- (AFP) -- US Senator Robert Byrd -- a senior Democrat
-- issued a scathing denunciation of White House military and diplomatic
policy, particularly of the recently-concluded war in Iraq which he said
may have been waged in violation of international law.
-
- "The American people may have been lured into accepting
the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing
international law, under false premises," Byrd said, in offering some
of the most unvarnished criticism yet by Democrats of the US-led war on
Iraq.
-
- "Our costly and destructive bunker-busting attack
on Iraq seems to have proven, in the main, precisely the opposite of what
was the urgent reason to go in.
-
- "This house of cards built of deceit will fall,"
said Byrd, a West Virginian and the most senior member of the US Senate,
in comments delivered from the Senate floor.
-
- The George W. Bush administration, Byrd charged, "assiduously
worked to alarm the public and to blur the faces of Saddam Hussein and
Osama bin Laden, until they virtually become one.
-
- "What has become painfully clear in the aftermath
of war is that Iraq was no immediate threat to the United States, and many
of us here said so before the war," Byrd said.
-
- After the war, the search for banned nuclear, biological
and chemical weapons has come up empty, Byrd noted.
-
- "The Bush team's extensive hype of (weapons of mass
destruction) in Iraq as justification for a preemptive invasion war has
become more than embarrassing -- it has raised serious questions about
prevarication and the reckless use of power," Byrd said.
-
- "We did not complete the war in Afghanistan because
we were so eager to attack Iraq. Now it appears that al-Qaeda is back with
a vengeance ... and we may well have destabilized the Mideast region, a
region we have never fully understood."
-
- The West Virginia Democrat also criticized as "spineless"
his colleagues in Congress for voting to authorize the war.
-
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