WorldPeace - "Cheney's and little George's obsession with Iraq" by John WorldPeace on daily press photos

Cheney's and little George's obsession with Iraq

In one of the below articles, it states:

"Aboard Air Force One on Sunday, as Bush flew back to Washington from a month's vacation in Texas, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush agrees that "unfettered inspections" are a required first step toward solving the Iraq problem, but not necessarily enough.

Inspections are "no guarantee if at the same time the regime in Iraq continues to try to hide weapons of mass destruction," McClellan said. The burden is on Iraq, he said, to prove the country is not producing weapons of mass destruction."

Everyone with a brain knows that you cannot prove a negative. "Prove that you are not beating your wife. Prove you have never stolen a candy bar. Prove that you never looked at Playboy."

Well if Saddam has to prove that he is not making weapons of mass destruction, then I am afraid that we are headed for an invasion of Iraq.

What I cannot understand is that there is an Earth Summit taking place in South Africa that has a much bigger impact on the world and the United States than whatever Saddam is doing and little George is refusing to attend.

The reality is if Saddam uses any of his alleged weapons of mass destruction, then Baghdad becomes the first glass city; due to the nuclear weapons that I have no doubt little George will use and whose heat will melt what ever city he targets. Now is Saddam a problem? I doubt it. His use of a weapon of mass destruction will bring about his annihilation.

Now in South Africa they are talking about allowing the world economy to grow without destroying the environment. They are talking about world wide human rights. They are talking about health, food, and water. These are the real problems and over half of the world's nations are attending. But not little George.

The economy is going to hell in the United States. Bin-Laden is still on the lose. There have been no major terrorist acts and Americans are starting to question all the restrictions since 911. So little George needs to go after Iraq to keep Americans from considering that the United States' economy is in serious trouble.

It is a very serious problem when little George thinks he rules the world as opposed to just the United States. Everyone knows that going into Iraq would be a mistake but little George is intent on going. And if he does not find any of these weapons of mass destruction, then what? Will he deny that there was nothing there or will he say that they just haven't found these weapons yet?

Oh yes. If Iraq does have weapons of mass destruction, then obviously some country supplied him with the components and the technology and maybe the personnel to make them. So how many more countries are going to be added to the little George list of bad guys?

By Jim Forsyth
Reuters

SAN ANTONIO (Aug. 29) - Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday hammered home the U.S. case for pre-emptive action against Iraq, brushing off a groundswell of unease among European allies, Muslim states and broader world public opinion.

Cheney used a gathering of Korean War veterans to repeat an earlier indictment of Saddam Hussein, charging the Iraqi leader with acquiring weapons of mass destruction and posing a ''mortal threat'' to the United States.

He also downplayed concerns, laid out by some senior members of his Republican Party and echoed abroad, that a U.S. strike could hamper the global war on terrorism and undermine pro-U.S. governments in the Arab world.

''Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,'' Cheney said, reprising a fighting speech he gave on Monday in Nashville, Tennessee. ''There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use them against our friends, against our allies and against us,'' he said.

''The elected leaders of the country have a responsibility to consider all available options and we are doing so. What we must not do in the face of a mortal threat is to give in to wishful thinking or to willful blindness. We must not simply look away, hope for the best and leave the matter for some future administration to resolve,'' he said.

COOL RECEPTION ABROAD

Cheney's Nashville speech had sparked a fresh round of critical remarks in many states, including close European ally France, which questioned the right under international law of the United States to act unilaterally.

Congress, back next week from its summer recess, has announced hearings on Iraq, inviting senior administration figures to outline their proposed course of action.

A White House spokesman said U.S. officials would cooperate fully with the lawmakers. In July the administration had declined to take part in Senate hearings, saying it did not want to be locked into positions prematurely.

''What is important is that we have an agreement, an essential agreement among the American people, through their elected representatives in Congress, that the country is behind this effort in its own self defense against terrorist acts,'' House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt told CNN.

