The Failure to Find Iraqi Weapons-N.Y.T Spin

Ayinde

Ayinde

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The Failure to Find Iraqi Weapons-N.Y.T Spin

« on: September 27, 2003, 05:50:46 AM »

The New York Times | Editorial
Friday 26 September 2003

This page did not support the war in Iraq, but it never quarreled with one of its basic premises. Like President Bush, we believed that Saddam Hussein was hiding potentially large quantities of chemical and biological weapons and aggressively pursuing nuclear arms. Like the president, we thought those weapons posed a grave danger to the United States and the rest of the world. Now it appears that premise was wrong. We cannot in hindsight blame the administration for its original conclusions. They were based on the best intelligence available, which had led the Clinton administration before it and the governments of allied nations to reach the same conclusion. But even the best intelligence can turn out to be mistaken, and the likelihood that this was the case in Iraq shows why pre-emptive war, the Bush administration's strategy since 9/11, is so ill conceived as a foundation for security policy. If intelligence and risk assessment are sketchy -- and when are they not? -- using them as the basis for pre-emptive war poses enormous dangers.

A draft of an interim report by David Kay, the American leading the hunt for banned arms in Iraq, says the team has not found any such weapons after nearly four months of intensively searching and interviewing top Iraqi scientists. There is some evidence of chemicals and equipment that could have been put to illicit use. But, to the chagrin of Mr. Bush's top lieutenants, there is nothing more.

It remains remotely possible, of course, that something will be found. But Mr. Kay's draft suggests that the weapons are simply not there. Why Mr. Hussein did not prove that when the United Nations demanded an explanation remains a puzzle. His failure to come clean strengthened the conviction that he had a great deal to hide. His history as a vicious tyrant who had used chemical weapons in war and against his own people lent credence to the fear that he could not be trusted with whatever he was holding and would pose a significant threat.

Before the war, we objected not to the stated goal of disarming Iraq but to the fact that the United States was waging war essentially alone, in defiance of many important allies. We favored using international inspectors to keep Iraq's destructive programs in check while diplomats forged a United Nations effort to force Mr. Hussein to yield his weapons.

The policy of pre-emption that Mr. Bush pursued instead junked an approach that had served this country and the world well for half a century. That policy, simply stated, was that the United States would respond quickly to aggression but would not be the first to attack.

The world changed on Sept. 11, 2001. Terrorist groups like Al Qaeda are dedicated to inflicting maximum harm on this country. Since such groups rely on suicide bombers and are therefore immune to threats of retaliation, the United States is right to attack a terrorist group first in some circumstances. It was certainly justified in its war in Afghanistan, which had become little more than a government-sponsored training camp for Al Qaeda. It is quite another thing, however, to launch a pre-emptive military campaign against a nation that the United States suspects poses a threat.

Americans and others in the world are glad that Mr. Hussein has been removed from power. If Iraq can be turned into a freer and happier country in coming years, it could become a focal point for the evolution of a more peaceful and democratic Middle East. But it was the fear of weapons of mass destruction placed in the hands of enemy terrorists that made doing something about Iraq seem urgent. If it had seemed unlikely that Mr. Hussein had them, we doubt that Congress or the American people would have endorsed the war.

This is clearly an uncomfortable question for the Bush administration. Yesterday, Secretary of State Colin Powell met with Times editors. Asked whether Americans would have supported this war if weapons of mass destruction had not been at issue, Mr. Powell said the question was too hypothetical to answer. Asked if he, personally, would have supported it, he smiled, thrust his hand out and said, "It was good to meet you."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/092703A.shtml


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Ayinde

Ayinde

Posts: 1531

NYT plays down anti-war opinion

« Reply #1 on: September 27, 2003, 05:51:32 AM »

When "Doves" Lie, NYT plays down anti-war opinion

by Jim Naureckas
April 2003 http://www.fair.org

In a breakdown of major U.S. newspapers' positions on the Iraq issue before the invasion began, the trade magazine Editor and Publisher (3/14/03) labeled the New York Times "strongly dovish," based on its stance in a March 9 editorial: "If it comes down to a question of yes or no to invasion without broad international support, our answer is no."

But in its news coverage in the period before the invasion began on March 19, the New York Times played down opposition to war and exaggerated support for George W. Bush's Iraq policy--in ways that ranged from questionable to dishonest. (For earlier examples of the Times' minimization of peace activism, see Extra!, 11-12/01, 7-8/02; FAIR Action Alerts, 10/2/01, 5/30/02, 9/30/02, 10/28/02.)

Take, for example, the March 14 article by Kate Zernike, headlined "Liberals for War: Some of Intellectual Left's Longtime Doves Taking on Role of Hawks." The article argues that "as the nation stands on the brink of war, reluctant hawks are declining to join their usual soulmates in marching against war." It cites seven people by name as "somewhat hesitant backers of military might"--every one of whom was actually on the record as having supported the 1991 Gulf War.

One of those said to have "joined the ranks of the reluctant hawks" was New York Times Magazine contributor Michael Ignatieff. Shortly before the Gulf War, Ignatieff wrote in the London Observer (12/9/90) that the U.S. secretary of state should show Saddam Hussein "a video demonstration of the shortest way to turn Baghdad into a car park. The dictator is a military man: The West must speak his language." Another of the Times' "longtime doves" was Paul Berman, who wrote an op-ed for the Times during the Gulf War (1/31/91) criticizing protesters for "mobilizing against the war in Vietnam" when Iraq represented "a dynamic, expanding Fascism, 1930's-style."

