French leaders, gwb told Le Figaro newspaper, "must work to convince their own citizens and show that France is ready to cooperate with the United States", a euphemistic phraseology that Caesar himself may have uttered about restive Gauls 2,000 years ago.

The headlines in selected newspapers tell the story: "GIs in desert town face rising Iraqi hostility" (New York Times); "Firing of council in Basra upsets middle class" (Washington Post); "War Isn't over in Iraq, general says" (Wall Street Journal); "More US troops to stay in Iraq after rise in violence" (USA Today).
Meanwhile, the news out of nearby Afghanistan is even worse. "It is a crucial moment," warned Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid and one of the foremost US experts on Afghanistan, Barnett Rubin, in a joint column in the Journal. "A failure to provide Afghans with security will push that country back to the state of anarchy that gave rise to the Taliban and allowed al-Qaeda to base itself there."

In a real war, a war in which most people agree there is some powerful motivating cause, the fate of an individual soldier like Private Lynch becomes almost unimportant. Soldiers in real wars are reduced to just about the status of soldier ants in a war between two ant nests.

As for France, "there were times when it appeared that American power was seen to be more dangerous than perhaps Saddam Hussein," Ms. Rice said. "I'll just put it very bluntly, we simply didn't understand it."

Even in the United States, Blair comes out ahead of Bush. Majorities in seven of the eight Muslim countries surveyed said they think their nation will be attacked by the United States. In Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan, more than 70 percent of those questioned had this concern. In a previous Pew survey, negative feelings about the United States were confined to the Middle East and Pakistan but now they have expanded to Africa and Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation. There, 83 percent had an unfavorable view of America, compared to 36 percent a year ago

Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz reportedly suspects that Saddam Hussein played a significant role in the three worst terrorist attacks ever on the U.S. - the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Last Sunday, the day President Néstor Kirchner took office in Argentina, none of the top 25 U.S. dailies carried the story on its front page, and only three ran the story inside. Granted, this is nothing new. As the late New York Times columnist James Reston used to say, ``The American people will do anything for Latin America, except read about it.''
Richard Feinberg, a former head of the Clinton White House office of hemispheric affairs, once told me with a resigned smile that he had two officers reporting to him: One was dedicated full time to Haiti, and the other to the rest of the hemisphere. (Yes, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina included.)

cheney: "the only way to deal with this threat is to destroy it completely and utterly, and President Bush is absolutely determined to do just that."

"I'm not sure they used the particular words that they were FBI agents, but they gave that impression," Hardebeck said. "It was an unusual experience."

but 151 American young people are most definitely dead, their futures eradicated, and all the work that went into making them into people who could read and write, add and subtract, who could change tires or tie their ties -- all that work is wiped out, expunged, nullified and negated.

But no U.S. weapons hunters or intelligence officials have visited the heart of Iraq's missile programs - the state-owned al-Fatah company in Baghdad, which designed all the rockets Saddam Hussein's troops fired in 1991 and again this year. Not only that, it's not even on their agenda.

Russia dismissed U.S. efforts to present its discovery of a mobile laboratory as an example of Iraq's banned weapons program

Whenever it happened, the pledge to support Bush's world view became a crucial limitation on our prime minister's independent judgment. It lay behind every decision the British took... he loaded the benefit of any doubt in favour of war rather than no war.

“The (US government produced) primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then [i.e., since the violent destruction of the Afghan secular government in the early 1990s] as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books...” – Washington Post (3/23/02)
“And before the end of the year, we’ll have sent almost 10 million of them [that is, new textbooks] to the children of Afghanistan. These textbooks will teach tolerance and respect for human dignity instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry.” – Radio Broadcast, (3/16/2002)
“‘The pictures [in the old schoolbooks] are horrendous to school students, but the texts are even much worse,’ said Ahmad Fahim Hakim, an Afghan educator who is a program coordinator for Cooperation for Peace and Unity, a Pakistan-based nonprofit.’” – Washington Post (3/23/2002)

The WMD issue is of vital importance but it needs to be put into a wider perspective. There is a fundamental contradiction involved in the US going to war to remove another country's WMDs when the US possesses the world's largest quantity of such weapons.

fundamentalist Muslim terrorists from abroad are not our only enemy, and that, in fact, religious extremism by American Christian fundamentalists is every bit as real. 

Mr Bush's remarks on Thursday made it clear the United States had lowered its standards of proof. Mr Bush said the discovery in Iraq of two trailers, with laboratory equipment but no pathogens, was tantamount to a discovery of weapons.

"The Bush team's extensive hype of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a justification for a preemptive invasion has become more embarrassing. It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power," byrd added.

The letter was addressed to a person whose name was covered in blood and could not be identified, the report added

The most likely giant to hoover up the reconstruction contracts in Iraq is the Bechtel corporation whose senior vice president, retired general Jack Sheehan, serves on President Bush's defence policy board. This is the same Bechtel which - according to Iraq's pre-war arms submission to the UN, which Washington quickly censored - once helped Saddam build a plant for manufacturing ethylene, which can be used in the making of mustard gas. On the board of Bechtel sits former secretary of state George Schultz, who again just happens to be chairman of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq which has, of course, close links to the White House. Iraqi reconstruction is likely to cost $ 100bn which - and this is the beauty of it - will be paid for by the Iraqis from their own future oil revenues, which in turn will benefit the US oil companies.
Because it sounds to me, watching America's awesome control over this part of the world, its massive firepower, bases and personnel across Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Bahrain, Doha, Oman, Yemen and Israel, that this is not just about oil but about the projection of global power by a nation which really does have weapons of mass destruction. It's no longer safe. And it's going to get much worse. " robert fisk

send friedman to firing range:
"The failure of the Bush team to produce any weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.'s) in Iraq is becoming a big, big story. But is it the real story we should be concerned with? No. It was the wrong issue before the war, and it's the wrong issue now.
Why? Because there were actually four reasons for this war: the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason."
The only way to puncture that (terrorism) bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill


"As Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to make his case for invading Iraq to the U.N. on Feb. 5, a friend of his told me, he had to throw out a couple of hours' worth of sketchy intelligence other Bush officials were trying to stuff into his speech."
god knows how bad that must have been!

When James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director and current Pentagon adviser, appeared on "Nightline" five days after 9/11 and suggested that America had to strike Iraq for sponsoring terrorism, Ted Koppel rebutted: "Nobody right now is suggesting that Iraq had anything to do with this. In fact, quite the contrary."
Mr. Woolsey replied: "I don't think it matters. I don't think it matters."