Meanwhile, foreign leaders pressed Washington to work with international weapons inspectors to rein in the Iraqi weapons program, and to seek U.N. approval for any future military campaign if inspections failed.

In his remarks on Thursday, Cheney responded to this, recalling what he called the Iraqi ''science'' of deceiving weapons inspectors in the past and saying a return to Iraq of inspection teams was no guarantee of disarmament.

French President Jacques Chirac said earlier on Thursday he was concerned by what he called a ''temptation to seek to legitimize the use of unilateral and pre-emptive force.'' Any such attack, Chirac said, would require U.N. authorization.

TURMOIL IN ISLAMIC WORLD

Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke with German, British and Spanish foreign ministers in the last 24 hours, in part to discuss Iraq, his spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters.

Powell was ''taking up the fact that Iraq's defiance of the Security Council and development of weapons of mass destruction constitutes a danger that we have to deal with, and discussing with these countries how to deal with that,'' Boucher said.

Muslim leaders kept a united front of pressure on Washington to avert a strike against Iraq, saying it could unleash fresh turmoil in the Islamic world by widening a gulf between Muslims and the West.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, both pivotal pro-U.S. figures in the Muslim world, joined the growing chorus of open opposition to proposed U.S. intervention.

White House officials stress no decision has been taken on a proposed military strike, and they have pledged to consult with U.S. allies and regional powers beforehand.

On the campaign trail in support of fellow Republican candidates in Oklahoma City, President Bush made no direct mention of U.S. determination to oust the Iraqi leader. But he made it clear Saddam remained on his mind.

''We must not allow the world's worst leaders to develop and harbor the world's worst weapons,'' Bush said at a fund-raising speech. The remark is his standard stump-speech line generally regarded as referring to Saddam.

Reuters 16:55 08-29-02

Sen. Lugar Cautions Bush on Iraq

WASHINGTON- A leading Republican lawmaker urged President Bush on Sunday to underpin any military action against Iraq with resolutions from the United Nations, demanding that weapons inspectors be allowed to return, and from Congress, giving its approval for action.

Sen. Richard Lugar, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the U.N. Security Council's action would be little more than symbolic, because Iraq would reject the demand and it would be left to the Americans to enforce it.

Just before Lugar spoke on CNN's "Late Edition," Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, interviewed from Baghdad, said the idea of the inspectors' return is "a nonstarter because it's not going to bring about a conclusion."

"By saying they're not even going to start, (Aziz) gives us the opportunity (to) go back to the U.N. to re-energize our partners, to indicate how unreasonable the Iraqis are, to get resolutions that if we cannot get in - and apparently we're going to have difficulty doing that - then we have a military force option," Lugar said.

Lugar, R-Ind., was among the earliest Republican leaders to advocate caution by Bush as he contemplates how to deal with what the administration says is President Saddam Hussein's quest for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The administration has made "regime change" in Iraq a basic goal of its foreign policy.

To end the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq agreed to cease all attempts to obtain such weapons and to allow unrestricted inspections to ensure compliance. Inspectors left in late 1998, just before punitive U.S.-British airstrikes because of Iraq's refusal to cooperate, and Saddam refused to allow the inspectors back in.

Policy on whether to seek renewed weapons inspections after a four-year hiatus or to strike Iraq pre-emptively to remove Saddam has become muddied. Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney said inspectors "would provide no assurance whatsoever" of compliance and might even bring "false comfort" that Saddam had been contained.

On Sunday, the British Broadcasting Corp. released a text of an interview in which Secretary of State Colin Powell said, "The president has been clear that he believes weapons inspectors should return."

Aboard Air Force One on Sunday, as Bush flew back to Washington from a month's vacation in Texas, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush agrees that "unfettered inspections" are a required first step toward solving the Iraq problem, but not necessarily enough.

