Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board

A R C H I V E S

Can Bush Alter Course, or Is War Inevitable?

Madina Archives


Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board

Can Bush Alter Course, or Is War Inevitable?
Halima
03/04/03 at 07:16:42
Subhanallah!  For Bush, it has become a matter of saving face, so he must go to war no matter what!  Yet, everytime he hits an obstacle, he changes the reason and justification for war with Iraq.  After reading every news paper, listening to all sorts of news on TV, I realize that after assuming power by default, Bush was at a loss for what to do and 9/11 provided him with absolute opportunity to look and act important.  As a result, he has just exposed himself as someone who is incapable of such a task (the presidency).


NEWS ANALYSIS - NYTimes
Can Bush Alter Course, or Is War Inevitable?
By PATRICK E. TYLER

ASHINGTON, March 3 — The Western dragnet since the Sept. 11 attacks is producing results: a major terrorist chief one rung below Osama bin Laden was captured over the weekend, a third of Al Qaeda's top operatives are dead or in custody and those at large seem more vulnerable than ever.

For the first time in a long time, there was a sense today that America might see justice done with the capture and trial of Osama bin Laden, who has all but admitted in videotapes that he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Iraq destroyed more Al Samoud missiles today. Its scientists dug up anthrax bombs and prepared a detailed report that would explain, they asserted, how they disposed of 1.5 tons of deadly VX nerve gas in a dirt pit in 1991.

The vise grip of political and military pressure on Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, appeared to be working as never before.

Yet the Bush administration seemed ever more determined to go to war, while much of the rest of the world was determined to avoid war if at all possible.

Republicans said today that the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed should answer criticism by Democrats that a potential war with Iraq was a distraction from anti-terrorism activities.

"Are we finding the bad guys who conducted the operation?" asked Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania. "The answer is clearly yes. We are doing it on a systematic basis."

But the portrayal of an Iraqi war as "diversion" from the goal of hunting down Al Qaeda was one of many arguments against war that continued to mount today.

Quite a number of America's allies in Europe and the Middle East argued that steady military pressure on Iraq along with prodigious expenditures of shoe leather in law enforcement and intelligence were accomplishing the Bush administration's anti-terrorism goals.

"No one wants this war, it is too unpredictable," said an adviser to the Saudi royal family, which came under severe criticism at an Arab summit meeting this weekend for publicly opposing war while providing bases to American forces.

The French president, Jacques Chirac, said in Algiers today that France still opposes a war. "France wants to give peaceful disarmament every possible chance," he said, warning of "the disastrous consequences" of a new war in a region already so deadly and fragile.

The antiwar camp fears chaos in one of the world's most volatile regions, where Iraq's neighbors and other actors seeking power or oil or Islamic leadership appear poised to exploit any opening a war might provide.

"Bush seems very determined to go ahead towards war," said Lee H. Hamilton, president of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. For many years, Mr. Hamilton was chairman of the House committee overseeing foreign affairs.

As a centrist Democrat, Mr. Hamilton agrees with Mr. Bush's larger goal of disarming Iraq, but as a politician, Mr. Hamilton believes there are other considerations affecting the timing. "I think Bush has come to the conclusion that he cannot really exit the path toward war without severely damaging his own political standing," he said. "And I don't think he can go into the next presidential election with Saddam Hussein still in power."

The president might be able to accept a delay of "several weeks" for the sake of Western unity, but not of several months, the time frame that the French and Germans are promoting.

All of this raises the question of whether, if Mr. bin Laden turned himself in tomorrow along with the rest of Al Qaeda's leaders, Mr. Bush would still feel compelled to launch a war in Iraq.

Mr. Hamilton thinks he would. "He has put so much of his political standing and prestige on Iraq," he said, "that he simply must have a politically acceptable solution, not just the disarmament of Iraq, but the removal of Saddam Hussein from power."

That might explain the shift by the White House on Friday, in which Mr. Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said disarmament was no longer sufficient and resurrected the goal of "regime change" in Baghdad.

The controversy over Iraq has reached extraordinary proportions.

Henry A. Kissinger, a former Secretary of State, said this weekend that he found it "shocking" that NATO members were actively working against the United States in the Security Council debate over Iraq. They were questioning the veracity of intelligence reports put before them by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, he said in an interview on CNN, and they were lobbying African and other nations to side with them against war.

"This has never happened in 50 years of previous controversies, which have been conducted as family controversies," Mr. Kissinger said.

The blame for this "shocking" behavior, Mr. Kissinger said, could not be laid at the doorstep of the Bush administration. In other words, he suggested, this was an unwelcome European challenge to American leadership.

But others disagreed.

Mr. Hamilton said Washington should recognize that European public opinion polls are showing that 80 to 90 percent there oppose a war.

At the United Nations, one senior diplomat pointed out that the peremptory tone coming from the Bush administration has not helped Washington as it seeks a the necessary nine votes in the Security Council for a war-authorization resolution.

As a result, diplomats who were confident last week that the United States would prevail in the vote that could come at the end of this week or early next are speaking of delay or even the possibility that the United States might withdraw its resolution, an acknowledgement that the votes may not be there.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Mr. Kissinger's longtime rival in cold war strategizing, argued in a joint appearance with Mr. Kissinger that the crisis America is facing arises from how it treats the rest of the world, telling nations to "line up" as if they were part of some "Warsaw Pact."

"The issue of Iraq is a complicated issue," Mr. Brzezsinki said, and the United States has "never been so isolated globally, literally never, since 1945."




Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
A R C H I V E S

Individual posts do not necessarily reflect the views of Jannah.org, Islam, or all Muslims. All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the poster and may not be used without consent of the author.
The rest © Jannah.Org