Bush team united Iraq front unravels
Use of flawed intelligence opens a Pandora’s box
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, foreground, in the Oval Office with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney in June.
ANALYSIS - By Michael Moran - MSNBC 7/11/2003
July 11 — The familiar drip, drip, drip of a brewing political scandal echoes through the power centers of Washington and London these days as the Bush administration and the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair are pelted daily with increasingly pointed questions about the case they made for going to war against Iraq. The admission that the president made an apparently false allegation against Iraq in his State of the Union address was supposed to help put the issue to rest. Instead, it reopened fissures inside the administration and in Blair’s government over the validity of their case for war.
THE FAILURE to turn up chemical or biological weapons in Iraq — initially dismissed as a “sour grapes” issue by Bush insiders — is growing into a genuine political problem, dogging the British and U.S. leaders at every public appearance and sparking various agencies that had a hand in Iraq policy to begin plotting a course through the gathering storm.
Throughout the president’s Africa trip this week, for instance, Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell were peppered with questions on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and particularly on the president’s Jan. 28 claim that Iraq sought to purchase uranium from African countries that mine it.
The image of African leaders standing mutely by as their news conferences were transformed into debates on Iraq could not fail to recall similarly uncomfortable moments during Bill Clinton’s scandal-plagued administration.
But the comparisons end there. Clinton’s troubles were domestic, in the strictest sense, and largely dismissed as unimportant in the rest of the world. Today, with U.S. troops dying in Iraq at a rate even the White House sees as politically unsustainable, there is a palpable desire to lay to rest any questions about the war’s real motives and stem any further damage to U.S. and British credibility.
“They have to get by this, and they have to do that very soon,” says a source close to the Bush family, who requested anonymity. “The GOP can bottle up inquiries in Congress, but they can’t bottle up public opinion.”
http://www.msnbc.com/news/937576.asp?0na=x22034K3--------------------------------------------------------
I know I posted a lot of text but this has to be read by everyone on this board!
“The GOP can bottle up inquiries in Congress, but they can’t bottle up public opinion.”...no that's the role of the US Lap Dog Media
BadGimp