Tuesday, January 13, 2004

From the Atlantic on what happened to WMD? Posted here Tuesday, January 13, 2004 at 12:04:56 PM     The follow excerpt is from another important article. It shows that Saddam was much more motivated by appearance and power than by policy or long term thinking. Things like the war in Kuwait were minor mistakes. The problem is, such mistakes by leaders cost dearly in the lives of ordinary people. Bush too seems to be making mistakes, mistakes that may turn out to enhance his position. The problem is, these ego moves by "leaders" have terrible effects on real lives.  That is what a democratic governance was supposed to prevent: the glaring indiscretions of tyrannical elites. by Kenneth M. Pollack   et's start with one truth: last March, when the United States and its coalition partners invaded Iraq, the American public and much of the rest of the world believed that after Saddam Hussein's regime sank, a vast flotsam of weapons of mass destruction would bob to the surface. That, of course, has not been the case. In the words of David Kay, the principal adviser to the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), an organization created late last spring to search for prohibited weaponry, "I think all of us who entered Iraq expected the job of actually discovering deployed weapons to be easier than it has turned out to be." Many people are now asking very reasonable questions about why they were misled. Democrats have typically accused the Bush Administration of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq in order to justify an unnecessary war. Republicans have typically claimed that the fault lay with the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, which they say overestimated the threat from Iraq—a claim that carries the unlikely implication that Bush's team might not have opted for war if it had understood that Saddam was not as dangerous as he seemed. ********

Middle east moderation Posted here Tuesday, January 13, 2004 at 11:49:52 AM     On the rise of adaptationalism in the ME. We need to face the possibility that the war in Iraq has had an overall beneficial result. Way too early to tell, but we need to consider the possibility. The Bush administration was never willing to say aloud whether it had Israel's interests so prominently in mind, but some officials did suggest that the post-Iraq shakeup might also lead to a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict in general and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in particular. "That doesn't yet seem to be at all in the cards," says Quandt, who suggests that progress "may require waiting out" the tenures of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. The US involvement in Iraq is hardly over, and analysts caution that a deterioration there might change the regional situation negatively as well. But for the time being - with former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in US hands and the anti-American insurgency tapering off slightly - war skeptics are acknowledging that things are looking up. "I hate to say it," says Said of the Al Ahram Center, " but at least from the results we are seeing the Iraqi thing was like a jolt in the region - it put a cap on radical politics." ********