They probably won't tell us, but I'm guessing it stands for: Politics (and) News Right Wing Conspiracy.
I suggest you read resolution 687. This isnt hard to do. If he didnt have them he shouldnt have hampered efforts to determine this. And if anybody tells you in 2002 they could prove he didnt have any WMDs then they are smoking the good stuff.
Depends if he is running a country with a past and is breaking a ceasefire agreement.
While this was a possibility. He didnt let us know he was toothless and thus keep us from knocking him out of power.
I would go along with making a mockery of a weapons filing and not allowing us into his room to look.
Does that really matter? So because he wanted to terrify the Iranians we should continue to let him make the world think he had WMDs?
Silience is rather deafening isnt it?
We have attack plans for several scenarios. We probably even have attack plans for Canada oh wait......
Does that really prove anything?
Oh come on you cant be this simple can you?
And we knew all of this in 2002-2003 how? If Clinton felt Saddam was a problem then why would the Bush administration think any differently?
Will you be as disgusted if John Kerry gets elected and has to invade Iran to stop them from going Nuclear?
You invade and get a handle on their records. Before you could only go on what information you could gather from agents in Iraq and snooping on enemy transmissions.
btw some of the records that are being looked at are starting to show some kind of transactions between Iraq and some terrorist organizations.
lol when did you come up with this theory? Let me guess, 24 hours ago?
So what you are saying is you dont have an answer?
Are you now GoPackGo's proxy? I have an answer and I've given it many times up here before. Go search.
GoPackGo
Diamond Member
- Oct 10, 2003
- 6,521
- 598
- 126
I understand...but whats strange is the report suggested that the effort for WMDS ended in 1991 and one of Saddam nuke scientists suggested it ended after Saddam had his son-in-law killed. Officially we dont seem to get the truth...(if there is such a thing)
Does he still believe there is WMD in Iraq or the new Bush_Cheney Montra that Saddam wished he had WMD so he was a threat???
Apparently Saddam did comply. He destroyed all Weapons of Mass Destruction and filed reports indicating as such. Therefore, he didnt lie, your President did. What else did he not comply with?
The sanctions put in place following the Gulf War essentially ended Saddam's WMD programs. He may have still had an intent to reconstitute those programs but he was helpless in acting upon that intent.
He was contained.
Does that mean he would never again be a threat? No.
Does that mean Saddam would eventually have to be dealt with? Yes.
Does that mean Saddam needed to be removed from power because he was an imminent threat? HELL no.
Bush rushed to war because he knew the writing was on the wall. Kay had gone to the administration and said they weren't finding anything. They begged the administration to tell them where to go to find these known stockpiles. Every place they went came up with nothing. If the inspections had been allowed to continue, we'd have seen all of the claims by the Bush administration were completely without basis and, therefore, Bush's lone justification for invading Iraq would be washed away.
He couldn't have that. Or, rather, the neocons couldn't have that. Therefore, the inspectors were yanked out of Iraq and the fight was on.
Now we have the mess that Bush's father didn't want to own (and Bush, Sr. had a much more competent administration.)
The families of these people may or may not care.They prolly have more important things to think about....like christmas is coming up .....
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...0608&enterthread=y
personally, i believe the dubs, cheney, rummy, and conda should all get on tv, apoligize for all the death and destruction, and step down from their positions. nuf said.
And to add to what I just wrote about Kay:
Bush administration in denial about lack of Iraq WMD: Kay
http://story.news.yahoo.com/ne...fp/us_iraq_weapons_kay
Bush administration in denial about lack of Iraq WMD: Kay
http://story.news.yahoo.com/ne...fp/us_iraq_weapons_kay
The most important thing is that Bush decided to dump diplomacy when time would have shown that it was working. Then he bungled the war. Kerry wouldn't have done either. [/b] Right now thousands more people would still be alive. GWB is a murderer.
I also want to Add that Kerry Is not the one who gives the command to invade iraq. Its the President ... point blank. He was the one who sidelined the inspection process and rushed to war. If he was a bit more thoughtful or politically astute he should have at least waited for some "on the ground" evidence found by objective UN inspectors before invading Iraq. Iraq would then have been a non issue since the opposing countries in the UN security Council would have looked like fools for opposing the war. But oh no ... the administration broke the inspection process that they agreed to within the council... "
Now I am willing to Admit that im a Centrist Democrat .. am im not a Democrat lackey and i supported Reagan ... twice ... theres a huge difference Between a true conservative and a neo con.. and the disengenuosness of this administration and the way they over play the terrorism card is astounding
I also follow the belief that if someone is going to flame me or personally attack me for my political views then we have nothing to speak about ... Civilty still exists ..we should utilize it even where there is discord on an issue.
