"If Congress and the American people knew the whole truth, America never would have gone to war" by Sen.Edward Kennedy 6:43am 15th Jan, 2004   January 14, 2004.    "Kennedy: Bush broke faith with Americans on Iraq" by Vicki Allen. (Published by Reuters)    Fueled by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's blasts at the Bush administration, the U.S. Senate's leading liberal Democrat Wednesday accused the Republican White House of breaking faith with Americans by forcing them into an unnecessary war with Iraq.    Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts said President Bush and his advisers capitalized on the fear created by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and put "a spin on the truth to justify a war that could well become one of the worst blunders in more than two centuries of American foreign policy."    "If Congress and the American people knew the whole truth, America never would have gone to war," Kennedy said in a speech to the Center for American Progress.    He said the administration "has broken faith with the American people, aided and abetted by a congressional majority willing to pursue ideology at any price, even the price of distorting the truth."    He also said the Iraq war has made the effort to stop terrorism more difficult. "We knocked al Qaeda down in the war in Afghanistan, but we let it regroup by going to war in Iraq," he said of Osama bin Laden's network, blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.    Kennedy said the statements by O'Neill, Bush's first treasury secretary, that the president focused on ousting Saddam Hussein from his first days in office "revealed what many of us have long suspected. Despite protestations to the contrary, the president and his senior aides began the march to war in Iraq in the earliest days of the administration."    O'Neill, ousted about a year ago in a shake-up of Bush's economic team, has sparked a firestorm with interviews and his contributions to a book depicting a disengaged president and an administration bent on toppling Saddam long before Bush cited Iraq as a terrorist threat after the Sept. 11 attacks.    The White House has lashed out at O'Neill, launching an investigation on whether he disclosed secret documents.    Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Tuesday said the idea that Bush came to office "with a predisposition to invade Iraq ... I think is a total misunderstanding of the situation." Bush decided to invade Iraq in March last year "after trying everything else in the world," Rumsfeld said.    But Kennedy said the administration's "agenda was clear: find a rationale to end Saddam's regime," and he said the White House timed its announcements on Iraq to influence 2002 congressional elections.    "War in Iraq was a war of choice, not a war of necessity. It was a product they were methodically rolling out," he said.    Kennedy branded the administration as "breathtakingly arrogant," convinced "they know what is in America's interest, but they refuse to debate it honestly."    © Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.    WASHINGTON. January 15, 2004    "Kennedy lashes Bush adminstration for waging war on Iraq" by Brian Knowlton. (Published by International Herald Tribune)    Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts on Wednesday issued a scathing denunciation of the Bush administration's planning for the Iraq war, saying the decision to oust Saddam Hussein was misrepresented, was in part political and could represent "one of the worst blunders in more than two centuries" of American foreign policy.    Kennedy said that the administration, by taking the nation into a war that he insisted was avoidable, had "put the state of our union at risk" -overstretching the military and diverting attention from the war on terror.    The comments were noteworthy not only for their virulence in coming from a senior Democratic spokesman. They also built on recent comments by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, as Kennedy laid out a timeline to argue that the administration had begun moving toward war with Iraq long before it shared that decision with the public.    Kennedy's earlier criticism on Iraq had paved the way for Democratic presidential candidates to take a less cautious tone in assailing a still-popular president. Kennedy said Wednesday that conservative aides surrounding Bush led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Vice President Dick Cheney, whom he called "the axis of war" had overwhelmed the objections from some in the administration, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, who felt Saddam could be contained.    Kennedy charged that the administration used "scare tactics" and a "gross abuse of intelligence" to gain congressional approval and public support for war with Iraq, bringing it to a vote in September 2002, two months before midterm elections, although, he said, it could as easily have been announced earlier. "The politics of the timing is obvious," he said.    When Bush said in his State of the Union address a year ago that Iraq reportedly had sought African uranium, the administration knew this was false, Kennedy said. "Has any other State of the Union address," he asked, "ever been so disgraced by such blatant falsehood?"    He also asserted that the administration plan to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqi people by the end of June, while pushing Afghanistan for elections, was "intended to build momentum for the November elections in this country."    Kennedy spoke before a meeting of the Center for American Progress, a self-billed nonpartisan research and educational institute headed by John Podesta, who was President Bill Clinton's chief of staff.    Kennedy began lashing out at the administration's Iraq policy in mid-September, as the White House was seeking $87 billion for war and reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq. He then called Bush's Iraq policy "a fraud" and "a colossal failure."    While Kennedy and Bush have cooperated on some major legislative initiatives, including education reform and a plan to help older citizens pay for prescription drugs, the senator did not hold back Wednesday, blasting the administration as "breathtakingly arrogant" and "vindictive and mean-spirited."    "The election," he concluded, "cannot come too soon."    January 13, 2004.    "President Bush besieged by US Army War College" by Suzanne Goldenberg. (The Guardian/ UK)    The Bush administration's doctrinaire view of the war on terror, which lumped together regimes like Saddam Hussein's and al-Qaida as a single undifferentiated threat, led the US on a dangerous "detour" into an unnecessary war, according to an unusually strong critique from the US army war college.    "The global war on terrorism as presently defined and conducted is strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate US military and other resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security," says the study by Jeffrey Record, a visiting scholar at the Strategic Studies Institute.    The report, endorsed by other scholars at the institute, appeared yesterday at a delicate moment for the White House, which was fending off damaging comments from a former cabinet member on its decision to go to war.    Mr Record recommends a total overhaul of the national security strategy and says it must redirect its campaign against global terror from "unrealistic to realistic war aims".    Although he says that Washington may be able to defeat al-Qaida, he concludes that its war on terror has designated so many fronts and enemies that it is fundamentally unwinnable.    Meanwhile the war in Iraq has led it into an open-ended conflict that has drained resources from its efforts to secure American soil against another attack by al-Qaida.    The critique of the Bush administration's doctrine of pre-emption action and regime change appeared as the human toll of the engagement in Iraq approaches a new milestone: the number of American war dead came one closer to 500 yesterday when the 495th soldier died in a roadside bomb attack in Baghdad. Two others were injured.    Seven armed Iraqis were shot dead by US forces yeaterday while they were trying to siphon off petrol from a pipeline near the town of Samara.    Mr Record traces the failings of the war on terrorism to its very conception, arguing that a world view which saw purveyors of weapons of mass destruction, leaders of rogue states, and terrorist organisations as part of the same threat has eroded its ability to defend the American heartland.    Entering into an open-ended guerrilla conflict in Iraq has drained its military and financial resources and cost the country dear in international diplomacy, the report says, while emphatically failing to advance the war on terror.    "Operation Iraqi Freedom may have expanded the terrorist threat by establishing a large new American target set in an Arab heartland," it says.    On its second front, the White House is swatting off comments by the former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. In a memoir of his two years at the treasury, Mr O'Neill accuses President Bush of being a semi-detached president while rightwing members of his administration spun their plots to go to war on Iraq.    "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," Mr O'Neill told the CBS programme 60 Minutes.    But if White House officials succeed in writing off Mr O'Neill's expose as a pathetic attempt at revenge by a gaffe-prone official who was eventually sacked, Dr Record will not be so easy to dismiss.    He is the author of six books, he served as a military adviser during the Vietnam war and to Republican senators, and his report was endorsed in the Washington Post by the director of the war college.    Although the essay carries a standard disclaimer that its views do not represent those of the Pentagon, the study was endorsed by several other academics at the institute.    "This piece of work, like many others, certainly should be considered in the debate being taken place on national security policy," the institute's director, retired army colonel Douglas Lovelace, said. He said it had "a fairly strong foundation of support among the academic faculty".    12 January, 2004. "Bush 'plotted Iraq War From Start.(Published by BBC World News).    A top official sacked from the US Government has accused President Bush of planning for an invasion of Iraq within days of coming to office. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said Mr Bush was looking for an excuse to oust Saddam Hussein. As a member of the president's National Security team he said he never saw any evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.    "From the very beginning, there was a conviction Saddam Hussein was a bad person and he needed to go," the former treasury secretary said in an interview broadcast by CBS News on Sunday. Mr O'Neill was in office for nearly two years before he was sacked over differences with the administration in December 2002. The BBC's Washington correspondent, Justin Webb, says his remarks represent the most sustained and damaging criticism of the Bush administration from a former insider since the president came to power.    Mr O'Neill also portrayed the president as unwilling to engage in debate - a charge rejected by Bush officials.Mr O'Neill gives an unflattering account of Mr Bush's leadership style, saying that at cabinet meetings the president was like a blind man in a room full of deaf people.    But the current Commerce Secretary, Don Evans, told CNN that the president liked nothing better than vigorous discussion in cabinet. "He drives the meetings, tough questions, he likes dissent, he likes to see debate," he said. Republican Representative Mark Foley of Florida accused Mr O'Neill of delivering a "blatant stab in the back".    The former secretary gave his interview ahead of the publication of a book, The Price of Loyalty, which paints an insider's view of the administration based in part on his testimony. "In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterise as evidence of weapons of mass destruction", Paul O'Neill.    In his interview, Mr O'Neill said the Bush administration appeared to have assumed the right to act as it wished abroad.    "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap," he said.    He was also highly critical of Mr Bush's tax cuts policy.    The author of the new book, Ron Suskind, told CBS that he had received documents from Mr O'Neill and others which showed that during Mr Bush's first 100 days in office his officials were already looking at military options to remove Saddam from power.    Officials were looking into post-war contingencies such as peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil, according to the documents. Mr Suskind referred to a memo entitled "Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq".    In a separate interview for Time magazine, Mr O'Neill said he had never come across any evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) during his period in office. "In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterise as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," the former member of the president's national security team said. "To me there is a difference between real evidence and everything else."    Coalition forces have found no hard proof of continuing WMD programmes since the invasion of Iraq in March.. Visit the related web page
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