Pacific Views

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When George Bush announced that he was acceding to demands he have an independent investigation of the "intelligence failures" that led to the decision by his administration to invade Iraq on the basis of its possession of weapons of mass destruction, a friend of mine wondered why he was giving in.

"So he can appoint Henry Kissinger to head the commission, of course," I joked.

Little did I suspect Bush would actually top that by doing this:

The panel will be co-chaired by a Democrat and a Republican: Former Sen. and former Gov. Chuck Robb of Virginia, and former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman, a conservative who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

This description beggars the reality about Silberman. He's not merely a conservative...

Does anyone here think that any WMD may be hidden in a hole, like the one Saddam was found in?

I mean, it took 9 months to even find that.

Plus, read this:

Pre-emption is effective tool

The CIA was careful enough to distinguish between weapons agents and deliverable weapons. It's not out of the question that someone may find a ten year old bucket of mustard agent somewhere, but that hardly constitutes an imminent threat. There were no production facilities, no missiles ready to go, no field deployment of any kind. The only centrifuge was found buried in a garden in pieces.

Witnesses thus far have uniformly testified that the weapons were destroyed. With Saddam captured and his sons dead, no one can say they're answering out of fear of the regime.

The fact is, hard as this may be for you to swallow, the UN was right. The skeptics were right. And the Bush administration has seriously damaged our nation's credibility in the course of getting us into this debacle. We're now the country that cried wolf.

Well natasha,

What do you mean "now we're the country that cried wolf"

As far as I know, Milisovich in Kosovo did not pose a threat, and the USA without UN or even congressional approval (atleast US congress voted for war in Iraq) started a war and bombed innocent people and babies.

I say that this made us a country that cried wolf.

It's nothing new.

I guess going to war is justified only if a Democrat is President....

How is it that Clinton lying about his personal life is this huge bru-ha-ha and nobody is up in arms about Bush lying about why we went to war?

As far as I know, Milisovich in Kosovo did not pose a threat, and the USA without UN or even congressional approval (atleast US congress voted for war in Iraq) started a war and bombed innocent people and babies.

The sole legal basis for the invasion of Iraq was that Iraq was in violation of UN SCR 1441 and posed an "imminent threat" to other nations. This has been established. At no time was Saddam Hussein's internal repression advanced as a grounds for invasion. Evidence was fabricated. Americans were duped. Since the foundation for American intervention in Iraq was a series of SCR's, SCR approval for the actual invasion was an illegal oversight.

The legal foundations for the Yugoslav intervention are entirely different. Belgrade was a signatory to the Rambouillet Accord. The same guarantor to the RA, the OCSE, also gave the green light for the intervention in Serbia-Montenegro. The UN SCR had recused itself from the then-unfolding democide in Kosovo, and the Yugoslavian government had absolved itself of responsibility for the province.

The USA is a member of the OCSE and NATO, and is bound to assist the latter. The NATO HC established before the Rambouillet Accords that the carnage in Kosovo represented a danger to the stability of Europe; Italy, in particular, was faced with a flood tide of Kosovar refugees.

The correspondence between the two events is utterly dishonest. Moreover, the total loss of life in Yugoslavia caused by NATO/OCSE intervention, both directly and directly, was small relative to the proximate cause of that intervention--namely, the flight of 1.5 million refugees to Macedonia and Albania.