- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- 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."
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- But, thanks to the debates in the Democratic primaries
and other developments, Americans are catching up.
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- 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.
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- David Kay has declared that:
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- Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.
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- It did not, as claimed by Washington, ship out such
weapons to Syria. It had none to ship.
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- Iraq had no weapons programs to speak of after about
1995.
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- Iraq did not get any nuclear cake from Niger.
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- The mobile weapons lab that Dick Cheney and Colin Powell
portrayed as death on wheels, were carriers of hydrogen for weather balloons.
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- 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.
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- Kay made two more telling points, in interviews and at
Congressional hearings yesterday.
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- The administration's exaggerations aside, the Central
Intelligence Agency's intelligence gathering in Iraq was flawed, he said.
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- The CIA had infiltrated the U.N. Special Commission weapons
inspection teams to spy on Iraqi weapons capabilities (just as Saddam Hussein
had charged).
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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!
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- Despite Kay's devastating indictment, Bush and the boys
are refusing to blink.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- There is a difference?
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- 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.
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- The difference in this case, of course, is that more
than 500 Americans and nearly 15,000 Iraqi soldiers and civilians are dead.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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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