wilson: The best line I?ve ever heard about democracy is that it?s a bit like an English lawn. You have to seed it, you have to fertilize it, you have to water it, and to make it look really good you have to rule it every day for 600 years. Now I?ve done democracy in Africa for 25 years, and it is tough. It takes a lot of institution building, it takes a lot of precedent setting, it takes a certain respect on the part of the population for the institutions and the laws that have been passed, it requires the spirit of compromise?none of which is in place in Iraq.
"Well, I don?t think it was oil. What I do think on the oil thing, though, is that my experience is that once you have vested commercial interests in place, that they will trump strategic interests every time. So that while I think that they did go on what these guys thought were strategic reasons, that the vested interests will begin to shape how we deal with this going forward.

xymph: In order to maintain the charade that such weapons would be found, Bush gave Kay $600 million to go back to Iraq and pretend to look for them. Since the Administration already knew that there were no weapons to be found, the only purpose of the $600 million was to delay admitting that there were no weapons to a time when it would be less politically sensitive for Bush and the Republicans. Shouldn't the Republicans be offering to pay this completely wasted $600 million back to the American taxpayers?

Intelligence sources, policy makers and weapons inspectors familiar with the details of the hunt for WMD told The Observer it was widely known that Iraq had no WMD within three weeks of Baghdad falling, despite the assertions of senior Bush administration figures and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

In quick summary, if enough cold, fresh water coming from the melting polar ice caps and the melting glaciers of Greenland flows into the northern Atlantic, it will shut down the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe and northeastern North America warm. The worst-case scenario would be a full-blown return of the last ice age ? in a period as short as 2 to 3 years from its onset ? and the mid-case scenario would be a period like the "little ice age" of a few centuries ago that disrupted worldwide weather patterns leading to extremely harsh winters, droughts, worldwide desertification, crop failures, and wars around the world.
It turns out that the ice age versus temperate weather patterns weren't part of a smooth and linear process, like a dimmer slider for an overhead light bulb. They are part of a delicately balanced teeter-totter, which can exist in one state or the other, but transits through the middle stage almost overnight.

"If you cannot rely on good, accurate intelligence that is credible to the American people and to others abroad, you certainly can't have a policy of preemption," Kay said on Fox News Sunday.
Recalling former French President Charles De Gaulle's statement that he so trusted President John F. Kennedy's word he did not need to see satellite photos of Soviet missiles near Cuba, Biden told CNN: "No leader in the world would respond to President Bush that way today."
"A marketplace phenomena was about to occur, if it did not occur; sellers meeting buyers. And I think that would have been very dangerous if the war had not intervened," Kay said.

mr ed - it seems that everyone is reading off the same page re germany's "self-confessed cannibal". wot, pray tell, is a self-confessed cannibal?

NO wonder Downing Street detests the BBC. Take your mind back to the episode of Yes, Minister wherein Jim Hacker expressed great concern about a looming political scandal. Should the media twig what had been going on, Jim's brilliant career would be considerably tarnished. His unflappable permanent head, Sir Humphrey, sought to soothe the panicking politician by suggesting that the best approach would be to hold a "top-level inquiry", chaired by some "sound fellow" from the City, one hopeful of preferment. Perhaps a chappie yearning for an appointment to the Bank of England board?

Noting that "The Wall Street Journal lists Halliburton's billings at twice the total of 40 other contractors in Iraq," Lionel Van Deerlin observes that "Clearly, war is not hell for everyone."

"It's exposed a huge problem in our intelligence gathering. But who wants to take that on in an election year? Or while you are fighting terrorists?"

coulter:Kerry's life experience consists of living off other men's money by marrying their wives and daughters. For over 30 years, Kerry's primary occupation has been stalking lonely heiresses.

As the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein trenchantly observed, "It's amazing the coincidences you find digging into Hollinger International," where corporate bandits and rip-off artists meet and merge with the intellectual Mafia that runs American foreign policy.

The spirit of the neoconservative enterprise was captured, oh irony of ironies, in a wonderful piece in the Jerusalem Post, "Neoconservatives on Mars.":
"But the best thing, the most thrilling aspect of the space program, the truly delicious part, is how it eats up so many hundreds of billions of dollars for no other purpose but one's amusement! One's joy. When all those rabble that the liberals are always blubbering over are starving, dying of thirst, dying of AIDS, dying of whatever ? we're going to Mars! It's so ? Roman."

It is no longer possible to view commercial news media as mere servants of the ruling rich ? they are full members of the presiding corporate pantheon.
The corporate media is a window on the dialogue among the rich.

Foreign Affairs [May-June, 2001]:
Abuzed Dorda, Libya's U.N. envoy, has said, 'I expect that we will sit down with the Americans and put the past behind us.' Even Qadaffi, in his own eccentric manner, has made overtures to the new American president, stressing, 'I believe that George W. Bush will be nice. As a person he is not malicious or imperialist. I believe that he attaches importance to the United States and does not have world ambitions.'"