I was watching Wolf Blitzer and he interviewed someone especially interesting for UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter. He believed all along that Saddam didn't have WMD back in 98 and throughout and even wrote a book about it proving exactly what this new CIA report said. Check out his interview because he even calls Duelfer's character into question. Link
Long before the world focused on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Scott Ritter was already an expert on the subject. Over the course of almost a decade, the former U.N. weapons inspector managed to irritate two U.S. administrations and his United Nations boss with contrarian views that now appear to have been absolutely right.
Here's CNN Brian Todd.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): At first, he was a thorn in Saddam's side.
SCOTT RITTER, FORMER CHIEF U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR IN IRAQ: Are you denying the access to this site?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm not denying you.
RITTER: So let me go.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You are not allowed to go.
TODD: That was in the mid-1990s, when former U.S. Marine Scott Ritter was such a bulldog as a U.N. weapons inspector that he was accused of being an American spy by Iraqi officials. He later quit the inspection team, accusing the U.N. and the Clinton administration of being too soft on Saddam's regime.
By late 2002 and early 2003, as U.S. forces prepared to invade Iraq, the president's national security team fanned out on TV to pound the message.
DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Based on what we have seen, we're fairly confident that he in fact is moving forward once again to develop nuclear weapons.
TODD: But, by then, Scott Ritter had emphatically changed his tune.
RITTER: We have inspectors on the ground. They're getting compliance. They're doing their job, and they're not finding anything that warrants a threat worthy of war. TODD: Ritter became a punching back, pummeled by some of the most powerful figures in the Iraq debate, from his former boss in the U.N..
RICHARD BUTLER, FORMER UNSCOM CHAIRMAN: What Ritter is saying is simply not true. When he worked for me, right to the last day before he resigned, he gave me robust recommendations to the effect that we should go and kick in doors and look for the weapons that he utterly assured me Iraq continued to hold.
TODD: To the man who was then vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Shelby, September 2002, quote -- "I have met Scott Ritter before and I think he's an idealist. I think he wants to believe that everybody's good and the world's going to be safe. But I don't believe there's any real credence to his statements. It looks to me like that he's over there courting Saddam Hussein at the wrong time at the wrong place."
Ritter had gone to Baghdad in September 2002 to address the Iraqi Parliament. He told them the Bush administration had no proof that Iraq had reconstituted its weapons program. At the time, Charles Duelfer, another of Ritter's former U.N. bosses, had this to say.
CHARLES DUELFER, FORMER U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: I think it's an exercise that you know, supports the Iraqi government, him showing up in Baghdad. I wish that Iraqis could come to the United States with equal freedom and speak their minds equally.
TODD: This was Charles Duelfer on Wednesday on his role as chief author of a new CIA report on Iraq's weapons program.
DUELFER: I think the prospects of finding militarily significant -- and I sound like I'm trying to create jargon here -- but a significant stockpile is -- I don't know, less than 5 percent.
TODD: Those prewar attacks on Ritter's credibility were not entirely baseless. Ritter had, by own admission, accepted $400,000 from an Iraqi-American businessman said to be sympathetic to Saddam to produce a documentary critical of U.S. sanctions against Iraq.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
TODD: And at the time he leveled those prewar assertions that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, one intelligence analyst points out, Ritter hadn't been an inspector for years. He had to have been guessing on at least some of it. Well, guessing or not, most accounts now support much of what Scott Ritter said then -- Wolf.
BLITZER: Brian Todd, thanks very much for that report.
And let's bring in the man himself, Scott Ritter, the former U.N. weapons inspector, joining us now from Albany, New York.
Scott, as you take a look right now at what Charles Duelfer has reported, David Kay has reported, the fact that no significant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction have been found, what goes through your mind looking back on what you went through personally, how you were hammered before the war?
