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

To: lurqer who wrote (41173)	4/3/2004 7:26:27 AM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

No End in Sight BOB HERBERT We’re told that President Bush watched the television news coverage of the Iraqi mob that attacked, burned and mutilated four American civilians in Falluja on Wednesday [March 31]. I can imagine the fury he must have felt. But I wonder what specific thoughts ran through his mind, and what other emotions he experienced. Was there any soul-searching, any second thoughts about whether he did the right thing in launching this war, which he thought was all but over last May but which remains with us, with no end to the carnage in sight? With so many now dead, might the President have felt even the mildest of qualms, the faintest flickering of regret while watching the hideous images from Falluja? If you talk to the troops who have served in Iraq, you can only marvel at their bravery and commitment to duty, and the lack of bellyaching at the difficult hands they were dealt. I’ve interviewed several servicemen and servicewomen who have returned from the war zone, including some who were horribly wounded, and I’ve yet to hear one of them utter any variation of the complaint, “Why me?” But I inevitably come away from these conversations asking the question for them. Why were they ever placed in harm’s way in Iraq? Wednesday’s atrocity was inexcusable -- unconscionable -- and those responsible should be tracked down and punished. But even if that happens, the greater tragedy of the war itself will continue indefinitely. We rode into this wholly unnecessary conflict on the wave of Bush’s obsession with Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and we’ve made a hash of it. Hundreds of Americans and thousands of innocent Iraqis have died for reasons the administration has never been able to coherently explain. Last May 1, in a fun moment for the commander in chief, Bush sat in the copilot’s seat as an S-3B Viking aircraft landed on the deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln. The President was in full flying regalia: flight suit, parachute, water survival kit. “Yes,” he told reporters, “I flew it.” The President’s giddily choreographed Top Gun spectacle was designed to take full public relations advantage of his triumphant announcement that “major combat operations in Iraq” had ended. He was wrong, of course, just as he was wrong about the weapons of mass destruction, and about the number of troops that would be needed to secure Iraq, and so many other things. In fact, the Bush administration has managed to conceal any and all evidence that it knows the first thing about what it’s doing in Iraq. When the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, dared to say publicly that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to occupy Iraq, he was ridiculed by the administration and his career was brought to a close. When Bush’s former Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, disclosed that planning for an invasion of Iraq was already under way in early 2001, he was denounced as someone who didn’t know what he was talking about. And there’s hardly a serious person in the country who is unaware of the administration’s sliming of Richard Clarke, who said, among other things, that the war in Iraq had undermined the war against terror. There were 4,000 marines stationed near Falluja when Wednesday’s gruesome attack occurred. But Marine commanders, as The Times’ Jeffrey Gettleman reports, decided they would not intervene to stop the mutilation of the bodies. The atrocity unfolded without interference. On that same day five soldiers were killed when their convoy rolled over a bomb buried in the road in a town 15 miles west of Falluja. A major trade show in Baghdad that was supposed to be held next week to showcase investment opportunities in the new Iraq had to be postponed Thursday because of security concerns. We are mired in a savage mess in Iraq, and no one knows how to get out of it. More than 600 US troops are already dead. The rest of the world has decided that this is an American show, so we’re not getting much in the way of help. (Even the Saudis have been sticking their fingers in Uncle Sam’s eye, leading the effort by Opec to cut oil production.) President Bush won’t come clean about the financial costs of the war. His mantra remains: tax cuts, tax cuts. We’re flying blind. There’s no evidence that the President or anyone in his administration knows what the next act of this great tragedy will be. abs-cbnnews.com lurqer

To: lurqer who wrote (41173)	4/3/2004 11:34:06 AM
From: sylvester80	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

NEWS: Powell no longer sure that Iraqi trailers were weapons labs; Top U.S. diplomat concedes presentation to U.N. may have been wrong msnbc.msn.com The Associated Press Updated: 9:27 a.m. ET April 03, 2004 WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Colin Powell conceded Friday evidence he presented to the United Nations that two trailers in Iraq were used for weapons of mass destruction may have been wrong. In an airborne news conference on the way home from NATO talks in Brussels, Belgium, Powell said he had been given solid information about the trailers that he told the Security Council in February 2003 were designed for making biological weapons. But now, Powell said, “it appears not to be the case that it was that solid.” He said he hoped the intelligence commission appointed by President Bush to investigate prewar intelligence on Iraq “will look into these matters to see whether or not the intelligence agency had a basis for the confidence that they placed in the intelligence at that time.” Powell’s dramatic case to the Security Council that Iraq had secret arsenals of weapons of mass destruction failed to persuade the council to directly back the U.S.-led war that deposed the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. But it helped mobilize sentiment among the American people for going to war. As it turned out, U.N. inspectors were unable to uncover the weapons, but administration officials have insisted they still might be uncovered. David Kay, who led the hunt for the weapons, showed off a pair of trailers for news cameras last summer and argued that the two metal flatbeds were designed for making biological weapons. But faced with mounting challenges to that theory, Kay conceded in October he could have been wrong. He said he did not know whether Iraq ever had a mobile weapons program. Powell: ‘I probed and I made sure’ Powell told reporters that as he worked on the Bush administration’s case against Iraq U.S. intelligence “indicated to me” that the intelligence was solid. “I’m not the intelligence community, but I probed and I made sure, as I said in my presentation, these are multi-sourced” allegations, Powell said. The trailers were the most dramatic claims, “and I made sure that it was multi-sourced,” he said. “Now, if the sources fell apart we need to find out how we’ve gotten ourselves in that position,” he said. “I have discussions with the CIA about it,” Powell said, without providing further details. The trailers were the only discovery the administration had cited as evidence of an illicit Iraqi weapons program. In six months of searches, no biological, chemical or nuclear weapons were found to bolster the administration’s central case for going to war: to disarm Saddam of suspected weapons of mass destruction.