Polls apart

Or consider the paper's reporting of a poll on March 11-- headlined, in the paper's online edition, "Growing Number in U.S. Back War, Survey Finds." Actually, on the most direct question asked in the poll, "Do you approve or disapprove of the United States taking military action against Iraq to try and remove Saddam Hussein from power?" the paper reported 66 percent in favor and 30 percent opposed, which was essentially unchanged from the last time the Times asked the question (2/10=12/03), when it found a 66/29 percent split.

The story, by Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder, said that the poll's findings "signal that the nation may be moving toward the traditional wartime rallying around the president." The journalists did not mention the poll's finding that Bush's approval rating for his handling of Iraq was 51 percent--not statistically different from the 53 percent found in February.

"By many measures, the poll found that the nation is behind Mr. Bush on Iraq," Nagourney and Elder wrote. "And for all the signs of dissent and protest around the nation, it would appear that support for war is on the rise." But most questions showed no significant increase in support for an invasion; in one of two questions that did show a small jump, a 52-to-44-percent majority still opposed the position that might most accurately describe the Bush stance on Iraq: that the U.S. should "take military action against Iraq fairly soon," rather than "wait and give the United Nations and weapons inspectors more time."

Another example of the New York Times downplaying anti-war sentiment was its treatment of the New York City Council's 31-to-17 vote in support of a resolution opposing an immediate war against Iraq. Even if the story hadn't occurred in the Times' hometown, the most populous U.S. city voting for peace on the verge of the country going to war would seem to be important national news--particularly when the September 11 attacks on New York's World Trade Center were repeatedly cited by Bush as a justification for war.

Although its article on the vote noted that it was covered by "TV cameras from CNN and networks in Japan, Germany, Spain and France," the Times evidently did not consider the story terribly important: Not only did it not make the front page of the paper, it didn't even make the front page of the Metro section--crowded out by a story on a merry-go-round restoration project, the story ended up on page B4. The article, by Nichole M. Christian, gave four paragraphs to quotes from supporters of the resolution and six paragraphs to the opposing minority.

After the invasion began, when more than 100,000 people in New York City demonstrated on March 22, it was front-page news the next day in the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. But the New York Times, whose offices are two blocks away from where the anti-war march started, placed the story on page B11.

http://www.fair.org/extra/0304/nyt-doves.html


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Ayinde

Ayinde

Posts: 1531

Weapons of Mass Deception

« Reply #2 on: October 10, 2003, 07:35:16 AM »

by David Cortright, http://www.sojo.net/

The failure to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has exposed the lie at the heart of the Bush administration's case for war. It is part of a much deeper web of deceit that underlies U.S. policy in Iraq.

Prior to the war the president repeatedly claimed, as he said two days before the invasion, that "the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." After months of searching hundreds of suspected sites, U.S. occupying forces have found no evidence that the alleged stockpiles actually exist, just as U.N. inspectors found no prohibited weapons in the months leading up to war.

Iraq's rapid collapse in battle was enough to disprove the claim of military menace. Far from being a massively armed colossus bent on aggression, Iraq turned out to be an ill-equipped and impoverished country, lacking in advanced weaponry and unable to defend itself against U.S. and British assault.

The administration systematically ignored evidence disproving its case for war. It refused to acknowledge the combined effects of the first Gulf war and 12 years of punishing sanctions, which severely limited Iraq's military capabilities. It denied the successful results of the first U.N. disarmament commission, from 1991 to 1998, and rebuffed the renewed monitoring effort that began in December 2002. And, as the administration finally admitted, it ignored its own intelligence agencies to trumpet forged "evidence" of alleged uranium imports from Africa.

ANOTHER BIG LIE was the implied link between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11. The president consciously manipulated the public's fear of terrorism to build support for attacking Iraq. Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld put Iraq in their crosshairs almost immediately after the destruction of the twin towers. Throughout the buildup to war, the implied message was that overthrowing Saddam was payback for Sept. 11.

The Iraqi dictator was indeed a murderous tyrant, but he had nothing to do with the terrorists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11. The United States had no evidence before the war, and has found none since, linking the Baghdad government with al Qaeda. The latest report of the U.N. experts group monitoring the terrorist network also found no connections between al Qaeda and Saddam's regime.

A further level of deceit, this time a self-deception, was the Bush administration's belief that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators rather than foreign invaders, and that the United States with its ersatz coalition (consisting mostly of one other country) could succeed in rebuilding a shattered nation. The administration had no realistic plan for post-war Iraq, and its efforts to date have been tragically inadequate.

The Pentagon code-named its operation "Iraqi Freedom," but in fact how well off are the Iraqi people since the war? They may be free of Saddam Hussein, but they live under the boot of an occupying power they increasingly resent. Theirs is a strange and warped kind of liberation—thousands killed, a shattered infrastructure, the collapse of basic services, rampant insecurity and looting, rising malnutrition, mass joblessness. U.S. and British troops face mounting attack and protest and are cast in a peacekeeping mission for which they are ill suited.

The logical solution is to replace U.S. troops with a U.N.-authorized security force and to set a fixed timeline for establishing Iraqi self-rule. If the United States refuses this option, it will confirm the suspicions of many that the real U.S. purpose in Iraq is to control the nation's vast oil wealth and establish a permanent U.S. military presence to dominate the region.

President Bush not only misled the country into war, he subverted the very foundations of American democracy. Freedom is imperiled when government goes to war on the basis of lies. This is the deeper meaning of the controversy over justifying war in Iraq.

David Cortright, a Sojourners contributing writer, is president of the Fourth Freedom Forum and a founder of the Win Without War coalition.

Copyright 2003 Soujourners


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