RITTER: Well, I try to keep myself out of the debate, because it's not about me. It's about the United States of America and the decisions that our elected officials make in our name. Look, I said what I said. I wasn't guessing. I was basing it upon factual data derived from seven years experience in Iraq.
If you read my book that I write in 1998, "Endgame," it's almost a mirror image of the report that Charles Duelfer just produced. It's the same data. We used the same facts. The problem is, in 1998, I was willing to embrace these facts. Unfortunately, it's taken us five years and a war and over 1,060 dead Americans before government officials have come to the same conclusion that was very reachable in 1998, indeed reachable in 2002 on the eve of war.
BLITZER: Well, what is your interpretation? You came up with the right conclusion before the war. The administration came up with the wrong conclusion. You didn't have access to the latest intelligence reports. You had access to information you had collected years earlier.
RITTER: Well, let's keep in mind that I acknowledge that all of the analysis that I made was derived from seven years of accumulated data that I had not updated the database since I left in 1998. And I made it clear in my discussion since 1998 that unless someone can demonstrate that there is a new stream of intelligence, that there is new data out there that significantly alters what I knew to be the case in 1998, then I would stick to the data that existed.
No one could provide any hard substantive data to sustain the assertions made by the Bush administration post-2001 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It simply wasn't possible.
(CROSSTALK)
BLITZER: Scott, one final question. I want to cut this relatively short, because we have breaking news coming out of the Middle East in Taba, Egypt, as you know.
There was a suggestion from Charles Duelfer in his report saying that if the sanctions were lifted, Saddam Hussein would then go ahead, his intention was to reconstitute a weapons of mass destruction program. Do you accept that one?
RITTER: Absolutely not.
First of all, Charles Duelfer in his report acknowledges that this assessment is based on fragmentary speculation. He doesn't have a confession from Saddam. He doesn't have a confession from any of the senior leadership. He doesn't have any documentation to back this up.
This is political spin. Charles Duelfer, a nice guy, I like him a lot and I respect him, but he's a political appointee whose task is to spin this data to the political advantage of the president, and that's all this issue of intent is. BLITZER: Well, if that was what he was intending to do, to spin it for the political advantage of the president, he certainly didn't do it in that 1,000-page document, most of which contradicted dramatically what the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense were saying on the eve of the war, so you have to give him a little bit more credit than that.
RITTER: No.
Again, the issue of intention provides the Bush administration a convenient out. Witness the statements made by the president and the vice president just today, where they say that because Saddam Hussein intended to have his weapons, this war was justified. That's a dramatic, you know, new approach to why we went to war with Iraq, and I don't think the American public or the American Congress should buy it in the least.
We should demand that the data used by Charles Duelfer to derive this conclusion of intention be declassified, so that we all could be privy to why he believes Saddam Hussein had such intentions.
BLITZER: Scott Ritter joining us today -- Scott, thanks very much.
RITTER: Thank you.
Long before the world focused on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Scott Ritter was already an expert on the subject. Over the course of almost a decade, the former U.N. weapons inspector managed to irritate two U.S. administrations and his United Nations boss with contrarian views that now appear to have been absolutely right.
Here's CNN Brian Todd.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): At first, he was a thorn in Saddam's side.
SCOTT RITTER, FORMER CHIEF U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR IN IRAQ: Are you denying the access to this site?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm not denying you.
RITTER: So let me go.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You are not allowed to go.
TODD: That was in the mid-1990s, when former U.S. Marine Scott Ritter was such a bulldog as a U.N. weapons inspector that he was accused of being an American spy by Iraqi officials. He later quit the inspection team, accusing the U.N. and the Clinton administration of being too soft on Saddam's regime.
By late 2002 and early 2003, as U.S. forces prepared to invade Iraq, the president's national security team fanned out on TV to pound the message.
DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Based on what we have seen, we're fairly confident that he in fact is moving forward once again to develop nuclear weapons.
TODD: But, by then, Scott Ritter had emphatically changed his tune.
RITTER: We have inspectors on the ground. They're getting compliance. They're doing their job, and they're not finding anything that warrants a threat worthy of war. TODD: Ritter became a punching back, pummeled by some of the most powerful figures in the Iraq debate, from his former boss in the U.N..
RICHARD BUTLER, FORMER UNSCOM CHAIRMAN: What Ritter is saying is simply not true. When he worked for me, right to the last day before he resigned, he gave me robust recommendations to the effect that we should go and kick in doors and look for the weapons that he utterly assured me Iraq continued to hold.
