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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (3448)	2/21/2004 10:57:07 AM
From: ChinuSFO	Respond to of 81568

Many are running away with a given that one of Bush's positive is his foreign policy and his war on terrorism. Well, here is what a foreign press has to say about the failure of Bush foreign policy. This clearly goes to show that American intelligence is not flawed but was manipulated to serve the political designs of the Administration. Chasing Iraq when Pakistan was to blame By LEON HADAR THE revelation that a leading Pakistani scientist has been running a smuggling operation that provided nuclear military designs to Iran, Libya and North Korea has ignited 'Shocked! Shocked! Shocked!' outcries in Washington. As the saying goes: with allies like Musharraf, who needs enemies like Saddam Hussein? Like in the aftermath of the disclosures about the failure to discover WMD in Iraq and the admission by the White House that it didn't find any evidence linking Al-Qaeda to Saddam, officials, lawmakers and journalists want to examine now why US information-gathering organisations weren't able to figure out what was happening in Iraq and Pakistan. In a way, there has been a common element in the story lines advanced by the Bush administration and its political allies in Congress and the media to explain why 'we' - notice how politicians tend to use the collective 'we' when it comes to disasters - were wrong in assuming that Iraq was a WMD threat and Pakistan wasn't. They seem to suggest that if only 'we' had more access to information about what Saddam was thinking and what Musharraf was doing, well, Americans could have then been able to mark the dots and connect them. But the problems Americans faced in Pakistan, like in Iraq, had less to do with their ability to get the accurate information that would have permitted them to develop the necessary policies. In both cases, the Bush administration made up its mind following 9/11 to pursue specific policies - to back up Musharraf and to oust Saddam - that reflected certain frames of reality: a nuclear Iraq, with ties to the 9/11 terrorists was at the centre of the web of anti-American radical Islamic terrorism, while Pakistan was committed to rid the world of those same threats. Iraq was the villain; Pakistan was the good guy. Any news that couldn't be integrated into this neo-conservative narrative was downplayed, while any intelligence that seemed to fit with the Bushies' grand strategy was welcomed. 'It was the policy, stupid!' But you didn't have to be a covert US intelligence operator, fluent in Urdu, and familiar with the complex technical aspects of WMD, to be able to gain access to credible and comprehensive information about much of what was taking place in Pakistan and Iraq. Some media outlets and think tanks have argued that while Americans have been searching in vain for WMD and for Al-Qaeda agents in Iraq, they could have discovered those same threats in Pakistan, with its legions of Osama bin Laden followers, plenty of links between government officials and terrorists, and nuclear weapons that could fall into the hands of anti-American terrorists. This kind of information would have led to the conclusion that Pakistan - not Iraq - was at centre stage in America's anti-terrorism campaign, and that by diverting scarce military and economic resources to fight an unnecessary war in Iraq, Washington would weaken its ability to contain those who perpetrated the 9/11 terrorist acts and their benefactors. And by framing the international realities based on such assumptions, an administration committed to protecting US national interests would have worked with other governments to ensure that both Iraq and Pakistan were not engaged in the proliferation of WMD and in supporting terrorism. But it's not surprising that those officials committed to let's-get-rid-of-Saddam-and-be-friends-with-Musharraf made sure that President Bush's daily intelligence briefings were dominated by the type of disinformation provided by pro-invasion Iraqi exile groups funded by the US government or by Pakistani officials assisting terrorists in Kashmir and protecting the WMD smuggling operations. Dissenting perspectives provided free-of-charge on the Internet by many other sources were disregarded and are continuing to be marginalised now as the usual suspects are promising that democracy is spreading into Iraq and the Greater Middle East, and that Musharraf is ridding Pakistan of 'rogue' WMD operations. But the truth is out there, if you just do a Google search on 'Iraq' and 'Pakistan'. And remember that while the information you get from the CIA, Ahmed Chalabi and Musharraf costs a lot of money, an online search is relatively cheap. business-times.asia1.com.sg