Inspections are "no guarantee if at the same time the regime in Iraq continues to try to hide weapons of mass destruction," McClellan said. The burden is on Iraq, he said, to prove the country is not producing weapons of mass destruction.

Another Republican senator, Fred Thompson of Tennessee, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said he sees no reason to even bother with trying to send back the inspectors.

"I think Saddam will not allow inspectors back in, number one. The Security Council will not support us to put inspectors back in, two. And three, if inspectors went back in, it would be a fool's errand," Thompson said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

In testimony a few months ago, Thompson said: "These same former inspectors ... said that there's no way that you can discover and determine what he has. It's too large a country, there are too many facilities. He is a past master, and even better now than he was then, on hiding facilities. And once you get close, he shuts you down."

Lugar's push for congressional votes on any military involvement drew other prominent support Sunday. Writing in Monday's edition of Time magazine, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Bush's principal opponent for the 2000 GOP nomination, said he remains unconvinced "that the large U.S. force contemplated for the operation is the best or only option" to oust Saddam.

McCain said, however, that Bush "should seek congressional support soon - before staging large numbers of troops in advance of hostilities. Although the legal necessity for doing so is arguable, the political imperative is not."

"Public support, best measured by the extent of congressional support the president receives, is as important as the size and quality of our military force," McCain wrote.

Writing in Sunday's edition of The Washington Post, former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., the Republican presidential nominee in 1996, agreed that Bush has the authority needed to send troops without Congress' say-so, but "when all is said and done, Congress will respond affirmatively and the president will be strengthened as he reaches out to willing allies. Saddam Hussein will also clearly understand that America means business."

For more than 30 years, we have debated the meaning, lessons and significance of the Vietnam War. The chords of memory still resonate: the arrogance of power, the world's policeman, the dangers of nation-building.

Can those lessons help in understanding our current situation? Or will they be relegated to an ash can of history by a Bush administration bent on erasing such issues from public consciousness or awareness?

Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) recently remarked that, if George W. Bush had been president in the 1960s, we would have won in Vietnam. Learn nothing; forget everything. The lessons of the past are problematic, sometimes distorted for partisan gain, but they can provide sober enlightenment. They will not go away, however the president might wish. He should remember the Vietnam War's painful, clear lessons on the limits of our power, limits to our ability to impose our will on others, and the hazards of unilateralism and lack of support in the international community. He should remember his father's determination to build a grand coalition for the Persian Gulf War.

Bush II is considering the necessity of an invasion of Iraq and the toppling of its regime. Where is the debate? Absent any real dissent, we have a lethal combination of inertia, intimidation and political impotence, all combining to cast an illusion of overwhelming consensus.

In this march toward war, Bush is antagonizing potential allies such as Iran. The Bushes have a problem - or a grudge - with Iraq, to be sure, but why publicly humiliate and then outrage the other sometime-antagonists when all the available evidence indicates that they have been moving toward a rapprochement with the rest of the world, including the United States? Or does the president curiously interpret his election as a mandate to repudiate all of Bill Clinton's initiatives, such as the progress made in the last year of his administration in reducing differences and tensions between Washington and Tehran?

Some months ago, Bush, for yet unfathomable reasons, lumped Iran with Iraq and North Korea as an axis of evil.

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami's government recently delivered 16 al-Qaida suspects to the Saudi government. In remarks in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, Khatami hinted at Iran's still-secret role in ending Taliban rule.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flippantly dismissed the Iranian transfer of al-Qaida suspects. The president's "wanted dead or alive" dictum simply does not have the carpet of jurisdiction he and Rumsfeld would like. But Bush might remember that Iran's enmity toward Iraq long antedates and outweighs ours. We could use this to our advantage.

The history lessons from Vietnam and other successes and failures in foreign policy are relevant to the moment. Where is the debate?

History is worth remembering; after all, it is our ideas and memories that we are supposed to be defending.

How can we manifest peace on earth if we do not include everyone (all races, all nations, all religions, both sexes) in our vision of Peace?