TODD: To the man who was then vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Shelby, September 2002, quote -- "I have met Scott Ritter before and I think he's an idealist. I think he wants to believe that everybody's good and the world's going to be safe. But I don't believe there's any real credence to his statements. It looks to me like that he's over there courting Saddam Hussein at the wrong time at the wrong place."
Ritter had gone to Baghdad in September 2002 to address the Iraqi Parliament. He told them the Bush administration had no proof that Iraq had reconstituted its weapons program. At the time, Charles Duelfer, another of Ritter's former U.N. bosses, had this to say.
CHARLES DUELFER, FORMER U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: I think it's an exercise that you know, supports the Iraqi government, him showing up in Baghdad. I wish that Iraqis could come to the United States with equal freedom and speak their minds equally.
TODD: This was Charles Duelfer on Wednesday on his role as chief author of a new CIA report on Iraq's weapons program.
DUELFER: I think the prospects of finding militarily significant -- and I sound like I'm trying to create jargon here -- but a significant stockpile is -- I don't know, less than 5 percent.
TODD: Those prewar attacks on Ritter's credibility were not entirely baseless. Ritter had, by own admission, accepted $400,000 from an Iraqi-American businessman said to be sympathetic to Saddam to produce a documentary critical of U.S. sanctions against Iraq.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
TODD: And at the time he leveled those prewar assertions that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, one intelligence analyst points out, Ritter hadn't been an inspector for years. He had to have been guessing on at least some of it. Well, guessing or not, most accounts now support much of what Scott Ritter said then -- Wolf.
BLITZER: Brian Todd, thanks very much for that report.
And let's bring in the man himself, Scott Ritter, the former U.N. weapons inspector, joining us now from Albany, New York.
Scott, as you take a look right now at what Charles Duelfer has reported, David Kay has reported, the fact that no significant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction have been found, what goes through your mind looking back on what you went through personally, how you were hammered before the war?
RITTER: Well, I try to keep myself out of the debate, because it's not about me. It's about the United States of America and the decisions that our elected officials make in our name. Look, I said what I said. I wasn't guessing. I was basing it upon factual data derived from seven years experience in Iraq.
If you read my book that I write in 1998, "Endgame," it's almost a mirror image of the report that Charles Duelfer just produced. It's the same data. We used the same facts. The problem is, in 1998, I was willing to embrace these facts. Unfortunately, it's taken us five years and a war and over 1,060 dead Americans before government officials have come to the same conclusion that was very reachable in 1998, indeed reachable in 2002 on the eve of war.
BLITZER: Well, what is your interpretation? You came up with the right conclusion before the war. The administration came up with the wrong conclusion. You didn't have access to the latest intelligence reports. You had access to information you had collected years earlier.
RITTER: Well, let's keep in mind that I acknowledge that all of the analysis that I made was derived from seven years of accumulated data that I had not updated the database since I left in 1998. And I made it clear in my discussion since 1998 that unless someone can demonstrate that there is a new stream of intelligence, that there is new data out there that significantly alters what I knew to be the case in 1998, then I would stick to the data that existed.
No one could provide any hard substantive data to sustain the assertions made by the Bush administration post-2001 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It simply wasn't possible.
(CROSSTALK)
BLITZER: Scott, one final question. I want to cut this relatively short, because we have breaking news coming out of the Middle East in Taba, Egypt, as you know.
There was a suggestion from Charles Duelfer in his report saying that if the sanctions were lifted, Saddam Hussein would then go ahead, his intention was to reconstitute a weapons of mass destruction program. Do you accept that one?
RITTER: Absolutely not.
First of all, Charles Duelfer in his report acknowledges that this assessment is based on fragmentary speculation. He doesn't have a confession from Saddam. He doesn't have a confession from any of the senior leadership. He doesn't have any documentation to back this up.
This is political spin. Charles Duelfer, a nice guy, I like him a lot and I respect him, but he's a political appointee whose task is to spin this data to the political advantage of the president, and that's all this issue of intent is. BLITZER: Well, if that was what he was intending to do, to spin it for the political advantage of the president, he certainly didn't do it in that 1,000-page document, most of which contradicted dramatically what the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense were saying on the eve of the war, so you have to give him a little bit more credit than that.
