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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (156652)	1/20/2005 10:25:45 AM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 281500

Sounds good to me.

To: michael97123 who wrote (156652)	1/20/2005 10:31:36 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Drop the 'Bush Doctrine' ___________________________ by Robert Steinback Published on Wednesday, January 19, 2005 by Miami Herald The Bush administration last week admitted having committed what may be the most astounding miscalculation in American military history -- and most of America barely blinked. Remember that dire threat posed by Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction? The peril that required us to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers to invade a foreign land to ''pre-empt'' a looming danger? The urgent crisis that left no time for U.N. experts to complete their search for WMDs? Well, no WMDs were ever found. And now, the Bush team has given up the search. This suggests one of two possibilities: Either Hussein is a true evil genius who managed to uproot, move and hide his nuclear, chemical and biological arsenal so efficiently that the entire investigative apparatus of Earth's most technologically advanced nation could find no trace of them -- or they didn't exist when Bush's people told us that they did. And if they didn't exist, the United States invaded a sovereign nation, trashed its infrastructure, toppled its government, caused the deaths of anywhere from 15,000 to 100,000 of its citizens, propelled the region to the precipice of civil war, likely reinvigorating terrorist recruitment in the process -- and sent more than 1,300 of its own sons and daughters to their deaths -- for nothing. I wonder how the 59.8 million Americans who voted for Bush took last week's revelation. What do you say when you discover you championed an unnecessary war? Oops? Where are all those folks who two years ago professed unwavering faith that Bush had secret knowledge of the Iraqi menace unknown to the general public? Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said the president has no regrets and would have made the same decisions even knowing what is known today, because ''this is about protecting the American people.'' Oh? From what? Administration supporters lately have been fond of pointing out how much America has done for the Iraqi people -- they're about to engage in an exercise vaguely reminiscent of a real democratic election! -- but nothing about the invasion, occupation and resulting quagmire can be construed as having protected us from Hussein. He had no WMDs and no way to deliver them against us if he did. Case closed, McClellan all but admitted. Why a bloody, expensive war? Why was the administration so willing to go to war based on information that was unverified? Intelligence, by its nature, can be misleading, incomplete or dead wrong. It's not enough for a president to say, ''I felt like we'd find weapons of mass destruction,'' as Bush told Barbara Walters. The American public needs to know why the president launched a bloody, $200 billion war without knowing we'd find them. Maybe Bush would have made the same decisions two years ago even knowing what he knows today -- but would Congress and the public have allowed it, had we known what we know today? Vice President Cheney, in an August 2002 speech said, ``Simply stated, there's no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.'' A month later, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was warning that the ''smoking gun'' of a threat could come in the form of a nuclear mushroom cloud. Bush in October 2002 said, ``Saddam Hussein has chosen to build and keep these weapons despite international sanctions, U.N. demands and isolation from the civilized world.'' That's not just bad intelligence. That's the misrepresentation of bad intelligence as hard fact. Either Bush never asked his intelligence people the essential question, ''How certain are we about the truth of this data?'' or a whole lot of people under him lied to him when he did. Regardless, the breakdown caused Bush to mislead Congress and the American people about the urgency of going to war. Bush, as the administration's CEO, needs to take responsibility for the Iraq intelligence blunder -- and junk the ''Bush Doctrine'' justifying war against any nation whose resident tyrant sticks his tongue at us. The State of the Union address would be the perfect opportunity for Bush to chart a new, more-sane foreign policy that genuinely undertakes war only as a last resort, and only when the case for it is unimpeachable. © 2005 Miami Herald commondreams.org