Suddenly, Abbas was gone and the United States demonstrated once again that authority can come at the end of a rifle. brutal colonialism in action that´s what Americans are good at - spreading "western values" at gunpoint
Western values at gunpoint? As if "gunpoint" is something new and shocking in Iraq. I suppose Saddam's were better values? A complete charlatan comes into a gov't building and arbitrarily claims he's in charge. You find nothing wrong with that? BTW, what color is the sky on your planet?
A gang of heavily armed American complete charlatans come into an Iraqi gov't building and arbitrarily claim they´re in charge. You find nothing wrong with that?
Get a clue. They did not "arbitrarily" claim they are in charge, they are hardly "charlatans," in fact, they are in charge.
There is nothing wrong with that when you consider the alternative. Oh wait you dont do that, bashing america is your only concern I forgot.
War's loose ends Iraq is not yet as free as Bush claims George Bush last night effectively declared an end to a war in Iraq that most people in the Middle East and the world beyond believe should not have been started in the first place. The full consequences of the conflict begun in earnest on March 19 are as numerous as they are still uncertain, not least for Iraqis. Historians will have much to ponder. But a number of outstanding issues are worthy of note right now. One is that the same, deep legal ambiguities that overshadowed the war's onset also qualified Mr Bush's virtual victory statement, ostentatiously yet fittingly proclaimed at sea somewhere off California. By having the president refer only to the completion of "major combat operations", the US hopes to avoid incurring the full legal obligations of a post-war occupying power. Apart from imposing duties and standards for the protection and fair treatment of civilians (not currently being observed in Falluja), application of the Geneva conventions would also oblige the US to release all prisoners of war "without delay". This it is loath to do. And this is but the latest example of the way the US and Britain have sought to reshape, or ignore, international law in the course of the crisis. Their principal offence was to demand UN backing and, when it was withheld, press ahead regardless. By acting pre-emptively in the absence of aggression or a pressing, agreed Iraqi threat, they set a precedent with destabilising implications for how states may behave in future disputes. Whether Mr Bush and Tony Blair fully understand, even now, the broader institutional and geostrategic consequences of their actions is another question of more than academic historical interest. In short order, the US-British axis exposed to dismaying view the pre-existing flaws of the security council system. From this humiliation, it is possible the UN will not recover. Between them, Mr Bush and Mr Blair split the EU down the middle, transforming long-standing French mutterings about US hegemony into a fully-fledged anti-American rebellion, turning east against west, "old" Europe against "new", and indirectly assuring Gerhard Schröder's re-election. Their policy wrought chaos in Nato, pulverised relations with key players like Russia and Turkey, and even alienated America's closest neighbours, Canada and Mexico. While claiming to advance Arab-Israeli peacemaking, they actually delayed it, infuriating the Muslim world, undermining "war on terror" priorities and almost daring al-Qaida to hit back. They played good cop-bad cop with Syria and Iran, goaded North Korea to a reckless nuclear brink, and meanwhile forgot all about Afghanistan, let alone the starving of Africa. And all for the sake of Saddam. The explosive effect of the Iraq obsession has been so great that the picking up of pieces is only just beginning. It could take years. It may never succeed. From these blitzed buildings, in fact, the architecture of a very different world order may emerge. That of course is exactly the aim of Bush administration ideologues. For Europeans and others, that is the big challenge of the post-war era. Was it really all worth it? Mr Bush and Mr Blair seem to have no doubts even though both Saddam and his weapons remain embarrassingly elusive. Many others will reply with a blunt no. But perhaps the question should properly be addressed in the first instance to surviving Iraqis whom the US president, with unconvincing altruism, vowed to liberate. A free Iraq would certainly be a laudable achievement. The trouble is, for all Mr Bush's jolly nautical self-congratulation, it has not happened yet. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,947771,00.html
man, the desperation of the anti-war wacko's smells powerfull !!! smells like Victory !! LOL. The left is DEAD MEAT. Now they are all praying for a depression so they will have a shot at Bush in the next election. All the whacko's need to be replaced with new immigrants that can appreciate this country.
Missing in Action: Truth By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF - NY Times When I raised the Mystery of the Missing W.M.D. recently, hawks fired barrages of reproachful e-mail at me. The gist was: "You *&#*! Who cares if we never find weapons of mass destruction, because we've liberated the Iraqi people from a murderous tyrant." But it does matter, enormously, for American credibility. After all, as Ari Fleischer said on April 10 about W.M.D.: "That is what this war was about." I rejoice in the newfound freedoms in Iraq. But there are indications that the U.S. government souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their conclusions and concealed contrary information to deceive people at home and around the world. Let's fervently hope that tomorrow we find an Iraqi superdome filled with 500 tons of mustard gas and nerve gas, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 29,984 prohibited munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several dozen Scud missiles, gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, 18 mobile biological warfare factories, long-range unmanned aerial vehicles to dispense anthrax, and proof of close ties with Al Qaeda. Those are the things that President Bush or his aides suggested Iraq might have, and I don't want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit. Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously. I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged. The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted â except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway. "It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said. Another example is the abuse of intelligence from Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq's biological weapons program until his defection in 1995. Top British and American officials kept citing information from Mr. Kamel as evidence of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr. Kamel had actually emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D. program in the early 1990's. Glen Rangwala, a British Iraq expert, says the transcript of Mr. Kamel's debriefing was leaked because insiders resented the way politicians were misleading the public. Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Defense Intelligence Agency, says that he hears from those still in the intelligence world that when experts wrote reports that were skeptical about Iraq's W.M.D., "they were encouraged to think it over again." "In this administration, the pressure to get product `right' is coming out of O.S.D. [the Office of the Secretary of Defense]," Mr. Lang said. He added that intelligence experts had cautioned that Iraqis would not necessarily line up to cheer U.S. troops and that the Shiite clergy could be a problem. "The guys who tried to tell them that came to understand that this advice was not welcome," he said. "The intelligence that our officials was given regarding W.M.D. was either defective or manipulated," Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico noted. Another senator is even more blunt and, sadly, exactly right: "Intelligence was manipulated." The C.I.A. was terribly damaged when William Casey, its director in the Reagan era, manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the Soviet threat in Central America to whip up support for Ronald Reagan's policies. Now something is again rotten in the state of Spookdom.
If Saddam didn't have WMD and if he had been more open and cooperative with the inspectors and allowed complete freedom for inspections or documents on their destruction he would probably still be in power and saved everyone a whole lot of trouble. If that is the case he directly brought on his own destruction and pulled one of the stupidest moves in modern history.