RITTER: No.
Again, the issue of intention provides the Bush administration a convenient out. Witness the statements made by the president and the vice president just today, where they say that because Saddam Hussein intended to have his weapons, this war was justified. That's a dramatic, you know, new approach to why we went to war with Iraq, and I don't think the American public or the American Congress should buy it in the least.
We should demand that the data used by Charles Duelfer to derive this conclusion of intention be declassified, so that we all could be privy to why he believes Saddam Hussein had such intentions.
BLITZER: Scott Ritter joining us today -- Scott, thanks very much.
RITTER: Thank you.
Didnt the Bush admin constantly say that they had some sensitive information that they wouldnt disclose to the public or congress because it would danger their sources?
The independant
Friday, October 8, 2004
What we have here is a failure to find justification for war
By THE INDEPENDENT
Now we finally know what we had long suspected. When U.S. and British forces invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein had no chemical weapons; he had no biological weapons; he had no nuclear weapons. In fact, he had no banned weapons at all.
That is the considered judgment of the Iraq Survey Group, set up by President Bush to prove his case for removing the Iraqi dictator, and released in Washington this week.
In more than 1,000 pages, the ISG report proves precisely the opposite. The much-maligned international regime of weapons containment had functioned exactly as it was supposed to. After his failed effort to annex Kuwait, Saddam progressively disarmed.
Establishing this truth has required half a dozen top-level inquiries on either side of the Atlantic, spending millions of dollars and pounds, the dispatch of hundreds of United Nations weapons inspectors over the years and -- since Saddam's removal -- the work of 1,200 inspectors who scoured the country under the auspices of the U.S.-directed ISG.
Oh yes, and it took a war, a war in which many thousands of Iraqis, more than 1,000 Americans and more than 100 British and soldiers of other nationalities have died. The injured run into tens of thousands. Iraq is a devastated country that risks sliding into anarchy. And what has it all been for?
After the war officially ended, Bush and his chief ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, kept telling us to wait patiently for the ISG to report. In that time, they have changed their story many times over, editing the words, trimming the sense for the possibility that the threat might not have been as great as they had thought.
Perhaps there were no weapons, Bush said, but it hardly mattered because he would have gone to war anyway. Even if there were no actual stockpiles, Blair and his ministers told us, there were definitely "weapons programs." Last week, the programs themselves evaporated. Blair told us (almost) straight that the intelligence was wrong. "I can apologize for the information that turned out to be wrong," he said, without actually doing so, "but I can't sincerely, at least, apologize for removing Saddam."
Bush's case for war is also unraveling. His defense secretary let slip this week that there was no "hard evidence" for a link between Saddam and terrorism in the shape of al-Qaida. The second U.S. viceroy of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said the U.S. troop numbers determined had been grossly inadequate for the job they had to do. The number of troops had been an ideological decision.
Now that the Iraq Survey Group has reported, it is clear beyond doubt that Iraq's deadly weapons capacity boiled down to a glint, if that, in Saddam's eye. In one of the more shameless examples of pre-emptive "spinning" we have heard, even from this government so addicted to "spin," the foreign secretary told us "the report highlights the nature of the threat from Saddam in terms of his intentions and capabilities in even starker terms than we have seen before." Try parsing that. Try translating it into plain English.
The ISG report tells us in no uncertain terms that the invasion of Iraq was grounded in little more substantial than figments of a fevered, post-9/11 imagination. The international "consensus" that Saddam constituted a global threat was incorrect. So much for U.N. Resolution 1441 that gave the United States and Britain their spurious excuse for war.
There was a failure of intelligence, on either side of the Atlantic, of historic proportions, the reasons for which need to be identified as a matter of urgency. More gravely, though, there was a historic failure of judgment on the part of a small group of national leaders. Trust us, they told us. They were credulous, they failed to consult broadly enough, they failed to exercise due responsibility -- and they were wrong.
Spanish voters have already given their verdict on the judgment of their former prime minister. Australians have their chance this weekend. Americans should use their vote in less than four weeks' time to express their disgust with a president who rushed their country into so unnecessary and damaging a war. We British will probably have to wait at least until next year.
