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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Vitas who wrote (9394)	4/10/2004 2:34:54 AM
From: geode00	Respond to of 173976

Can you possibly make any kind of argument that has some basis in fact and not pure emotion? =============== It was the weather stupid? nytimes.com. ...'' His frustration with the Bush administration, expressed throughout this book, was that it was both supremely confident that the weapons existed and utterly uninterested in evidence. Indeed, the administration was deeply mistrustful of Blix's search for it. Washington's logic, he writes, appeared similar to that of witch hunting in the Middle Ages. ''The witches exist; you are appointed to deal with these witches; testing whether there are witches is only a dilution of the witch hunt.''... The entire assessment of Iraq's weapons program, he argues, lacked any kind of ''critical thinking.'' In addition ''the contempt which both Vice President Cheney and the leadership in the U.S. Department of Defense appear to have held for international inspections deprived them, in effect, of a valuable source of information.'' Everyone recognizes the need for human intelligence in societies like Saddam Hussein's. Well, the inspectors, who met with Iraqi officials, traveled around the country and inspected sites, were human intelligence.... But something changed around the early 90's inside Iraq. Perhaps the regime became dysfunctional, or the inspections worked, or the bombing and sanctions took their toll or something else. But at that point, Iraq appears to have quietly thrown in the towel. Blix speculates that the Iraqis did not reveal this to the world for several reasons: the Americans seemed dead set against them anyway; national pride; they wanted to scare their neighbors (''like someone who puts up a sign warning BEWARE OF DOG without having a dog''). Whatever it was, the United States -- and most of the world -- missed it. But if getting Iraq right was tough, getting the diplomacy right was much easier. Reading this book one is struck by how, at the end, the United States had become uninterested in diplomacy, viewing it as an obstacle. It seems clear that with a little effort Washington could have worked through international structures and institutions to achieve its goals in Iraq. Blix and ElBaradei were proving to be tough, honest taskmasters. Every country -- yes, even France -- was coming around to the view that the inspections needed to go on for only another month or two, that benchmarks could have been established, and if the Iraqis failed these tests the Security Council would authorize war. But in a fashion that is almost reminiscent of World War I, the Pentagon's military timetables drove American diplomacy. The weather had become more important than international legitimacy. Had Washington made more of a commitment to diplomacy, Saddam Hussein would probably still have been deposed. Blix's book provides ample evidence that the Iraqis would most But the war would have been authorized by the Security Council, had greater international support and involved much more burden sharing. Countries like India and Pakistan, with tens of thousands of troops to provide, made it clear that they needed a United Nations mandate to go into Iraq. The Europeans and Japanese (who now pay for at least as much of the reconstruction of Afghanistan as the United States does) would similarly have been more generous in Iraq than they are today. Most important, the rebuilding of Iraq would be seen not as an American imperial effort but as an international project, much like those in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and even Afghanistan. America is paying a price in credibility for its mishandling of Iraq. But the real price is being paid by the Iraqi people, whose occupation has been far more lonely and troubled than it needed to be. " ====== However, since the contemptuous diplomatic bungling, Powell and Bremmer and now Bush has gone begging to the rest of the world for help. They could have done it before. They are idiots and we are paying for their arrogance and idiocy.