existed. What other assumption could they make? That Hussein had destroyed them and not reported that to the very agency that could have then vindicated him and gotten sanctions lifted? Secretary of State Colin Powell correctly makes the case that this very fact — the concealment of both the weapons and their possible destruction — clearly justifies the legality of the Iraq war, since the terms of the 1991 cease-fire placed the positive obligation on Iraq to demonstrate its own disarmament. It clearly and repeatedly failed to do that. But beyond the legal question is the security question. People forget that when the Bush administration came into office, Iraq was a very unstable place. Thousands of Iraqis were dying as a result of sanctions. Containment necessitated the garrisoning of Saudi Arabia with thousands of "infidel" American troops — in the eyes of many Muslims, a desecration (cited by Osama bin Laden as his No. 1 reason for his 1996 "Declaration of War" on America). The no-fly zones were slow-motion war, and the embargo was costly and dangerous — the sailors who died on the USS Cole were on embargo duty. Until Bush got serious, threatened war and massed troops in Kuwait, the U.N. was headed toward loosening and ultimately lifting sanctions, which would have given Hussein carte blanche to regroup and rebuild his WMDs. Bush reversed that slide with his threat to go to war. But that kind of aggressive posture is impossible to maintain indefinitely. A regime of inspections, embargo, sanctions, no-fly zones and thousands of combat troops in Kuwait was an unstable equilibrium. The United States could have either retreated and allowed Hussein free rein — or gone to war and removed him. Those were the only two ways to go. Under the circumstances, and given what every intelligence agency on the planet agreed was going on in Iraq, the president made the right choice, indeed the only choice.