In the meantime, the very least that Blair should offer is a full apology. An apology for asking us to trust him so unconditionally. An apology for the lives of the British servicemen and the Iraqis who have been so needlessly lost. An apology for his judgment that turned out to be so flawed on a matter so crucial as peace and war. The final verdict will then rest, as it should, with the voters.
The Independent is published in Britain.
Friday, October 8, 2004
What we have here is a failure to find justification for war
By THE INDEPENDENT
Now we finally know what we had long suspected. When U.S. and British forces invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein had no chemical weapons; he had no biological weapons; he had no nuclear weapons. In fact, he had no banned weapons at all.
That is the considered judgment of the Iraq Survey Group, set up by President Bush to prove his case for removing the Iraqi dictator, and released in Washington this week.
In more than 1,000 pages, the ISG report proves precisely the opposite. The much-maligned international regime of weapons containment had functioned exactly as it was supposed to. After his failed effort to annex Kuwait, Saddam progressively disarmed.
Establishing this truth has required half a dozen top-level inquiries on either side of the Atlantic, spending millions of dollars and pounds, the dispatch of hundreds of United Nations weapons inspectors over the years and -- since Saddam's removal -- the work of 1,200 inspectors who scoured the country under the auspices of the U.S.-directed ISG.
Oh yes, and it took a war, a war in which many thousands of Iraqis, more than 1,000 Americans and more than 100 British and soldiers of other nationalities have died. The injured run into tens of thousands. Iraq is a devastated country that risks sliding into anarchy. And what has it all been for?
After the war officially ended, Bush and his chief ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, kept telling us to wait patiently for the ISG to report. In that time, they have changed their story many times over, editing the words, trimming the sense for the possibility that the threat might not have been as great as they had thought.
Perhaps there were no weapons, Bush said, but it hardly mattered because he would have gone to war anyway. Even if there were no actual stockpiles, Blair and his ministers told us, there were definitely "weapons programs." Last week, the programs themselves evaporated. Blair told us (almost) straight that the intelligence was wrong. "I can apologize for the information that turned out to be wrong," he said, without actually doing so, "but I can't sincerely, at least, apologize for removing Saddam."
Bush's case for war is also unraveling. His defense secretary let slip this week that there was no "hard evidence" for a link between Saddam and terrorism in the shape of al-Qaida. The second U.S. viceroy of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said the U.S. troop numbers determined had been grossly inadequate for the job they had to do. The number of troops had been an ideological decision.
Now that the Iraq Survey Group has reported, it is clear beyond doubt that Iraq's deadly weapons capacity boiled down to a glint, if that, in Saddam's eye. In one of the more shameless examples of pre-emptive "spinning" we have heard, even from this government so addicted to "spin," the foreign secretary told us "the report highlights the nature of the threat from Saddam in terms of his intentions and capabilities in even starker terms than we have seen before." Try parsing that. Try translating it into plain English.
The ISG report tells us in no uncertain terms that the invasion of Iraq was grounded in little more substantial than figments of a fevered, post-9/11 imagination. The international "consensus" that Saddam constituted a global threat was incorrect. So much for U.N. Resolution 1441 that gave the United States and Britain their spurious excuse for war.
There was a failure of intelligence, on either side of the Atlantic, of historic proportions, the reasons for which need to be identified as a matter of urgency. More gravely, though, there was a historic failure of judgment on the part of a small group of national leaders. Trust us, they told us. They were credulous, they failed to consult broadly enough, they failed to exercise due responsibility -- and they were wrong.
Spanish voters have already given their verdict on the judgment of their former prime minister. Australians have their chance this weekend. Americans should use their vote in less than four weeks' time to express their disgust with a president who rushed their country into so unnecessary and damaging a war. We British will probably have to wait at least until next year.
In the meantime, the very least that Blair should offer is a full apology. An apology for asking us to trust him so unconditionally. An apology for the lives of the British servicemen and the Iraqis who have been so needlessly lost. An apology for his judgment that turned out to be so flawed on a matter so crucial as peace and war. The final verdict will then rest, as it should, with the voters.
The Independent is published in Britain.
Agreed.
Bush should apologize and step down. He's been a complete and utter failure and an terrible human being.
Yes. The infamous solid evidence. I recall many occassions where I was thoroughly blasted by righties for even suggesting that this might be a little 'less' than solid (whatever it is), and that now that SH is gone and we are pretty much in control if perhaps this so-called solid evidence can be revealed.
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