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

To: stockman_scott who wrote (67474)	11/19/2004 6:59:07 PM
From: Crimson Ghost	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

More evidence that the Democrats are as much a part of the problem as the Bushies. Reading Harry Reid: New Democratic Leader in Senate Unlikely to Oppose Bush Administration‚s Foreign Policy Agenda By Stephen Zunes The overwhelming selection of Nevada Senator Harry Reid as minority leader of Congress‚ upper house shows that the Democrats are still willing to give their backing for the Bush administration‚s reckless militarism and contravention of international legal norms. Despite evidence that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, WMD programs or offensive delivery systems, Reid voted in October 2002 to authorize a U.S. invasion of Iraq because of what he claimed was „the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.‰ The Reid-backed resolution falsely accused Iraq of „continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability . . . [and] actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, thereby continuing to threaten the national security interests of the United States.‰ When Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the International Relations committee, tried to alter the wording of the resolution so as not to give President Bush the blank check he was seeking and to put some limitations on his war-making authority, Reid as assistant minority leader of the Senate helped circumvent Biden‚s efforts by signing on to the White House‚s version. As the Democratic „whip,‰ Reid then persuaded a majority of Democratic Senators to vote down a resolution offered by Democratic Senator Carl Levin that would authorize force only if the UN Security Council voted to give the U.S. that authority and to instead support the White House resolution giving Bush the right to invade even without such legal authorization. (By contrast, a sizable majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against the Republican resolution.) Stephen Zunes is a professor of Politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. He is Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project fpif.org <http://www.fpif.org/> and the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003) available online at: irc-online.org