Toronto Star a "well respected " newspaper ?
LoL, give your head a shake there harry.






"Harry Krause" wrote in message
...
Truth catching up to Bush


Regardless of who emerges as the Democratic presidential nominee, the
race has already served its greater democratic purpose: It has blown
away George W. Bush's wartime aura of patriotic infallibility.

Not only Howard Dean, the passionate truth-teller about Iraq, but
Senator John Kerry, Gen. Wesley Clark and others have found their voices
to question almost all aspects of Bush's post-Sept. 11 performance.

They are bringing home to Americans the worldwide debates about their
president's penchant for exploiting and fanning fears by exaggerating
dangers, taking unilateral actions abroad, and squandering U.S.
credibility.

"The U.S. is facing a crisis of international legitimacy," writes Robert
Kagan, the respected analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, in the upcoming spring issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

Adds Serge Schmemann, editorial page editor of the Paris-based
International Herald Tribune and a former writer for the New York Times:
"I've been living in France for the past six months and I often wonder
whether Americans are aware of the depth of the dread and revulsion in
which Bush's United States is held by many foreigners."

But, thanks to the debates in the Democratic primaries and other
developments, Americans are catching up.

Hardly a week goes by without new evidence of how Bush launched the war
on Iraq on false pretences. The latest source of embarrassment is
America's own chief weapons hunter in Iraq.

David Kay has declared that:

Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.

It did not, as claimed by Washington, ship out such weapons to Syria. It
had none to ship.

Iraq had no weapons programs to speak of after about 1995.

Iraq did not get any nuclear cake from Niger.

The mobile weapons lab that Dick Cheney and Colin Powell portrayed as
death on wheels, were carriers of hydrogen for weather balloons.

These conclusions are the same as those of Scott Ritter, a member of the
first United Nations weapons inspections team that was withdrawn in
1998. And of Hans Blix, head of the reconstituted U.N. inspections team.
And of Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Kay made two more telling points, in interviews and at Congressional
hearings yesterday.

The administration's exaggerations aside, the Central Intelligence
Agency's intelligence gathering in Iraq was flawed, he said.

The CIA had infiltrated the U.N. Special Commission weapons inspection
teams to spy on Iraqi weapons capabilities (just as Saddam Hussein had
charged).

But "UNSCOM was like crack cocaine for the CIA," Kay told the New York
Times. Once withdrawn, the CIA was adrift and missed a key development
in Baghdad.

Saddam had lost touch with reality. He was approving every major
decision himself. Scientists were running scams. They would present him
with big schemes for weapons. He would grant huge sums of money. But not
much would be done.

These were the same con artists, you will recall, whom Washington wanted
interviewed by Blix and whisked out of Iraq so they could spill the
beans on Saddam's secret weapons!

Despite Kay's devastating indictment, Bush and the boys are refusing to
blink.

While no longer insisting, as they were until last week, that weapons
would eventually be found, Bush, Cheney and others have slipped into
their secondary argument: Saddam was evil and needed to be removed anyway.

But that was not their chosen tool to scare Americans into supporting
their war. Rather, it was that Saddam could attack America with his
deadly weapons, using missiles or terrorists.

To get around that blatant inconsistency, the White House is now trying
a new tack: that Bush had never characterized Saddam's danger as
"imminent," only as "grave and growing."

There is a difference?

The last time the White House tried such hair-splitting was when Bill
Clinton argued it was not "sex" that he had had with Monica Lewinsky.

The difference in this case, of course, is that more than 500 Americans
and nearly 15,000 Iraqi soldiers and civilians are dead.

As for the policy of toppling bad guys, of whom there are many, Human
Rights Watch had something to say this week in a major report.

Humanitarian interventions, it said, are best reserved for stopping
ongoing or imminent slaughters, as in Rwanda (where no one intervened in
time) or in Iraq in 1988 when Saddam was gassing Kurds (and Washington
winked). And such actions are best taken multilaterally.

The lone sheriff tableau is exclusively American — an outdated one at
that, resurrected nonetheless in times of trouble for comforting
reassurance. But if a Newsweek poll is any indication — Kerry leading
Bush, 49 per cent to 46 per cent — the president may have overstayed his
welcome in that role as well.
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